Mansions threaten this quaint community

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By SANDRA THOMPSON

© St. Petersburg Times, published March 31, 2001

For a while, it looked like you couldn't get a BLT anymore in South Tampa. I'm just as fond of focaccia and goat cheese as anyone else, but sometimes I just want the same thing I ordered in coffee shops when I was 15: a BLT on toast with mayo. Last summer, I was dying for one, and the only place I could think of to go was Steak & Shake, and there was a line a mile long. I never did get one till the Coffee Cup II opened on Gandy. Monday, after I gave my $2.75 order, the waitress said, "And I thank you very much."

How do you say your neighborhood has become too upscale? I mean, it's not really anything most people can sympathize with. "Your property values have gone up!" they point out. Okay, I appreciate that as much as anyone else. But I bought my property, that is, my house, to live in. And I bought it for the neighborhood it's in.

That neighborhood, Bayshore Beautiful, like most of South Tampa, has become so desirable that small houses have been torn down and big ones built in their place. In this, for once, Tampa is in line with national trends, and so far, we're doing nothing official to stop it. Some Chicago and New York suburbs, for example, are fighting mushrooming houses with imposed square-foot limits in relationship to lot size.

On our street, in the two blocks between MacDill and Himes, the count is now 14 big -- or, at least, bigger -- houses where once they were small, with two more plots ready to build on. There's been so much construction that driving home means weaving in and out of contractors' trucks; sometimes you can't get through at all.

On Bayshore Boulevard, a brand new 8,500-square-foot mansion is on the block for $2.98-million. At least it's on a large lot and set back 125 feet from the street, worth an extra million as far as I'm concerned. Also on Bayshore, a once-simple Charleston-style house has metamorphosed into a walled compound with pool and pool house, but no room for a tennis court, so the owner is building one on three residential lots eight-tenths of a mile away.

My block, so far, has been immune to tear-downs. But in back of us, instead of one small white cottage, two large two-story houses are nearing the end -- finally -- of construction. After a year of worrying the one directly behind us would be painted Don CeSar pink, I can report that it is a pleasant lemon yellow. What's distressing is the oak tree, whose bald trunk rises up through a break in the back porch roof.

Over a year ago, the builder told me the reason it was taking so long to begin construction was that he wanted to save the oaks. The next week, I heard a buzz saw. I jumped in my car and, armed with my cell phone, pulled up just as two-thirds of the tree hit the ground.

A month or so ago, a woman rapped on my door in a panic. She feared the second oak on the property behind us -- that tree is right next to her house -- was about to go down. A perfectly reasonable young mother, she said she felt like doing something radical, maybe chaining herself to the tree. We've started a grand oaks registry in the neighborhood; we're looking out.

I've lived here for 10 years. Friends of mine have lived in South Tampa for decades, even for generations. One of them, on Davis Islands, fears that the '60s Florida ranch house, architecture significant of a place and time, will be wiped out. People in Beach Park fear being literally left in the dark as McMansions block the sun from their one-story houses. Parkland Estates is trying through zoning to retain its individual small-town character.

We are the fortunate ones. We live in a place with everything we need, and more. We are not being faced with foreclosures or overgrown empty lots, crack houses, derelicts or prostitutes on our streets.

Isn't it odd that in all this affluence, we have to fight to save our neighborhoods?

- Sandra Thompson is a writer living in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com. City Life appears on Saturday.

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