Florida may be known for its beaches, water sports, Disney World, the Kennedy Space Center and the rich Latin culture of Miami, but the Tampa area, with Ybor City and St. Petersburg, provides history, art and a waterfront walkway in this part of Florida’s west central coast. 

For two nights and three days, we, my brother, David; sister-in-law, Justine and myself truly packed in quite a bit of sites. Although Covid-19 has made travel difficult, it has not made it impossible. And, in our case, much of what we saw and did was not crowded. And, any indoor activities, especially the museums, required everyone to wear a mask. 

Come join us as we explore the Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales; the historic area of Ybor City where we rented one side of a two bedroom Airbnb duplex and walked back in time to connect with some family history. We were also charmed by the eccentricities of the Salvador Dali Museum, the stunning glass art at the Chihuly Collection and the Central Art District’s colorful and stunning murals in St. Petersburg. Although Tampa feels like a small city, the Tampa Bay Area, which encompasses Tampa, St. Petersburg and Clearwater are actually considered the second largest areas in Florida while ranked as 18th among the top metropolitan areas in the U.S. And, in Tampa we enjoyed the Riverwalk and the Perry Harvey Sr. Park. 

The 250-acre gardens began in 1921 Dutch immigrant, Edward W. Bok, editor of the popular women’s magazine Ladies Home Journal and his wife, Mary Louise Curtis Bok, decided to create a bird sanctuary.
Olmsted was commissioned to transform what was then an arid sandhill into “a spot of beauty second to none in the country”. The first year was spent digging trenches and laying pipes for irrigation, after which soil was brought to the site by thousands of truck loads and plantings began. The Olmsted plan included the planting of 1,000 large live oaks, 10,000 azaleas, 100 sabal palms, 300 magnolias, and 500 gordonias, as well as hundreds of fruit shrubs such as blueberry and holly.

Under construction for over five years, Bok Tower Gardens was dedicated by President Calvin Coolidge on Feb. 1, 1929, but Edward Bok died on Jan. 9, 1930 and was interred at the base of the tower.

Hope you enjoy too!

Ybor City

The first thing we did when we arrived in Ybor City was to go to where our grandmother, Monserratte Acosta Gonzalez and Justina Valentine once lived.

Our first night in the historic Ybor City, after getting settled in our two bedroom Airbnb duplex was to walk the couple of blocks onto the main thoroughfare of 7th Avenue before heading to Columbia Restaurant for a delicious dinner. With full bellies and a beautiful night for a stroll, we found the streetcar and took the 20 minute or so ride to downtown Tampa where enjoyed a brief sojourn along the Tampa Riverwalk before heading back to our Airbnb in Ybor City.

Ybor City Historic District 

We spent the morning of our first full day walking the mainly empty streets along 7th Avenue in Ybor City. In 2008, 7th Avenue, Ybor City’s main commercial thoroughfare, was recognized as one of the “10 Great Streets in America” by the American Planning Association. Ybor, just northeast of downtown Tampa, was founded in the 1880s by Vicente Martinez-Ybor and other cigar manufacturers and populated by thousands of immigrants, mainly from Cuba, Spain, and Italy. For the next 50 years, workers in Ybor City’s cigar factories rolled hundreds of millions of cigars annually.

Martinez-Ybor moved the production of his Príncipe de Gales (“Prince of Wales”) cigar line from Key West, Florida, to the new company town he founded just northeast of Tampa in 1885. Over the next few decades, skilled tabaqueros (cigar makers) would roll hundreds of millions of cigars on wooden workbenches set close together in the building’s wide, sunlit rolling rooms.

After Ybor died in 1896, the building was owned by a succession of other cigar manufacturers and continued to be a productive cigar factory until after World War II, when the industry (and Ybor City in general) entered a long period of decline. Over the next few decades, the buildings were vacant, then were used as gallery and studio space for artists, then converted to a festival marketplace called Ybor Square in the mid-1970s. The Ybor Factory Building was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on November 15, 1972. In 2010, the Church of Scientology bought the building.

St. Petersburg

After our morning walk through Ybor City, we took the less than 30 minutes drive across the Tampa Bay on the 4-mile long Sunshine Skyway Bridge to St. Petersburg. It was a hot afternoon of more walking, art and  fun with my brother David and sister-in-law Justine with a visit to the Salvador Dali Museum.

“Dali and his younger sister Anna Maria were born into a prosperous Catalan family that divided its time between Figueres and the coastal village of Cadaques. He attended a prominent art academy in Madrid. From his earliest years as an artist, he exhibited his work widely, lectured and wrote. In 1929, he joined the Surrealist Movement, becoming its most visible and controversial member. That year, Dali met Gala Elgar’s when she visited him with her husband, poet Paul Elgar’s. Subsequently, Gala became Dali’s wife, his must, primary model and lifelong obsession.

“Dali broke with the Surrealist Movement in 1939. He and Gala fled Europe in 1940 and spent the war years in the United States where he revisited other artistic traditions. In 1948, Dali and Gala returned to Spain and thereafter divided their time between Europe and the United States. In 1974, Dali organized a museum of his collection of art, the Teatro-Museo Dali in Figueres. After Gala’s death in 1982, Dali’s health declined. His final years were spent in seclusion at his museum. Salvador Dali died on Jan. 23, 1989 in the city of his birth,” from the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg biography entitled ‘the artist.’

Tampa

On our last day in the Tampa area, David, Justine and I decided to take a late morning walk  along the 2.6-mile-long Tampa Riverwalk. It really was a beautiful and rather hot day, even in the morning, but the open space, pedestrian trail along the Hillsborough River is packed with things to see and do along the way.

And, as we were leaving Tampa to return back to Rockledge, we came across the Perry Henry Sr. Park and the impactful history of the recently free slaves who created Tampa’s oldest and largest African American neighborhood, called The Scub and Central Avenue, where the park is present.