SoUL: Restoring St. Pete’s Urban Lakes

Picture your favorite park in St. Pete. Chances are, there’s a lake or pond right in the center of it. While we are best known for our beautiful beaches, these humbler freshwater features are hidden gems, reflecting our polychrome sunsets, soothing our spirits, and hosting a diversity of wildlife. Keeping these waterways clean and healthy is a big job – one that requires love, labor, and, sometimes, a little bit of SoUL. 

Stewards of our Urban Lakes, that is. The nonprofit organization, whose origins date back to 2007, works to improve the water quality and restore the natural habitat of urban lakes through education and community engagement, hosting regular clean-ups and educational events at eight local lakes – including Crescent, Round, Mirror, Jungle, Winston, Pasadena, Eagle Crest, and Meadowlawn – and counting.

It’s a calling that came naturally to Lucy Trimarco, a retired educator and native plant gardener who lives near Crescent Lake. When she first moved to the area in 2002, nothing was growing in the lake. The city regularly sprayed pesticides along the lake’s perimeter and algal blooms and fish kills occurred every few months. Together with a group of concerned neighbors – the nucleus of volunteers that became SoUL – she lobbied the city to try using mechanical removal methods instead. Trimarco remembers the first time city workers showed up with a Weedoo (think of it as an aquatic tractor) to harvest water lettuce. She laughs. “It was thrilling to see that!” 

Now, as a lake champion – a SoUL volunteer who spearheads restoration initiatives at a particular lake – Trimarco helps to organize clean-up events for Crescent. SoUL measures the quantity of trash collected, helping guide the city’s decisions about the placement of Watergoats (floating nets that capture litter, but not fish). Since 2007, Crescent Lake volunteers have also partnered with Lake Watch, a water-quality monitoring program sponsored by the University of Florida. And most recently, Trimarco developed an Eco Explorer scavenger hunt that encourages kids and families to learn about plants, animals, and man-made items that can be found around the lake. 

Crescent Lake is now considered a “hotspot” for bird life according to Cornell University’s eBird database, which tracks the frequency and species diversity of bird sightings across the world. Each winter, birders now flock to Crescent Lake Park to catch sight of awe-inspiring avian visitors such as the American white pelican.  

For Trimarco, the lake’s transformation has been more than just a beautification project: it’s an investment in her community. “Crescent Lake means so much to our whole city. It’s like our own Central Park,” she says. After years of working for change with the Florida Democratic Environmental Caucus, she notes, volunteering with SoUL feels different somehow. “It’s just fulfilling,” she muses. 

The Power of Two

“Everybody wants a pelican,” jokes Jim Packer, one of two SoUL champions who steward Mirror Lake. But it may be a while before this broad basin, the city’s earliest drinking water reservoir, becomes a birding hotspot. 

Packer, who moved to the neighborhood in 2022, works closely with his fellow volunteer Jennifer Faller, who arrived in 2021. Both enjoy daily walks around the lake with their dogs, Daisy and Steinway, and both show up every single week to work on weeding, planting, or picking up garbage around the lake’s edge. They also host monthly clean-up events every second Saturday through SoUL and quarterly clean-ups through Keep Pinellas Beautiful. 

But, Packer insists, what they’re doing here isn’t simply picking up garbage; it’s a full-scale restoration. Faller recalls her early visits to the lake, finding a shoreline suffocated with trash and invasive weeds. Beneath that, a deep, sludgy layer of muck, litter, and tree debris had built up over time, stretching as much as eight feet out into the lake. She remembers thinking: “This is disgusting. I have to fix it somehow.”

Then, while walking Steinway around Crescent Lake, she discovered a group of volunteers collecting trash. She stopped to ask who had organized the clean-up, and, a few weeks later, she was taking SoUL’s president, Jim Bays, for a walk around Mirror Lake. Bays, an ecologist specializing in restoring freshwater habitats, suggested a total transformation: dig out the layer of muck along the lake’s edge and replant with native species that would improve water quality and provide habitat. SoUL helped the Mirror Lake neighbors coordinate with the city to clear out the lake’s edge and with the Tampa Bay Estuary Program to fund the necessary plants. They planted the northern edge of the lake and installed a pollinator garden around the viewing platform. Florida Fish and Wildlife performed a survey on the lake to document aquatic plant and animal species.

