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Letter to the editor

Bridge links us to more bits of history

By SHARON TUBBS City Times Editor
Published October 12, 2007

Garcia Avenue is a sliver of a street best measured in yards, not miles.

Just east of N Boulevard, it has no houses, no businesses, nothing to actually put it on an envelope. The two scrubby wastelands on either side have no address. Tampa Heights drivers cut through on their way elsewhere, probably never taking note that their favorite shortcut was once part of a main strip.

But people like Bob Mitchell and Wynelle Gilbert remember.

They contacted me after last week's column about the city rededicating the Eugene Holtsinger Bridge. For years, people had called it the NorthBoulevard Bridge based on its location.

What not even Mayor Pam Iorio knew: After the bridge's construction in 1959, the city named it for the early developer Holtsinger. Its markers disappeared over the years and so did the name - until a few months ago when Hal Holtsinger and his cousin Joan Turner wrote letters to Iorio, asking why no one referred to the bridge by their grandfather's name.

The column inspired a letter from Gilbert, then a phone call from Mitchell, both of them saying there was much more to the story. They remembered another bridge that had been called either the Garcia Bridge or the Garcia Avenue Bridge, long before the Holtsinger came along.

"All my life, and I'm 80, it was the Garcia Bridge," Gilbert said.

As a child, she rode across the Garcia from the Tampa Heights area every night with her mother and siblings. They'd take dinner to her father, a police officer walking his beat in West Tampa. He met them near a grocery store on Main Street, sat in the back seat and ate his home-cooked meal.

As Gilbert remembers it, the smell on the bridge was "horrible" because of sewage dumped into the waterway. (If you want to know more about her experience, read her letter on this week's opinion page.)

Mitchell, 73, used to cross the Garcia bridge on his bike. And in those days, streetcars trolled through the area, known then as Roberts City.

The bridge, Mitchell said, "may go way, way back."

I called to check all this out with a couple of Tampa historians and, as it turns out, you can learn a lot about this city by studying its bridges. Did you know, for instance, that the old Fortune Street bridge (later renamed for Laurel Street) was named after an African-American woman, Madame Fortune Taylor, a big-time landowner back in the day?

And the Garcia?

It was not one and the same as the bridge on N Boulevard.

The Garcia bridge was named for Garcia Avenue and extended over the river and land near what is now Blake High's campus, just east of the Holtsinger bridge.

Rodney Kite-Powell, curator of the Tampa Bay History Center, says the Garcia was built in 1909, the second bridge to connect West Tampa across the Hillsborough River. (The Fortune Street bridge was the first.) It was one of Tampa's earliest modern bridges to accommodate vehicular traffic.

Maura Barrios, a historian with the West Tampa Council on Arts, says Garcia Avenue and the connecting bridge formed a main strip in Roberts City, a racially mixed neighborhood wiped out in the 1960s by urban renewal. The bridge was hugely important to cigar workers who wanted to get to the area's cultural center, Ybor City.

Hal Holtsinger remembers the Garcia, too. "When I was a lot younger, there was an old bridge," he said. "That bridge had far outlived its life."

By the late 1950s, the city decided to build a replacement on N Boulevard, higher and more modern than its predecessor.

So now the question is, if the bridge on N Boulevard was named after Eugene Holtsinger, who was Garcia?

No one I talked with could say for sure.

Kite-Powell noted that lots of streets in West Tampa were named after cigar factory owners. Barrios said Garcia Avenue may have been named after a Cuban hero.

Either way, Barrios said, it should be noted in history that the Holtsinger bridge replaced an earlier one, from a bygone era with a forgotten street called Garcia.

[Last modified October 11, 2007, 07:29:23]