Seeing the town through her eyes

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By SANDRA THOMPSON

© St. Petersburg Times,
published June 2, 2001

On Memorial Day the streets of Tampa were so empty I made a U-turn on S Dale Mabry, a street where you take your life in your hands pulling out of a strip center into the right-hand lane. Where was everybody?

A lot of them were pulled over to the side of Interstate 4. A woman in my exercise class said she'd seen piles of seven or eight cars on the shoulder, along with state trooper vehicles, and a helicopter was flying overhead, communicating with the troopers on the ground. A trooper raced across the median to follow them in their old pickup, she assumed checking for seat belts.

This is the way we live.

It was astonishingly hot, and the air quality was bad. I am one of the canaries in the mine shaft, people with allergies -- and I'm beginning to think that in Florida I'm in the majority. When I called for a yet another prescription last week, my allergist said that with the ash in the air from the fires and the lack of rain, hundreds of people had respiratory diseases.

By late afternoon, when my daughter, who was in town for the weekend, and I got out of the car in the parking garage in Channelside, the air was almost choking. "Maybe the aquarium is burning down," we joked with a young couple in the elevator.

Then a huge cruise ship pulled out into the harbor.

I passed high school chemistry only by the good will of my teacher, who let me and two other cute girls do a paper on the chemicals in cosmetics, but my daughter said ships use gas, too. Diesel.

"Isn't there a cut-through?" my daughter asked.

We stopped in Swim'n Sport, the only shop open in Channelside. It has a terrific selection of swimsuits and related stuff. My daughter bought a hat.

There seemed to be a lot of people wandering around Channelside, as if it was actually a going concern and all that empty space was filled with boutiques and bars and the promised restaurants. Stump's Supper Club, though still not open, has its facade in place. It's funky in the extreme with a faux marquee, plastic flowers and retro-diner plastic chairs. "It looks like Elvis would eat here," my daughter said. It was interesting to see things through her 26-year-old eyes.

I'd given her a tour of all the things new in Tampa since she was last here more than a year ago, especially the new apartment complexes (to tempt her). She liked Post Harbour Place on Harbour Island and SoHo Madison and really liked the Camden of Ybor, noting its proximity to both the Ybor clubs and to the Y (the Central City branch on Palm). She loved Centro Ybor, thought the Ice Palace was a knockout. She was unimpressed with the changes in Hyde Park Village, feeling the two-story Pottery Barn complex overwhelmed the small shops.

The Marriott Waterside Hotel, she said, "looks like it belongs in Sarasota."

When we drove by the massive former Swann house on Bayshore Boulevard, she said, "Is that a museum?"

Pop City, the gameroom in Channelside, a place I'd have to be Baker Acted out of if I ever got locked in for five minutes, got her approval. We had pizza there at G. Elliott's. Not many people were there -- a family group at one of the outside tables by the water, a couple of guys in the comfy leather chairs by a TV in the sports bar.

On the large-screen TV, following a basketball game, a tape of a wedding was played. The bride was beautiful, dark hair and eyes, and all the young people dancing looked joyful and full of promise. We noticed the guys were wearing T-shirts and realized the wedding must be in Israel, and then we saw the floor collapse and the dancers plunge through.

The pizza arrived, and we ate it, victims of an ever-present technology that won't allow us to live only our own tragedies.

- 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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