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Library a healthy sign of progress
By MIKE SAEWITZ © St. Petersburg Times, published May 6, 2001 ST. PETERSBURG -- In Larry Williams' long campaign to revitalize the Bay Village Shopping Center and the neighborhood surrounding it, Wednesday was a good day. The Environmental Development Commission approved a $2.63-million project to build a bigger South Branch Library just west of the center. Construction at 2300 Roy Hanna Drive S is expected to begin in July or August, with opening scheduled for September 2002, said Williams, a former City Council member and a mayoral candidate. The new library will be almost three times as large as the current branch, 1101 Country Club Way S, inside Boyd Hill Nature Park. Williams has lobbied for the project -- as well as a charter school less than a baseball throw from the library -- since Winn Dixie and Eckerd Drugs decided to leave the shopping center in 1993. "It's been an effort," Williams said. "A good all-American story of people coming together and not losing faith, of being tough when they had to be and nice when they needed to be. We're going to make it." The library will be moved from the Boyd Hill Nature Park, which will have more space for activities. Williams said the journey to overhaul the shopping center has had its roadblocks: the City Council approved the new library three years ago, but then-Mayor David Fischer was reluctant to spend city money to buy Bay Village; charter school founders tussled for two years with the Pinellas County School Board, which approved the 650-student school in November. After months of negotiations with Bay Area Land Corp., the city in December finally bought the 2.51-acre plot just west of the shopping center, near 62nd Avenue S and 22nd Street. A $300,000 state grant will help pay for the project, and some money will come from the Penny for Pinellas sales tax. The Pinellas Point Meat Market & Grocery, a Subway sandwich shop and a laundromat line the east side of the shopping center. St. Mark's African Methodist Church sits in the middle of a string of abandoned storefronts. A bank coverted into a funeral home on the west side and a sign on the long-gone Winn Dixie -- "Store is closed" -- make Bay Village look more like a ghost town than a shopping center. Williams said he is still negotiating the location for the Bay Village Center for Education. He wants to use the old Winn Dixie building for the school, which he hopes will have 50 sixth-graders in August. The school should have sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders by 2003. "It'll be a traditional school, which is similar but not just like a fundamental school," Williams said. Students will sign contracts binding them to finish their homework. One of the main differences between fundamental schools and this school: Students will not be expelled because of their parents' actions or inaction. Fundamental school parents are required to attend PTA meetings, participate in parent-teacher conferences and review homework and sign it. Officer Hugh Wade of the St. Petersburg Police Department, who was on patrol close to the shopping center Thursday night, said the school and the library are perfectly placed. "There are a lot of kids who live in this neighborhood," he said. "This will certainly help." The massive Bay Point Elementary and Middle School complex, with its 2,200 students, is on the northeast corner of 62nd Avenue and 22nd Street. Thirteen-year-old Larae Bryant, who lives around the corner from the shopping center and attends Bay Point, said he'd use the library. "It'll help me on my books," he said.
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From the Times South Pinellas desks |
