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DONG-PHUONG NGUYENCentral Avenue was the life blood of Tampa's African-American community for years. Those who remember it will salute it.
TAMPA - On their way to church, little girls in pretty dresses would buy full moon cookies for a penny from Miss Kinlodge's food stand. Parents shopped at the Joe Pullara grocery store. Men got their hair cut at Marshall's Barber Shop.
This was the 1930s, and Central Avenue was where Tampa's African-American community went to buy clothes, catch a movie or dance the night away.
Decades later, the interstate would slice through the community, devastating it.
On Saturday, those who remember Central Avenue in its heyday will gather for a reunion of sorts near where the Apollo Dance Hall, the Deluxe Cozy Corner restaurant and the Pyramid Hotel once stood.
It was the place where a musician found his inspiration to write The Twist, the song that made Chubby Checker a name known around the world.
"It was a time when black people really had their own business community," said Bernadine White-King, daughter of African-American pioneer Moses White, who once owned four businesses on Central Avenue. "That community does not exist today."
Sarah Jackson Robinson, born on Zack Street near Central Avenue, remembers Miss Kinlodge and her sweet treats. Stopping at her food stand was a Sunday tradition.
Now 87, Jackson Robinson still lives at the home her father built. Her family owned the first black cab company, and her husband had a barber shop on Central.
"There was a lot of excitement on Central," Jackson Robinson recalled. "It was a nice place to go - the only place that we really had to go."
The local theater charged 5 cents for a movie. The Apollo Dance Hall at Harrison and Central hosted free after-school and evening dances.
Jackson Robinson would walk with her mom to Tampa's courthouse to pick up laundry from judges and lawyers. She'd lug the baskets of clothes that her mother would wash and iron.
"It looks so deserted," she said of the area today. "It should be built back up. I know it can't come back exactly as it was, but near."
For White-King, that means resurrecting the past.
"It was charming, it was safe, it was such a sense of community," said White-King, 52. "There was really no reason to shop anyplace else."
Among the businesses her father ran was the Flamingo Dining Room, which served meals on fine china placed on crisp linens. He negotiated with the commander at MacDill Air Force Base to issue credit to military personnel who frequented his businesses.
White-King remembers when Hank Ballard and the Midnighters were in town performing on the Chitlin' Circuit. It was there, nearly 50 years ago now, in front of the Pyramid Hotel, that Ballard saw a group of girls doing an odd dance that involved twisting their bodies.
"The guy wrote it," White-King said, "and the next thing you know, you saw it on American Bandstand."
She went away to college in the 1970s, just as across the country interstates were cutting through black communities. When she returned home, Central Avenue was dying.
Her father, Moses White, put up a marker to memorialize the businesses forced to shut down to make way for Interstate 275.
The marker, now gone, contained an inscription about the avocado, White-King said, because her father's favorite saying was "Show the strength. Stand like an avocado tree."
They are durable trees, she said, and he wanted his children and his community to stand up to adversity. He put the marker up where the back door of the Deluxe Cozy Corner used to be.
It was his way of saying that "black business was dead," White-King said, while at the same time, urging the community to stand tall.
"I wouldn't miss (the reunion) for the world," she said. "It will be like a big family reunion. There will be a lot of tears."