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The woman who helped Tampa Bay to see itself
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 3, 2000 Most of us are cursed with ordinary eyes. A few people, and only a few, are not. Jan Abell was one of those. She saw grace in even throwaway things. The only decoration on the porch of the small house in Hyde Park where she had her architectural office was two round, squat concrete garden pots. Long before I met Jan, I often stopped on my walks to admire them. The paint had been peeling for years and left behind a patchwork of pink, peach, gray and off white that made an accidental but perfect counterpoint to the house's dark green paint. When I asked Jan how she found the pots, she shrugged her small shoulders and said they'd been in the yard of somebody who no longer wanted them, somebody like you and me, I guess, cursed with ordinary vision. Jan Abell died in a freak accident Saturday morning when she was thrown from a horse she was riding on a sprawling Pasco County farm. The horse kicked her, and death came within seconds. Abell was 55 and not much more than 100 pounds and 5 feet tall. "I always told her," remembers her business partner Ken Garcia, "you should be 6 feet tall, because you may be small but you're so big in persona." These are not just the words of a man lost in grief. In a community where progress is still measured by how fast the strip malls are built, Jan Abell convinced the city of Tampa years ago that saving its oldest buildings mattered. Every decaying brick, every battered door and broken window told a story, about Southern high society, freed slaves, cigar workers, musicians, teachers and preachers. She directed the restoration of buildings important to all those people and their descendants. She was the first chairman of the city's Architectural Review Commission. Hyde Park, Seminole Heights, Tampa Heights, Ybor City, West Tampa and Port Tampa all contain old gems she made gleam again. Her way of seeing spread, to St. Petersburg, to Tarpon Springs, to Sarasota, where she also did restoration projects. If you enjoy a weekend afternoon drive in the bay area's old but revived neighborhoods, you can probably thank Jan Abell for giving you the pleasure. Jan and I were like a lot of women, able to spill out chunks of our life stories in minutes, even though we were only acquaintances. And so I remember our last chance meeting, as she was leaving her office on her clunker of an orange bicycle on a Sunday afternoon a couple of years back. When I asked how she was, she stopped in the middle of the street and just grinned. She had finally met him. The One. His name was Thom McLaughlin, and he was an art professor at USF. They'd known each other casually for years, bumped into each other at a party, and that crazy thing that happens to people happened to them. Love does not come easily to anyone. This kind hardly comes at all. Thom McLaughlin was also her kindred spirit. "He just believes she's gonna walk through that door any minute," one of Jan's riding buddies, banker Michele Vogel, said Monday. Jan had so much energy, so much passion, Michele said, that Thom used to call her "the Energizer Bunny." Jan would be astounded by the outpouring since Saturday. To meet her was never to think that you were in the presence of a Somebody, a much honored architect, an intellect, a leader in her adopted hometown. She was that modest, and her modesty only magnified her impact. I admired her so that there were times I wanted to be her, with her confidence, cheerfulness and her ease in her own professional woman's skin. Her friends of course want to know why Jan had to die so soon. Michele Vogel thinks that this stupid accident is meant to remind the people she touched to be the best they can, and that sounds plausible to me.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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