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JANEL STEPHENSA Blimpie's, TCBY and maybe a boating store will move to the busy corner in St. Pete Beach. The old diner seeks a home.
ST. PETE BEACH - Three franchise stores are expected to replace the stainless-steel diner that has occupied the junction of 75th Avenue and Gulf Boulevard for half a century.
Owner George Calomiris wants to preserve the Pelican Diner intact somewhere as a piece of county history. Heritage Village in Largo already has declined his offer. One way or another, the Pelican has to go in two months when construction begins.
In its place will be TCBY and Blimpie's, and possibly West Marine, a boating retail store, Calomiris said. TCBY's staple is frozen yogurt. Blimpie's sells submarine sandwiches.
The new building's structure and pastel color will resemble the Panera Bread bakery and cafe and Outback Steakhouse on Fourth Street N, according to Clark East, a partner in the project.
The Pelican has been vacant for more than a year. Ziggy and Helen Radvil ran the diner for 32 years, before retiring and selling the restaurant to Calomiris for $300,000 in July 2001.
County records show that the diner arrived in the early 1950s. It was a mecca for St. Pete Beach native Pam Chamberlain and her high school friends.
"We usually went here before and after a date," said Chamberlain, 58. "We went down there and played the table jukebox and gossiped. It was just a neat place to go. That was our place on the beach."
Heritage Village officials said moving the diner to their open-air museum was implausible. The park's acreage is limited. Plus, the Pelican's kitchen is a concrete-block attachment to the dining car and would jack up the costs of moving the building intact.
"It's certainly an interesting and fun building and we gave it serious consideration," said Jan Luth, director of Heritage Village. "But we had to weigh all these factors."
Calomiris said several people have shown interest in buying and moving the Pelican.
Originating in Providence, R.I., diners appealed to night-shift workers who had nowhere else to get a bite to eat, Richard Gutman wrote in American Diner: Then and Now. There was a time when more than a dozen silver luncheonettes marked the Tampa Bay area. They began to lose their allure in the 1960s and gradually went out of business.
The Pelican was among two or three diners that remained open here for many years.
- Information from Times files was used in this report.