Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Marking their turf

By BRYAN W. WHITE
Published January 21, 2007

ST. PETERSBURG

They serve as beacons for a neighborhood. Some are aloft tall metal poles, while others are painted on boards or attached to old decorative monuments.

In the wake of St. Petersburg's economic surge, Midtown's neighborhoods are adorned with a variety of the vivid signs.

"As you go through you will see very colorful and very unique signage and other types of artifacts that delineate where one neighborhood starts and another ends," said Goliath Davis, deputy mayor of Midtown.

In one example, 22nd Avenue S has 12 neighborhood signs on its right of way in Midtown.

Lake Maggiore Shores marks its borders with a framed palm tree cutaway in green-painted metal. The colors recall St. Petersburg's standard street signs.

In the Old Southeast a hulking concrete marker recalls the appearance of a lighthouse, with a great blue heron standing in the shallows, while Highland Oaks pays homage to an egret.

Susan Ajoc, Neighborhood Partnership director, said the signs serve as a form of identity for the neighborhoods.

Chrisshun Cox, longtime president the Melrose-Mercy/Pine Acres Neighborhood Association, wanted to represent the history of her neighborhood. Her design includes Mercy Hospital, along with a pine tree. The artwork appears on the neighborhood's tile-covered concrete monoliths.

"It was the only African-American hospital," Cox said.

Mercy Hospital closed in 1966 after serving for decades as the primary hospital for black residents. The city purchased the building in 1998, and the Johnnie Ruth Clarke Health Center opened at the site in 2004.

The pine tree on the logo represents "everlasting," Cox said.

The nearby Mel-Tan neighborhood developed its marker after many other neighborhoods had established a theme. Inez Ford came up with ideas for the Mel-Tan design and presented them to the neighborhood association.

"I thought of a bird or a butterfly," Ford said. "They liked the bird."

The Perkins neighborhood chose a schoolhouse as its logo, commemorating education and the elementary school named for George Wesley Perkins, principal of Gibbs High School from 1938 to 1946, said Barbara Lewis of the Perkins Neighborhood Association.

Community leaders in the Perkins area saw other neighborhoods had used imposing concrete structures to help identify the neighborhood, Lewis said. An assisted living center had once stood on a portion of the Perkins elementary site; the neighbors decided to incorporate part of a decorative wall from that old structure in their new neighborhood marker.

A portion of that old wall remains at the south border of the Perkins Elementary property. Two steep pyramid-shaped structures, similar to the Perkins Neighborhood marker at the corner of 22nd Street and 14th Avenue S, border the school as part of the wall.

The signs were made possible through an Operation Commitment program, which offered financial incentives for the reformation of neighborhood associations. Neighborhoods could qualify for city funds by submitting detailed plans for beautification and improvement.

"We sought to revive neighborhood associations and as a neighborhood association would develop neighborhood plans, we, the city, would give them $200,000 to implement those plans," Davis said.

In addition to neighborhood signs and markers, Operation Commitment helped add new sidewalks, decorative lighting and traffic calming measures.

The city's plan operated on the idea that greater neighborhood involvement would help property values, discourage crime and attract economic investment. The city encouraged neighborhood groups to stay active by periodically offering new improvement incentives based on community proposals, following the same model that helped with the formation of the new neighborhood associations.

More than a dozen Midtown neighborhoods have established community identity with neighborhood signs.

Some of the improvements have developed maintenance problems. Openings in the Highland Oaks markers are treated as trash receptacles, for example. Lettering has peeled from the tall metal signs in Fruitland Heights to the point of illegibility. In some cases the signs appear completely blank.

Still, community leaders are pleased with the overall results of markers.

They help create an identity and "assist us with basically building sustainable communities, where young folk and others can thrive."

Bryan W. White is a reporter for the Neighborhood News Bureau, a program of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. He can be reached at (727) 327-2129.

[Last modified January 20, 2007, 23:26:36]