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One sweet slice of Tampa is gone

Goody Goody restaurant opened in its original spot downtown in 1925. Today it serves its last meal.

By SUE CARLTON
Published November 30, 2005

	[Times photo: Cherie Diez]
	Gerry Albin watches Goody Goody manager Yvonne Freeman bring an order to a table Tuesday at the restaurant on Florida Avenue in downtown Tampa. It was Albin's first visit to the restaurant, but his wife, Yana Albin, has been coming for more than 40 years.

All around downtown Tampa, construction cranes have been swinging and bobbing like giant dinosaurs, a sign of change and more tall buildings to come.

But at Goody Goody this week, some things looked pretty much like always.

Inside the boxy little Florida Avenue restaurant, the air was thick with the sweet smell of meat sizzling on the grill. A waitress spooned chocolate ice cream into a big silver cup to make a shake. A fry cook banged a brass bell, order up. On the counter sat a pie so pretty it made you think just a slice might make a nice lunch.

This week, the very last week, customers who heard that this piece of Tampa history would soon be history showed up in droves. They came in T-shirts and in ties, with aged parents and kids in strollers. The hungry and the sentimental waited in lines that spilled into the parking lot for one last chance to order a burger POX (pickles, onions and a ladle of funny red sauce, the recipe for which cannot be wheedled, extorted nor bribed from the waitress). Ladies in line wondered aloud if there would be a single slice of that butterscotch pie left. By half past noon on the last Monday that Goody Goody would ever be open, there wasn't.

Behind the yellowed cash register, Yvonne Freeman took a customer's twenty and calculated the tax in her head, like always (the register never did catch on when taxes increased over the years). Then she shouldered a tray of red plastic baskets of crinkle fries and wax-papered burgers and headed into the sea of customers.

Like Goody Goody itself, it seems she's always been here. The restaurant opened in its original spot in 1925, and she started as a car hop in the '40s. Many years later, she figured she could lease the place and run it herself. (Run it? She made the pies, even.)

Judges, politicians and working stiffs ate here. In these final days, the crowd included Helen Hill and her husband of 65 years, Ben, a longtime School Board member. The Hills started coming here on milkshake-and-a-movie dates in high school, back when ladies wore hats and gloves to the Maas Brothers tea room up the street.

This week, whole families with fourth- and fifth-generation hamburger-eaters wielding sippy cups crowded the old metal tables. Strangers lamented other places now gone, like Palios Brothers and Malio's Steak House.

Over the years, Freeman watched the neighborhood evolve from fancy new car lots to seedy skid row bars to ghost town. (A drunk once came in, plunked two bucks on the counter and asked what bed he could sleep in.)

Still, business stayed steady. Now downtown is changing again, this time with grand plans for tall condos filled with people who actually live there.

Today, when the last of the lunch crowd trickles out, Goody Goody closes its doors. The owners sold the property for $1.25-million. Though it's not clear what comes next, a tall building seems likely.

A downtown resuscitated is a good thing, but it's sad to see the places that give a town a little character and crust blink out. No influx of Starbucks or Subway could ever replace a Goody Goody.

"Yvonne, what're you going to do with yourself now?" a customer asked as she brown-bagged burgers.

She's thought about it, about a life that doesn't include waking up and coming here to serve all these people she's come to like. She's 77 now. Maybe she'll have time to read a book. Maybe she'll go to Yellowstone Park.

She smiles and tells him, "I'm going to sit down for a while." At the very thought, her customers laugh.

On another note, some readers apparently saw the words "Trappmans" and "bulldozer" in a recent column and assumed the popular seafood market on the St. Pete side of the Gandy Bridge was closing. No, no, no, says owner Mike White. Again: White has plans to develop a strip mall, but says the seafood market will either stay on the current property or move just up the street.

Trappmans, he says, lives.

--Sue Carlton can be reached at carlton@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 30, 2005, 02:15:38]