Tampabay: Community finally rises from ashes of tragedy

Community finally rises from ashes of tragedy

By MARY JO MELONE

The supermarket in Palm River Plaza has been closed for more than 16 years, but people in Clair Mel still know it by name.

The Billy Ferry Winn-Dixie.

Billy Ferry was the neighborhood crazy man. The Winn-Dixie was the neighborhood market.

As evening fell on Saturday, July 3, 1984, some voice in his head told Ferry to hurl a bucket of gasoline across the checkout lines crowded with shoppers buying picnic stuff for the Fourth of July.

The shoppers, the checkout clerks and the bag boys had no chance.

Ferry struck a match. Five people died, 13 others were horribly burned. And this little subdivision east of Tampa was scarred for what seemed forever. The mall soon was all but abandoned.

There are people who still consider the place jinxed. But the members of the neighborhood association, Palm River P.O.I.N.T., weren't among them. Neither were a couple of developers who dropped nearly $1-million to replace the roof and the walls and repave the parking lot.

Enrique Martinez opened his Latin American Barber Shop eight months ago. Business is so good, he cuts hair seven days a week.

"I am so happy to be here," he says.

Around the walls are flags of his customers' home countries. Ecuador. Haiti. Mexico. Jamaica. Venezuela. Cuba. And the United States. "So many people!" Martinez says, waving his scissors past the head of the man in his barber chair.

You can get a facial massage here. You can get your hair cut in a fade. And you can gossip, gossip, gossip while the telenovelas, Spanish-language soap operas, play on the screens overhead.

Martinez has a sign advertising his specials in the window of most every other store in the plaza. The furniture rental store. The optician's. "Solamente el Domingo," the sign reads. "Only on Sunday." On that day, a child's haircut is $8, an adult's $10. And if you bring in three new customers, you get a free haircut.

Clair Mel and adjacent Palm River, just east of Tampa, are odd places, with an almost perfect ethnic division in which blacks, Hispanics and Anglos each represent a third of the population.

The neighborhoods are half-suburban, half-inner-city, and 100 percent overlooked most of the time. Reopening Palm River Plaza might never have happened if the neighborhood association hadn't asked residents what they wanted. What they wanted more than anything were new businesses to work in and shop at, and a way for the place to be known for something other than the night Billy Ferry went berserk.

"There is a sense of community here. There is pride," said Chris Kale, an owner of Rent King, the furniture store.

And there is energy, lots of it, in the form of residents eager to start their own businesses.

"I've had people wanting to sell ceramics, collectibles, wanting to start music stores, bookstores, barbecue restaurants," said Edd McGrath, one of the developers. "There are far more people wanting space than we have had space for."

A sheriff's substation will be put here, as well as the office of an anti-crime program. People still wish the plaza had a fast-food restaurant. You'd think that would happen first, but there have been no takers.

A Dollar General store soon will open in some of the space once occupied by the Billy Ferry Winn-Dixie. Oddly, though, most of what was once the market remains closed. The old entrance is covered by plywood painted gray. A door cut out of the wood is closed with a small combination lock.

The space may be rented to a discount clothing store, McGrath said, or even a government agency. When the deal is closed, Palm River Plaza will be fully occupied.

Then it no longer will be a monument to terror. This modest place on Palm River Road will make a big statement about second chances and that frail thing called hope.