Are they proud symbols of entrepreneurship, icons of the city's longtime promotion of itself as a friendly and healthy place? Or are they uncomfortable reminders of the city's lingering reputation as God's Waiting Room or, even more unpleasant, unsavory memories of its history of racial segregation?

The answer, of course, is all of the above, but few people want to hear that. Most of us prefer our own versions of history.

The story of St. Petersburg -- just like the history of the city's green benches -- can be told from many perspectives. In his 1929 History of Pinellas County, newspaper editor W.L. Straub repeatedly touts the role his newspaper, the St. Petersburg Times, played in city affairs. In Peter Demens: An International Symposium, William H. Parsons, a professor of Russian Studies at Eckerd College, tries to set the record straight about the Russian-born founder of the city. In City of Green Benches: Growing Old in a New Downtown, Maria Vesperi, an anthropologist with an interest in gerontology, looks at the city through the eyes of the old.

Or consider the agendas of these two recent chronicles of the city:

St. Petersburg & Pinellas County: The Gulf Coast Jewel on Tampa Bay, a lavish coffee table book recently published by the Chamber of Commerce;

An Ethnohistorical Analysis of the Political Economy of Ethnicity Among African Americans in St. Petersburg, a 1994 doctoral dissertation in anthropology by Evelyn Newman Phillips at the University of South Florida.

The first can be found on display at various banks and businesses that are among the sponsors of this oversized book (histories of those sponsors are conveniently interspersed throughout the volume). The latter is available on the Web at www.nelson.usf.edu/mclin. Each sees the history of St. Petersburg from a distinct point of view, and like the proverbial blind men touching different parts of an elephant, each comes up with only a portion of the whole.

With a dreamy pastel oil painting of the city's waterfront by June Allard-Berre on the cover and sun-drenched photographs throughout, the Chamber of Commerce eye candy not surprisingly is terminally upbeat, depicting the area as a business-friendly place with "a quality of life that is second to none."

Phillips' dissertation, on the other hand, offers a far grimmer view of the "City of Green Benches." Not all taxpayers have "access to "everything that is needed to succeed and enjoy life as its best' as the Chamber's literature suggests," Phillips points out. She is referring to brochures put out by the chamber before the publication of the recent coffee-table book, but the language employed has obviously not changed much:

"The 1990 United States Census data indicate that over 80 percent of the residents who live in neighborhoods adjacent to downtown are African-Americans and do not have a quality of life that is second to none," writes Phillips, who is now teaching anthropology at the University of Connecticut.

The Web site where Phillips' dissertation is posted is the home page of a community history project that is collecting oral histories in the St. Petersburg black community. The project, which has created Bus to Destiny, a three-volume CD-ROM set of family and community histories, believes that "history should be written not only by professional historians but also by the people who actually live it."

To get a true representation of the entire city's history, however, we would have to have hear from many voices from a variety of communities. As St. Petersburg historian and University of South Florida professor Ray Arsenaut says in St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream 1888-1950, "recapturing the history of a city is almost inevitably a communal enterprise, a process of collective rediscovery that draws upon the talents and resources of numerous individuals and local institutions." But which individuals and which institutions are tapped? That is what determines whose history gets told.

Partially funded by a grant from the St. Petersburg Times, Arsenaut's 1988 book, which came out in paperback in 1999, embraces a broad spectrum of St. Petersburg society. Other histories of St. Petersburg have not been so generous. In the past, what writers have elected to leave out of their histories has been as important as what they have chosen to include.

In 1924 Karl H. Grismer devoted one line in his 299-page History of St. Petersburg to a group that accounted in 1910 for 26.6 percent of St. Petersburg's 4,127 inhabitants: "Negroes also began coming in," he writes on Page 124, and then never returns to the subject again. In his 1929 history Straub completely ignores the existence of blacks in the city, devoting more than half his book to biographical sketches of leading citizens of Pinellas County: all white and mostly male.

