A flourishing downtown - will a vision be reality?
By SANDRA THOMPSON
Published May 1, 2004
Driving around north downtown Sunday, I had a real-life vision of the future. At Herman C. Massey Park, the little park at Franklin and Tyler streets, there were attractive young people in jeans or in shortish skirts milling about. Two guys were tossing a football back and forth. It was just the kind of urban scene you might see on a hot Sunday afternoon in some other downtown, one that has people living in it.
What was the deal? Massey Park is known mostly as the place where people got arrested for feeding the homeless. How had it turned into an urban pocket park? On closer look, it appeared the kids were interviewing and filming the homeless people. A film class?
But back to the future.
I was at this unlikely place because I wanted to see the site of the Residences on Franklin, an eight-story condo building that exists there now only as a large sign in a vacant lot two buildings from the park. It's one of three residential projects going on at the north end of downtown.
Next to the park is the Albany Hotel, its windows boarded up and painted over, two small balconies that look stark and silly on a wall with no windows. The sign is so faded I had to get out of the car to read it. The design was originally Spanish Mission, I think, and the Albany is a wreck now, but it would make a lovely small apartment building. I saw myself living there, walking my dog in the park among my urban neighbors, dog walkers, newspaper readers, Frisbee tossers. I fell in love with fantasy. I was dying to live there. I would have to get a dog, of course.
On to my second destination, the Arlington, a former hotel farther north on Franklin Street slated for transformation into residences and live/work spaces by Atelier, the architects who remade the Tyer Temple into Sanctuary Lofts. Their offices are in the Arlington. It's a two-story brick building with a second-story balcony, an Ybor sort of building, very atmospheric.
To get there from the Residences site, you can't just drive straight up Franklin because the street runs smack into the Park Trammell Building, a bureaucratic hunk of state offices. That is one of the boneheaded things Tampa used to do - "You want to build something right on top of an existing street? No problem!"
Those times are past, aren't they, and Mayor Pam Iorio says Franklin Street will be extended, taking a piece of the building's parking lot. The city has the state's okay.
When that happens, Franklin Street will go under the interstate and connect at the Oceanic Oriental Supermarket.
Stetson's law school, the new big birthday cake of a bright Tuscan pink building, is right around the corner. Loop over past it to the river, and you'll run into my third destination, the Art Center Lofts. The five-story building is under construction. I followed a cement mixer there. It's behind One Laurel Place, the older apartment complex you can see from the interstate.
Across Laurel Street (I think it's Laurel; it's challenging to drive around this part of town), there's an immense, ugly fenced parking lot. It blocks direct access to downtown, but open it up, and you could walk right over to the Performing Arts Center.
By the way, the Dr. Pallavi Patel Performing Arts Conservatory under construction there is very far along now, and it's huge.
I was still stuck in my vision of the future living next to Massey Park.
I could walk to Tampa Theatre and eat at Spain, where I might be joined by my urban neighbors living in the four not-yet-built lofts on the building's second floor. I could browse through the Old Tampa Book Co. next door.
I was ready.
But I thought I needed a reality check, so Thursday at lunchtime I drove back to Massey Park. No other cars on the street, and the park was deserted except for two homeless men sitting and drinking from bottles and a third rummaging through his bag of possessions. The glow of a lively urban scene was gone.
But I saw those kids in the park Sunday. They'll be back, I just know it.
- Sandra Thompson, a writer living in Tampa, can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com City Life appears on Saturday.