An Ongoing Challenge

But there’s still a long way to go. Mirror Lake’s western bank still needs restoration, and plastic bottles and snack wrappers still dot the water’s edge. “The more you look, the more you see,” Faller laments. Two alligators, released as juveniles by neighbors who couldn’t care for them anymore, prowl the lake; Faller is convinced this is a major reason the lake doesn’t attract many ducks (or pelicans). And while a good number of volunteers show up for each clean-up, the lake champions have found it challenging to get neighbors out to help.

Packer, who recently retired from a career of building maintenance, is circumspect about their progress. “It’s a process,” he reflects, describing challenges like learning which tools work best for landscape maintenance, building a solid relationship with the city, and finding boats to help reach trash in deeper parts of the lake. “It’s also been a total education. I feel like I’ve gone to college again!”

Faller, who consults on concrete for industrial and commercial construction projects, longs for more movement, and faster. “I don’t think small at all,” she confesses. “I think big.” She feels hopeful when lots of folks show up for clean-ups, but wishes she saw more commitment from the neighborhood, particularly young people moving in. 

Both enjoy the positive feedback they get from neighbors and visitors. When one of the lake’s many unhoused residents stops us to thank Faller for the work they have done to improve the lake, she beams. “This feels like the thing I am supposed to be doing,” she says. 

Small Space, Big Difference

Adrian Arabitg can remember a time when there was no plant life in Round Lake. When the financial manager moved to the neighborhood in 2014, he says, “The lake was full of trash. There were no birds except some sickly-looking ducks. It was biologically dead.” After bringing the issue to the Historic Uptown Neighborhood Association (HUNA), he learned that Round Lake, like Crescent Lake, was managed with pesticides. “It was like chemical warfare for invasives!” he exclaims. 

Despite its diminutive size, Round Lake was once a much-loved destination for St. Petersburgers in the first half of the twentieth century. They gathered on its shores to play horseshoes, stage the elaborate pageant that preceded the annual Festival of States, and vie for the biggest catch in St. Petersburg’s first Fishathon. In later decades, the neighborhood began to fall into decline, with a proliferation of abandoned properties, prostitution, and drugs. The lake didn’t fare much better. Arabitg wanted to make a change – but first he needed some gear.

“Adrian contacted me,” remembers documentary filmmaker and former HUNA president, Kristy Andersen. “He said he needed four pairs of waders and a pole net.” The group they formed, Friends of Round Lake, began leading quarterly clean-ups at the lake. Andersen also provided another critical boost for the fledgling organization: a connection to SoUL. “We wanted to make the lake more of a habitat,” says Arabitg. “To do that, we needed a scientist.”

SoUL helped the Friends create a design for the lake featuring six native aquatic plants and install a test plot in 2019. Since that time, the plot has doubled in size. These hardy natives, including plants such as duck potato and pickerelweed, sequester nutrients that might otherwise pollute the lake, form habitat for birds, and require only minimal maintenance – all while tolerating large fluctuations in the rain-fed lake’s water level. “I consider Round Lake our best, most successful wetland plant coverage yet on any of our lakes,” reflects Bays.

In full bloom under the morning sun, with herons and gallinules stalking the reeds and neighbors promenading down the sidewalk, it seems Round Lake has come beautifully back to life. It just goes to show, says Arabitg, that “on a smaller level, bottom up, you really can effect a change. You don’t have to go to Tallahassee. Small associations can accomplish a lot.”

An environmental truism says that everything is connected. In the case of St. Pete’s lakes, this is literally true: the waters protected by SoUL volunteers flow on into the bay, and on into the ocean, improving water quality for seagrass, fish, birds, and ultimately, for all of us. The hours of organizing, planting, picking up trash, and sharing the message with neighbors are slowly breathing life back into these precious urban waterscapes – the flowing SoUL of our city.