The Westshore Mobile Home Park was filled with dumpy trailers and working-class people, but the neighborhood thrived. Park dwellers pushed out by redevelopment find better homes, but away from each other.
By RON MATUS
Published March 12, 2004
PORT TAMPA - On a gray Sunday in September, the trailer park coffee klatch begins to percolate.
Caffeine fuels the conversation. Brownies sweeten the laughter.
Ethyl Lange and neighbor Susan Mulhearn sit on lawn chairs in Mulhearn's kitchen while Fred Bennett, Mulhearn's boyfriend, parks on the rumbling washing machine against the wall. Without his stocky frame on top, the machine would make the whole house shimmy.
"Guess what was in the paper today?" asks Lange, a 71-year-old retiree with a salty tongue and a nose for bargains. "A coupon for two Mrs. T's Pierogies. Those are the best things I've ever tasted in my whole entire life."
Mulhearn, 41, just smiles. She's not as crazy about pasta pockets as Lange, but oh, can the two put away some Thai food. On special occasions, the retiree and the milk-plant worker splurge at hole-in-the-wall Asian restaurants on Dale Mabry Highway. On weekends, they bond over coffee.
It's what happens when neighbors become friends.
But today, bonds will fray.
Today, Lange will pack the comforts that accumulated over 14 years in one place and reluctantly move herself, her two dogs, three cats and one cockatiel to St. Petersburg. In coming months, everyone else in the park will move too, with Mulhearn ending up 40 miles in the other direction.
For Lange, the change is bittersweet. The Westshore Mobile Home Park "ain't the Taj Mahal," she likes to say. But her new park has issues, too.
For one, it doesn't have a coffee klatch.
And then there's her lilies.
* * *
From West Shore Boulevard, only slices of mobile homes are visible beyond a smattering of palms and cedars. An abandoned guard shack tries to bluff strangers. A one-eared stray cat camps in unmowed grass.
Next door, the Westshore Deli & Market offers the dream of lottery tickets and the reality of fried chicken gizzards.
As far back as World War II, life has ebbed and flowed in the Westshore Mobile Home Park, which was called Shady Pines before new owners bought it in 1996.
All the while, geography was rigging its fate.
The re-development rippling through South Tampa is lapping south of Gandy Boulevard, bringing bigger houses and people with money. A half-mile north of the mobile home park, workers this month will begin dismantling the old Westinghouse warehouse and preparing for a new subdivision: the Westshore Yacht Club.
The old mobile home park cozies up to Tampa Bay, too.
It never had a chance.
* * *
In August 2003, the letters arrive by certified mail, signed by a lawyer.
Pursuant to Florida Statutes 723.061(1)(d), your tenancy at Westshore Mobile Home Park shall be terminated effective February 28, 2004 because of a change in the use of the land comprising Westshore Mobile Home Park. This Notice of Termination of Tenancy affects all mobile home owners in Westshore Mobile Home Park and is intended to give you the opportunity to secure other accommodations.
And so the end begins.
"We figured we'd be here forever," says Eleanor DeGroat, 68, who lives in the park with her 90-year-old father. They moved here in 1991.
The park harbors about 100 mobile homes. When the notice comes, about 30 are occupied.
The people inside are young and old, black and white, Hispanic, American Indian and Moravian.
Half are renters. Half are homeowners.
Many have lived in the park 10 years or more.
In South Tampa, they're a dying breed: They run registers at Big Lots, swab hot tar on roofs and wash dishes at International House of Pancakes. They unload trucks at warehouses and stock shelves at the Circle K.
Ivy Campbell, a 23-year-old mother of two, operates a toll booth on the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway. Dee vonZiebrecht, 61, runs a resume service.
Their homes will be replaced by luxury apartments.
* * *
Susan Mulhearn's red hair bursts from her head, frizzy and wild, in contrast to her smile, easy and wise.
It's a survivor's smile.
In November 1997, Mulhearn woke up in a $19-a-day motel, broke, depressed and addicted to crack. When her brother came to pick her up for work, she told him no. She stayed in bed and cried.
And then, recovery began.
Friends took her in. The Centre for Women in Hyde Park offered treatment. Mulhearn got a second job so she could begin paying off debts.
"It's a b---- to be a dope addict with values and morals," she says years later.
Eventually, the time came for Mulhearn to get her own place again, but the past wouldn't let go. When prospective landlords asked Mulhearn why her credit was shot, she told them the truth. They told her, "Sorry."
She searched for weeks before finding the Westshore Mobile Home Park.
To get in, she paid a $400 deposit, four times the normal amount.
She moved in with her only possessions: a radio and a beach chair.
* * *
Residents know the real estate trends, but still, it stings.
Some bristle at the indignity of being forced out. Some had spent thousands of dollars on renovations.
