Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Columns

Tampa let that other bay city get ahead

By Sandra Thompson
Published November 11, 2006

Let's face it, this season in the Tampa vs. St. Petersburg battle, Tampa is playing like the Bucs. This week was the last straw - St. Pete even got the governor!

In the local media, the two cities are constantly compared, fairly or not. The thing is, until a few years ago no one would even think of comparing them. Tampa was the big city. St. Pete was the burbs.

Tampa had everything: the airport, the courts, a downtown with tall buildings, the big state university and - yes, the Bucs. It had the first real mall - WestShore Plaza. It had black beans and plantains.

St. Pete had the beach.

It still does. But it also has a downtown that has developed into something quite unlike the place an out-of-town newspaper once likened to a pinched Albanian village.

That was in the 1980s when the city was desperately seeking a Major League Baseball team. Then you could walk around downtown St. Pete at high noon on a weekday and the streets were empty. You could find a parking spot absolutely anywhere at any time. It was a big deal when the first real office tower went up. Few lived downtown or near it except those who couldn't afford to live anywhere else. The only hotels were residential - read, winter homes for people who couldn't afford the beaches. Restaurants? Forget it. And the beautiful downtown waterfront wasn't used for much of anything.

Tampa, on the other hand, was the go-go city! Tampa people didn't know St. Petersburg existed. They certainly never considered living there. Now, I hear people who were born and raised in Tampa talk about St. Pete with envy, and some have even moved there. I've heard people who came to Tampa recently say if they had known more about the two cities, they would probably have moved to St. Pete.

What happened?

Other than Tampa not becoming Houston or Atlanta, I think that people started to value different things in the places they live, and the way St. Pete's downtown has grown reflects those changes. It still doesn't have Tampa's office skyscrapers, but what people want in a downtown today is livability.

St. Pete's downtown has it: restaurants, museums, galleries, music venues where you can hear everything from chamber to alternative. There is endless activity - concerts, festivals - in the waterfront parks. The downtown Saturday Morning Market, in its fifth year, pulls in thousands every week, and this month it is expanding. USF's St. Pete waterfront campus, once a lonely outpost, gained separate accreditation this year, and this fall it became a residential campus.

The Mahaffey Theater has finished a major renovation. The Dali is building a new museum, the Museum of Fine Arts is expanding and the Arts Center has attracted a Dale Chihuly collection.

At the opening of a 10,000-square-foot Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago, Mayor Rick Baker told Creative Loafing, "I think there should be a vibrancy indication of downtowns based on how many Starbucks there are."

Make that St. Pete 4, Tampa 0.

Sandra Thompson, a Tampa writer, can be reached at sthompson125@tampabay.rr.com City Life appears on Saturday.

[Last modified November 11, 2006, 06:02:16]