Come to the Sunshine City!” Images on postcards, billboards, and in newspapers of the bathing beauties on St. Petersburg’s beaches circled the United States. Sunshine, happiness, relaxation, and ultimate paradise stung Northerners worse than the snow against their face. The harsh reality that they were shoveling snow – unlike the Southerners who were shoveling sand – could not be avoided. While battling the winter, they began to place themselves in the images they saw. Through the early 1900s, St. Petersburg had a large marketing push to lure tourists to the area. They targeted people living in the north, framing the area with a youthful energetic image.… Read More

The Old Northeast feels like a small, friendly neighborhood to me because so many people in the neighborhood are friendly. I regularly take walks and run into neighbors I do not know by name but readily greet and, more often than not, end up chatting with for a few minutes.

A few years back, while walking and looking down at the street, a random thought made me wonder how many bricks there are in the Old Northeast roads. I started doing the math, thinking there must be hundreds of thousands, but it didn’t take long to realize we have millions of bricks in our neighborhood.… Read More

Recently I took part in a fantastic art show called 100 Films. The show was in conjunction with the Sunscreen Film Festival, which I knew very little of. So, naturally I did a little digging and found out more. Sunscreen has been happening since 2006 and is now in its 9th year of providing a taste of what’s going on with local filmmakers. This year’s festival encourages its attendees to participate in all workshops, lectures and film screenings which makes it far more interactive and promotes community within our pool of local talent.

100 Films is an art show that was held at Blue Lucy Gallery in the heart of the Central Arts District.… Read More

Florida Ranch-Style Architecture

The Bahama Shores Neighborhood is located just south of Little Bayou. It is bounded on the west by 4th Street and on the east and south by Tampa Bay. Little Bayou is located just south of Big Bayou, adjacent to the Driftwood Neighborhood. A bayou is a water body tributary to another body of water, or simply a marsh. Little Bayou merges with Tampa Bay and is fed by Little Bayou Creek, which originally began from springs that now feed Lake Vista. At one time Little Bayou was a marsh, but little of the marsh exists today.

Both Bahama Shores and Driftwood were first settled by Native Americans, but few vestiges of theses original settlers remain.… Read More

I’ve always been concerned that someone is going to miss out on an opportunity to learn about or experience something new. Old teacher habits never seem to fade away. If you have never explored, or been to Weedon Island in recent years, now is the perfect time to discover the cultural and environmental treasures in what is literally our own backyard. Weedon Island Preserve (www.weedonislandpreserve.org) is 3,700 acres of natural ecosystems easily located at 1800 Weedon Island Drive NE (go east on 83rd Avenue North until you see the signage for the turn). Both the Preserve and Cultural and Natural History Center receive 18,000 visitors a year.… Read More

When we decided to move out of the ONE, we were hit with a barrage of questions. The hardest to answer were the permutations of the “why do you want to leave here” question. As with any soul-searching question, the answers were never easy. Life isn’t always as prosaic as we would like, and it was just the right time to move on.

This decision would have been a lot easier if we lived anywhere but in the Old Northeast. As anyone who is reading the Journal knows, the ONE is about as close to perfection as you can get in a neighborhood.… Read More

On New Year’s Day, St. Petersburg celebrated the centennial of the World’s First Airline. Now there is a second centennial to celebrate, the 100th anniversary of Major League Baseball. Major League Spring Training began in St. Pete on February 27, 1914 with the St. Louis Browns (now the Orioles). While the Browns were here only a year, St. Petersburg was host to eight other Major League teams over the next one hundred years. Among these teams was the New York Yankees who held spring training in St. Pete for 30 years beginning in 1925 and ending in 1961, with a few gaps in between.… Read More

The world is your canvas and you are the artist ready to paint the way. With every action, a brush glides paint on a canvas in effort to develop your masterpiece. This metaphor is often used and there is something that can be learned when looking at life through the eye of an artist.

Artist Jenny Bleackley knows that life and painting isn’t as simple or as easy as a glide of the paintbrush. A masterpiece takes time, commitment, passion, patience and continual development. As an artist develops his or her craft, they begin to notice how they look at life differently than most.… Read More

A can of soup. A can of soup? A can of soup! Wooden boxes painted to look like cardboard boxes containing Heinz ketchup. Wooden boxes!

Is this a hoax? This can’t be art, can it? Is Andy Warhol an artist like Salvador Dali, or is he just some media personality who was famous for fifteen minutes or so? Or is he, as the curator of the Warhol exhibit suggests, the person who may have had more of an influence on modern culture and art than any other artist, including Dali. And while we’re at it, what is the relationship, if any, between Dali and Warhol?… Read More

Sitting on the corner of  5th Street and 1st Avenue South, lays a forgotten triangular sliver of land called Liberty Bell Park. Nowadays, motorists and pedestrians pass by with barely a glance of this shambles of a place that offers little to make the casual passerby to want to enter anyway. The neglected sidewalks are crumbling and the landscape is strewn with litter, leaves, broken branches, and little evidence of any rake, broom, or parks department interest. Over the years, the few existing benches have been vandalized, and sit as unusable broken skeletons of their former selves.  To add more insult to this lost space, there is an incongruous and faded No Trespassing sign stuck in what looks like a public space warning people to ignore any interest in entering.… Read More