Revisiting Pier, piece by piece
By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published August 30, 2006
Ron Cheung reflected on the long walk out to the Pier in downtown St. Petersburg while his wife, Phyllis, sprawled on a bench recovering with sips of bottled water.
"They really need to put in some shade there," said the 55-year-old Boston vacationer after discovering, too late, that the city's rubber-tire trolley can take them about. "In this heat, walking all the way out here from BayWalk is nearly impossible."
The remote location made the Pier what it is: a place to feed a pelican, watch the sailboats or catch a sunset over a surprising skyline.
But the distance out in Tampa Bay has long been an obstacle to lure people there. Past efforts to break up the walk with potted palms and tented retail kiosks ended with all of them wilted from the hot sun and hostile salt air. Now the success of BayWalk and promise of more retail and tourist traffic emerging around it three-quarters of a mile inland are posing new challenges and changing how people wander around downtown.
City officials aim to find out how as they begin a long process of rethinking the Pier, the local landmark that's been an anchor of the downtown waterfront for 80 years.
Once the Pier was where local residents took visiting relatives. Now it's one of several.
This won't be a another cosmetic tweak of the civic icon. There's $50-million in tax money salted away to start work in 2011. Judgment day this time is not driven by the Pier's need for another refreshing. The city hopes to replace the entire 1,100-foot pier and the 100-foot-wide pedestrian area that surrounds the striking inverted pyramid.
The five-story pyramid is solid, city engineers insist, but the corroding structures that surround it are at the end of their life span.
The replacement will eat up as much as $35-million. The remaining $15-million would rehab the building and find new attractions to make the Pier worth the walk.
The city plans to spend $250,000 this fall on consultants to catalog what other pierlike gathering spots use as drawing cards, figure the new market mix for Pier retailing and stage community brainstorming sessions to build a consensus to support a solution next spring.
Then the two-year environmental permitting process can begin.
City officials expect big changes. Engineers are pricing alternatives such as replacing the approach with an earth causeway, adding space to somehow get new drawing cards closer to the mainland without obstructing the landing path at nearby Albert Whitted Airport, or even building twin spans to and from the pyramid with about 50 feet of open water between them.
Mayor Rick Baker offers a relatively open easel.
"We will have a pier with a community gathering place at the end, but we don't know what it will look like," he said. "We do know what we have is inefficient. Nothing is off limits if it fits the character of the city."
The process comes as the components of downtown St. Petersburg step past some critical junctures. The University of South Florida St. Petersburg campus is now a residential college. The downtown airport is a permanent fixture, thanks to a resounding citywide vote. Ground-floor retail in several downtown condos promises to spread more stores beyond BayWalk north into the new ParkShore Plaza and south to First Avenue S with the recent sale of Progress Energy's main offices that were originally built for a department store that never came.
Few expect big changes in what's sold at the Pier. That's because every previous attempt to sell more than food, drinks and tourist items flopped through a 33-year parade of retailers.
Sales from the 22 restaurants, shops and concessions hit $14.1-million in 2005, up from $10.6-million four years ago. Most of it - 64 percent - was at the Columbia Restaurant and its Cha Cha Coconuts lounge. The city's annual operating loss was narrowed to $1.4-million, down from $1.7-million in 2001.
About 1.5-million visitors made the trip, more than 75 percent of them from other states or countries.
"What we need are more reasons for people to come out here," said Don Paul, project director for Urban Retail Properties Inc., the Chicago company that manages the Pier.
The city has had a municipal pier since 1895. The first was wood and had a railroad track and bathing pavilion. The second one, the Million Dollar Pier that opened in boom-time 1926, however, was a people magnet. It featured daily dances, food, live radio broadcasts and, in the 1950s, a TV studio that housed a popular local kids show.
The city replaced the barrel-tiled Mediterranean-style building with the modern Pier in 1973. It was supposed to be an image statement from a modern, progressive city that had just ditched its famous trademark green benches full of retirees. The controversy lingered for years and the late-night TV comics continued to ridicule retiree-rich St. Petersburg as God's Waiting Room.
The consultants' tour of other city piers around the country will look at the tony Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, artsy Santa Barbara and the carnival atmosphere of piers in Santa Monica or Daytona Beach. South Street Seaport in New York is linked to history. Many Florida towns offer little more than fishing and a seafood restaurant. The Navy Pier in Chicago - which, incidentally, is managed by the same company that manages the Pier in St. Petersburg - has a Ferris wheel that salutes the debut of that ride at the 1893 World's Fair there.
The outcome in St. Petersburg is far from certain. The City Council has been rethinking projects that had been untouchable for decades. They tore down the Bayfront arena. They show signs of giving up their 30-year dream of a port for cruise ships or gambling boats. They are pondering whether to get out of the spring training business and flatten Progress Energy Park once the Devil Rays leave. Plus, there's that $50-million available in 2011 to grab for something that may not be the Pier.
Mayor Baker is steering the Pier decisionmaking. But he will be gone because of term limits in 2010, before work begins.
For years, people have volunteered ideas to make the Pier more popular. City officials labeled one guy a crackpot who suggested submerging glass tubes around the place underwater to create a real-life aquarium. On the other hand, they took a suggestion that a McDonald's out there would bring crowds seriously enough to make inquiries.
Today McDonald's would be probably the last thing on St. Petersburg's list.
But Seattle has a city aquarium of local fish that juts off a downtown wharf into the chilly waters of Puget Sound.
Times change.
Mark Albright can be reached at albright@sptimes.com or 727 893-8252.