One family worries about the effect moving will have on their 15-year-old son, who is developmentally disabled and will have to make new friends at a new school.
Some fear they can't afford to find new digs.
The situation has "left us in dire straits," says vonZiebrecht, a feisty Chicagoan with nearly 20 years in the park. "If God was trying to send me a message, I wish she wouldn't have used combat boots."
In the end, because their coaches are so old, most of the homeowners will sell their property to the park owner rather than relocate. Some will get as little as $1,000. Some will haggle for weeks over a couple hundred bucks.
Many of them must go beyond South Tampa to find new homes they can afford, and even then, it won't be easy. In October, vonZiebrecht likens the search process to "going through hell on gasoline sneakers."
But when they get to the other side, many residents will like what they see.
If only their neighbors were there, too.
* * *
Roof lines sag. Bottom boards buckle.
On many homes, squares of plywood sub for windows.
At times, kids blast stereos and shoot cats with pellet guns. Thieves steal bicycles.
One time, Lange filled a bag with beer bottles and candy wrappers and dumped it on the park manager's desk. "If you're going to keep renting to trailer trash," she told him, "hire people to clean up after them."
He didn't.
But even then, the park wasn't hopeless, Lange said -- not with its towering pines and bay breezes and swarms of squawking parrots.
Not with neighbors to share Christmas with.
Outsiders can't help but focus on the bad. They've heard about the drug dealers. They've seen the squad cars. When the apartment developer tells the Port Tampa Civic Association about his plans for the park, members all but cheer.
Residents say the drug problem faded in recent years, but trouble always lurks.
They whisper about the accused sex offender in their midst.
Two years ago, Tampa police arrested one resident on a charge of a lewd and lascivious act on a child after a 13-year-old claimed the man repeatedly touched her buttocks. Charges were never filed, but according to a police incident report, the man told investigators he had been arrested in another state for raping a 2-year-old.
Residents get another jolt in October, when a dark Chevy Blazer sped through the park at 1:30 a.m.
Someone inside fired six shots.
In the morning, residents looked for spent bullets.
* * *
Lange lived in No. 114. A friend gave it to her: a single wide, 31 years old, with flaking paint and plywood floors and bare bulbs on the porch.
Lange couldn't help but infuse the battered hull with life.
She grew up in 20 foster homes in Maine and watched her first husband die young. She nearly died from encephalitis.
She tended goats in the mountains of Arkansas. She met hippies and became a vegan. She taught art.
Six weeks after she moved into the Westshore park, her son died of AIDS at the age of 35.
Lange put down roots.
A crepe jasmine. A plumeria. Seven hibiscus.
Everywhere she could, Lange cultivated: plants that creeped, plants that pricked, and always, plants that flowered.
Two months after her move, green things still spill from pots left beneath the bird feeder and curl sunward from toppled-over cups.
Life demands: Bloom where you are planted.
* * *
Neighborhoods, too, bloom in unexpected places.
After 9/11, some Westshore residents put American flag stickers on their cars and trailers. One man hoists a POW-MIA flag.
Next to her home, vonZiebrecht builds a jungle.
She and her boyfriend install a deck and privacy fence and plant a tangle of date palms and azaleas. On weekend mornings, they haul speakers into the shade and listen to blues and jazz and opera.
Sometimes, Lange joins them. She and vonZiebrecht have known each other 40 years.
Lange becomes godmother to another neighbor's daughter.
When the girl, who has American Indian roots, attends a coming-of-age ceremony with shamans in Wesley Chapel, Lange is there to watch.
Quietly, Tom Green makes his rounds.
Green, 55, spent 20 years in the Marines. Now he's a missionary for the Root of David Messianic Synagogue. He asks neighbors if they're okay with bills and food and if they're not, he sees if his church can help.
Residents don't all agree with Green's religion, but he never pushes it on them, they say.
They like that someone is watching over them.
* * *
By November, moving plans crystallize.
With help from her son, vonZiebrecht is buying a house in North Tampa.
With help from her daughter, DeGroat and her father are heading to Georgetown Apartments, just north of Gandy Boulevard.
"It's in South Tampa and we love South Tampa," she says.
Mulhearn is dreaming about Polk County.
A double-wide, fairly new, on a full acre of grassy earth. A gopher tortoise makes it complete.
"You ever go to a place and see it and say, "This is where I want to be?"' Mulhearn asks.
The home is far away -- 50 minutes from Mulhearn's job at Reilly Dairy in Port Tampa -- but it's nice. Mulhearn envisions a serenity garden, "a place just for Mama."
She sees herself re-planting Lange's lilies.
"I told her one day that if she ever wanted to plant anything on my side, she could," Mulhearn says. "So one day I come home and there were lilies sprouting everywhere."
For now, Mulhearn waits. A loan officer wants to approve her application, but a supervisor hesitates.