Authors are to a large extent, of course, products of their times. When Grismer wrote a second history of the city, The Story of St. Petersburg, 25 years after the first, he expanded his coverage of blacks, but not by much: This time around his history included a three-page section titled "The Colored People Get Jordan Park," praising the housing project.

Del R. Marth, another St. Petersburg historian, also only slightly revised his history of the city -- this time 20 years after the first. In his 1976 version of Once Upon a Time, Marth used the term Redman; in his 1996 edition, he changed it to "native population." Another alteration, however, is a puzzling acknowledgement of race. In the 1976 edition, Marth describes the flood of World War II soldiers to the area in 1942: "Out on the beaches, bodies soaked up every ray of weekend sun." Twenty years later, that sentence awkwardly morphs into: "Out on the beaches, every ray of sun was soaked up by a white-skinned recruit."

Both of Marth's editions are chockablock with historic photographs. The 1996 edition, however, adds a few extra shots, including one of the Barrel Drive-In, a "beacon for both families and teenagers wishing a hamburger and frosted root beer." The odd caption under the photograph of the restaurant on 16th Street concludes: "Often crowded with cars, the Barrel lost some of its appeal during the 1960s when the civil rights movement resulted in racial disturbances in the parking lot."

Should Marth have mentioned the fact that blacks were not included among those "families and teenagers" who were served "a hamburger and frosted root beer" at the drive-in? Should he have pointed out that his nostalgia for places like the air-conditioned Florida Theatre, opened in the '20s just as Jim Crow laws were tightening, might not be shared by all of St. Petersburg's denizens? Should he have mentioned in his caption extolling the virtues of the Soreno Hotel that the first million-dollar hotel in the city had a "Gentiles Only" policy?

Or would that be, as some might argue, caving in to political correctness? Was, in fact, Marth himself struck by P.C. fever when in his second edition he added a chronology that included such items as "1966: Black activists tear down mural in City Hall"; "1968: Racial unrest hits city"; and "1970: Bette Wimbish elected first black on City Council"? Or does the inclusion of everyone's history just make good historic sense?

Inclusion is, of course, a challenge. Even in 1907, Arsenaut points out in St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream, there were already "several St. Petersburgs." Now, there are even more. How can historians give equal weight to the cacophony of voices -- black and white, young and old, rich and poor, Jewish and Gentile (as well as Muslim, Asian, Indian, gay and physically challenged) -- that are demanding attention simultaneously?

One solution is to expand Marth's chronology. Lawyer and mayoral candidate Rick Baker did just that in Mangroves to Major League: A Timeline of St. Petersburg, Florida: Prehistory to 2000 A.D. Providing no overarching commentary but rather organizing all the competing material into a timeline, Baker presents item after unrelated item under yearly headings, allowing for an enormously varied look at the city's history -- sometimes on the same page. The tale of anti-Semitic signs posted along Gandy Boulevard and Fourth Street by the local Ku Klux Klan branch in 1924, for example, is juxtaposed with blurbs about the opening of the St. Petersburg Kennel Club's greyhound race track on Gandy (now known as Derby Lane, the world's oldest greyhound track) and the New York Yankees first spring training workout at the newly dedicated Crescent Lake Baseball Park, both in 1925.

Also, along with the St. Petersburg area events (set in Roman type), Baker cleverly introduces Florida events (set in bold italic) as well as events outside of Florida (set in italics), broadening local history beyond its confining boundaries and placing it in a larger context. Under 1969, for example, Baker lists Neil Armstrong's walk on the moon, the largest anti-war rally in American history held in Washington and Woodstock. According to Baker's timeline, that was also the year the charter of St. Petersburg was amended by act of Florida Legislature, finally eliminating the section that authorized the division of the city into separate residential districts for "white and Negro residents." And it was the year when the city finally removed all its green benches.

With such a timeline, no one version of history can predominate. All the voices of St. Petersburg can be heard -- and if new voices emerge, as they surely will, there is a structure to easily insert them. Now all we have to do is ask everyone what they remember. History, after all, belongs to those who write it.

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