Tampa is a curious place in a curious state. Tampa like to let its hair down in creating ways. Annually Tampa plays host to the Gasparilla Pirate Invasion in which the Mayor surrenders the city keys to bands of marauding lawyers, physicians, and bankers. Despite the emphasis on pirates and being Florida’s left-coast’s biggest city and a popular the city has no gulf beach. The city finds other ways to attract visitors and diversity is a big factor. In August of 2012 Tampa hosted both Republican National Convention and the Annual Fetish Convention.
One of the most interesting parts of Tampa is Ybor City. Perhaps Tampa’s oldest and most diverse neighborhood, Ybor is an anomalous mix of Italians, Cubans, African Americans, Bahamians, and Southern whites. Named for cigar magnate Vicente Ybor, in this tight knit neighborhood an international cadre of workers rolled cigars shoulder to shoulder long before the trouncing of Jim Crow. Cigar factories, shotgun houses, and bakeries dotted the neighborhood. Guava pastry, platanos maduros, gnocchi, collard greens, and rocket-powered shots of coffee were as common as socials at the Italian-American club. Today the ethnic mix is preserved. During the day the best moros y christianos can be found at Carmines. Retired men and a few women still solves the world’s problems over La Tropicana’s heavenly cafe Americanos. At night Ybor is a hustle-bustle club scene, tinted with skantie women in teetering heels and precision shaved men jostling for time and space. Artists, poets, dealers, hoodrats, NFL and MLB players, and even a lonely business moguls stroll 7th Avenues hex0block sidewalks, sidestepping whoever or whatever are in the doors and alleyways. Not quite Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, Havanna or the Moulan Rouge, Ybor AKA GaYbor is a world unto itself.
Yet, a mere boliche ball toss away from Ybor City is Hyde Park, a tony enclave of white gentrification and mass-market pseudo-sophistication. Tightly stretched women and seer-suckered men parade dogs, cars, and children along the oak shaded avenues. Quaintly eclectic restaurants serve mojitos muddled by subtly accented and sufficiently handsome waiters, while energetic valets ease six figure automobiles into gated parking spaces. The residences of Hyde Park are some of Tampa’s oldest and finest examples of urban design. A mixture of Southern bungalow, plantation mansion, and Mediterranean villa, the neighborhood offers some of the best driving and peeping on the other 1%. Hyde Park’s urban chic seeps out into the public along Bayshore Boulevard, an almost 5 mile stretch of the best architecture money can’t buy.
Bayshore Boulevard from the Air and City Skyline – Tampa, Florida State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/163570
Despite imposing houses and obsessively manicured lawns the real fame of Bayshore Boulevard is not in it occupants, but in its infrastructure. It’s sidewalk and balustrade to be exact. Tampa touts Bayshore Boulevard’s four and a half mile sidewalk as the longest continuous sidewalk in the world. Paved on the bayside of the boulevard and framed by Moorish column railings the Bayshore Boulevard sidewalk is a haven for joggers, walkers, cyclists, and curiosity seekers. That’s right. The sidewalk-a paved conveyance-is an actual tourist destination. Ah, only in Florida, right?
State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/131821
Casual dismissal ignores Florida’s long history of creating tourism opportunities out of the mere luck of waking up in a tropical latitude. Florida took full advantage of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s depression era alphabet soup of recovery programs. Florida’s famed Key West was brought back from the brink of certain extinction by a concerted effort by FERA, CCC, and WPA workers. Roads were rebuilt, the infrastructure was repaired, murals were painted, and guidebooks were written. In one year Key West’s tourism trade increased by more than 400%. Today, it is commonplace to see bridges, roads, and sidewalk that were built by the FDR’s relief efforts. Parks were established, beaches were nourished, and Florida was advertised as a destination away from the terrors of the depression.
FERA Workers laying bricks and patchwork on the Bayshore Boulevard – Tampa, Florida.
State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory, http://floridamemory.com/items/show/151724
Today, boasting of the world’s longest continuous sidewalk may seem a lackluster claim. After all, it’s just a lot of divided concrete slabs. Beneath those slabs is the idea that hard work and community building can flourish into unimagined and enduring value. More than the longest sidewalk, Bayshore Boulevard was 4 ½ miles of rent, groceries and pride for depression era men. Was it folly to build a 4 ½ mile sidewalk to essentially nowhere? Perhaps, but is it not the foolish, the superfluous, and the ancillary that transforms merely existing into living in paradise.
Florida Superlative 