She's wondering about Mulhearn's past.
* * *
The Hollywood Mobile Home Park in St. Petersburg is neat and trim, with no litter and no druggies. The sign out front promises bingo every Tuesday.
Lange's daughter gave her the money to buy a home here, and Lange is grateful.
But something's missing.
The residents are old. They talk loud and dwell on medical problems. And they're so proper, Lange jokes that if she cusses, "their hair might fall out."
There's a bigger problem: her plants.
Lange moved dozens from Westshore, but after she replants them, management tells her she broke the rules. She's supposed to put down mulch and create borders with wood or bricks, so it's not too much trouble for the lawn crews.
Lange is disgusted. On $6,000 a year, she can't afford all that fancy stuff.
In a huff, she uproots.
* * *
Ivy Campbell can't wait for a change in scenery.
In Westshore, her family's mobile home is next to the Dumpster. At its future home, it'll be nestled under an oak.
Of all the families in Westshore, Campbell's is the only one that decides to relocate its home. The new spot: the Interbay Mobile Home Park, just on the other side of Port Tampa.
On the big day, Dec. 3, Campbell's kids are amped.
As soon as their home begins to lurch behind the moving truck, Mariah, 7, and Eric, 5, bounce with delight.
Tree limbs snap as the driver eases between a canyon of coaches. A small crowd gathers.
Seventy-three minutes later, 31,000 pounds of mobile home are ready for the final leg of the trip, a 10-minute coast down West Shore and Interbay boulevards.
"Come on!" Campbell yells to her kids as she gets ready to follow in her car.
"WE'RE MOOOOVING!!!" they squeal.
* * *
The living room is baby blue; vonZiebrecht is thinking celery green. The front door needs staining.
In her new back yard in North Tampa, she's planning to sprinkle Epsom salt beneath the orange tree -- a trick, she says, to make the fruit even sweeter.
Her disposition is as sunny as the tree's glowing orbs.
But dark clouds are gathering.
In late December, vonZiebrecht is still tussling with Westshore's owner about a selling price for her coach. Chronic back problems resurface. Her boyfriend is sick.
The storm hits at Westshore, in the middle of moving.
"I'm walking like Quasimodo on a bad day," vonZiebrecht says later, when she is chipper and confident again. "All of a sudden, I can't move. If I sit, I die. If I stand, I die."
She sits but doesn't die.
Instead, her eyes water until a few tears fall.
* * *
In St. Petersburg, Lange is alone.
On several occasions, she visits her granddaughter in Pinellas Park, but her granddaughter is a working mom with a young son and little free time for grandma.
Meanwhile, ties to Westshore unravel. She and Mulhearn eat Thai on Lange's birthday in November. She and vonZiebrecht talk by phone once a week.
It's not the same.
In late January, Lange gives away her 1985 Tercel after causing a fender bender. She begins taking long walks to Publix. She worries about arthritis in her knees.
"I've never been so isolated," she says.
Still, she stirs.
Life demands it.
One day, Lange puts the sewing machine on the screened-in porch. In her head, she begins to map out an arts and crafts studio.
For Christmas, she paints a gift for a sister: a landscape with a cascading waterfall.
Her new home is "neither good nor bad, it's just different," Lange says one day on her couch, surrounded by pillows and pets.
In the window behind her, an old man scoots past in a wheelchair.
In her living room, orchids bloom.
* * *
Mulhearn gets the news a week after New Year's: Her loan is approved.
After the call, "it was just, ahhhhh," she sighs.
It's not a done deal yet. Mulhearn and her family still haven't seen the inside; the mobile home looked so good from the yard, they didn't bother -- and they didn't want to get their hopes up.
In late January, they give the home a final inspection before the closing.
Past Brandon, and strawberry fields, and boiled peanut stands, they keep driving until they stand in front of a home as deliciously flat-yellow as key lime pie.
Once inside, the verdict comes in record time: Smiles, all around.
Vaulted ceilings. Powder-blue carpet. Wallpaper patterned with grape leaves.
In the kitchen, Mulhearn spies the perfect counter space for the coffeepot. In the bathroom, her 18-year-old daughter, Schyvon sprawls in the tub.
* * *
Outside, Mulhearn's boyfriend fantasizes: The burn pit goes there. The deck, over there.
He can't wait to cut the grass.
Mulhearn's visions sharpen into focus, too. She sees a gazebo and a butterfly garden. Maybe even a pond.
It won't happen right away, she says, but "I got all the time in the world."
She hasn't forgotten the lilies, either. The ones Ms. Ethyl planted for her.
They're going right there, right next to her home.
Right where they can't be missed.
- Ron Matus can be reached at 226-3405 or matus@sptimes.com[Last modified March 11, 2004, 15:08:04]
