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My Town

Palmetto Beach puts residents in its pace

Change and development are under way in the poor man's Riviera, but some older inhabitants just won't budge.

By GEORGE MEYER
Published February 18, 2005

To fully appreciate Palmetto Beach, walk to Bermuda Boulevard, which separates the neighborhood from the shallow waters of McKay Bay.

You'll meet the breeze, which starts out in the gulf and picks up speed over the bay before drifting into your face. It delivers a sweet and salty onshore smell, with just enough force to blow your hair. Once you reopen your eyes, you'll find dozens of other people doing just the same - enjoying the breeze.

A poor man's Riviera.

In Palmetto Beach, life moves at a pace slower than in the rest of America's Next Great City. Most residents speak Spanish as a first language, and their lifestyles and pace move as though siesta were a local address.

It won't be this way long.

In a hundred small ways, it's changing every day.

Since 20th Street was widened, the thundering truck traffic from U.S. 41 has shifted to the west, onto 20th, the neighborhood's western edge.

The 20th Street truck route means no more trucks on 22nd Street. It also means no more commerce and very little traffic.

But that's not buzzards circling the area.

It's developers.

I bought a pair of duplexes along Bermuda Boulevard five years ago, when a self-employed writer could still afford dreams of profitable rental property. A neighbor told me the duplexes were built by German prisoners of war in 1943. She knew because, "I saw them built."

Within a year, I bought an adjacent vacant lot for back taxes. It had been neglected and no one wanted it.

Not any longer.

Now, every time I post a "For Rent" sign, I get half a dozen inquiries, usually with out-of-state accents, asking if I'm interested in selling. Every time I scout other property for sale, I'm amazed to discover that $100 per square foot is now considered a fair price. That's about what Hyde Park property sold for just a decade ago.

The median age skews older: A friend says, "Every City Hall worker whose last name ends in a vowel has grandparents in Palmetto Beach."

My tenants have ranged widely. A tattooed pole dancer too illiterate to read a lease without help. A Honduran couple who converted a garage into a first-stop hostelry for newly arrived countrymen. One slightly batty tenant has so many stuffed animals she can't walk through her living room.

Despite some lost souls in Palmetto Beach, the place has never been a haven for crime. A teenage drug den appeared last year and, when I contacted neighborhood police, I learned they'd been watching the spot for months. The den was gone before things got worse.

Churches outnumber taverns about four to one in Palmetto Beach. Children roam nearly everywhere fearlessly, especially near bayview DeSoto Elementary.

The school sits next to DeSoto Park, which contains a new municipal swimming pool and the city's only picnic shelter surrounded on three sides by water. On clear days, it's worthy of a postcard; on blustery days it's downright dramatic.

Regardless of weather, the sea air's like a soothing balm for whatever ails you.

From anywhere in Palmetto Beach, it takes just five minutes to drive to downtown and about the same time to get to Brandon or MacDill Air Force Base via the Lee Roy Selmon Crosstown Expressway.

Across the 22nd Street Causeway, developers plan expensive houses on land the city once considered derelict. Like the rest of the 'hood, the homeowners' view will include the city incinerator, which resembles a nightly fireworks display, especially when viewed over open water.

My landlord's eye tells me many of the modest homes will soon be called teardowns. Given flood-plain issues, new homes and condominiums will be built on stilts. And they should be. Hurricane season flooded lots of homes.

Other changes have already begun. Homeowners, visited repeatedly by speculators, already are calculating their next move to retirement homes, downsized homes and other underdeveloped areas.

But some won't budge. They'll stick around, like my neighbor who watched the Germans build the duplexes. Once they whiff that sea air, some folks never want to leave.

George Meyer, a writer and communications consultant, is president of the Meyer Publishing Co. of Tampa.

[Last modified February 17, 2005, 10:50:08]