TEMPLE TERRACE - The faded yellow Florida College student center used to be the Morocco Club.
This was in the era of the Temple Terrace (sometimes called Temple Terraces) Country Club, a winter playground for the rich.
Today students mill about on mosaic-tiled floors. They sip sodas under ceiling fans that evoke black-and-white images from Casablanca.
This is Temple Terrace history, just off the main drag, beyond the chain stores.
Lovingly preserved, it's one of the coolest college buildings around.
More than 20,000 people live in Temple Terrace, a brand-new territory for our North of Tampa publication.
It's small as cities go, about 4.5 square miles. But it packs some potent history.
Right by Florida College, on the banks of the Hillsborough River, there is a shrine, of sorts, to the Rev. Billy Graham.
They say Graham got his calling here to serve the Lord, while studying at what is now Trinity College in New Port Richey. He later described "the moonlight, the moss, the breeze, the green, the golf course ... in my spirit, I knew I had been called to the ministry."
It's no coincidence that Florida College touts a strong spiritual life with 95 percent of its students active in a church.
I parked behind a red Alero with this Kentucky vanity plate: "I PRAY."
Why do they call it Temple Terrace?
That's an easy one, said Madelynne Johnson, children's librarian at the Temple Terrace public library.
They used to grow Temple oranges. Lots of them, until the hard freeze of 1927 and 1928.
The terrace part comes from the slight elevation. Yes, it almost feels hilly. So, to visitors from Hyde Park, this must have seemed an orange-scented terrace.
American Indians called the Tocobaga lived here many centuries ago. An explorer named Panfilo de Narvaez claimed the spot for Spain. It was a hunting preserve for a rich Chicago family who sold to the golfing people in the early 1920s.
Then the depression hit, and Temple Terrace stagnated. It stayed that way until after World War II, when a housing boom swept the nation.
And Tampa grew suburbs.
West of the library and a block or two outside the city limits is the very ethnic Busch Plaza.
If you're a Middle Eastern cook, the Sahara grocery store has you covered. Just outside are the Taj Mahal Indian grocery and the King Tut Egyptian furniture store, then an indoor flea market with a reggae soundtrack.
"All my neighbors are Muslims," said Shayma Metwally, co-owner of the furniture store along with her husband, Essam Hagoug. The Egyptian couple feel comfortable in their townhome development. Their store sells to people from India, the Arab world, Westerners too.
"Here we are much better off than in New York," said Hagoug, describing harsh treatment he received from airport officials there.
They send their son to an Islamic school so he will retain his Arabic and learn the Koran. There are several mosques in the area, including the Islamic Society of Tampa Bay.
Temple Terrace also is known for its churches, said Johnson, who has lived here seven years.
"We have our own fire department, our own police department, and that's wonderful," she said. "When I'm traveling, I say I'm from Temple Terrace." She doesn't mind explaining that it's a small city outside Tampa. "You don't want to say you live in Tampa," she said. "We say Temple Terrace. It's like the people who live in Avila."
As you leave Temple Terrace and head west on Busch, you pass pawn shops and more ethnic stores. Then it's Busch Gardens, enormous, inescapable. Stuff here also looks Egyptian and Moroccan.
It's fake, for the tourists. But then so was the original Temple Terrace.
Why does the past seem more elegant than the present? Will future generations make the Montu a monument? With the benefit of 75 years, old habits acquire charm.
People used to build bat towers, thinking bats would kill off the mosquitoes. It didn't work, and the towers gradually disappeared. They say Temple Terrace has one of the last ones, but I haven't found it yet.
I hope to some day, along with more history beyond the chain stores.
