About St. Pete

In 1876, John Constantine Williams left Detroit with bad lungs and bought land on the Pinellas Peninsula. A yellow fever outbreak chased him out of Tampa in 1887, so he settled on the shores of Tampa Bay and started building. He had the land. He needed the railroad.

Peter Demens had the railroad. Born Pyotr Dementyev, a Russian aristocrat who fled political persecution in 1881, Demens brought his Orange Belt Railway to Williams' settlement in 1888. The two men flipped a coin to name the city. Demens won and picked St. Petersburg, after his childhood home in Russia. Williams named the first hotel Detroit. One coin toss, and a Florida town got a Russian name and a Midwestern hotel. The first train arrived on June 8, 1888. It carried empty freight cars and a single passenger.

By February 29, 1892, the town was incorporated with 300 residents. Central Avenue became the commercial spine, lined with the First National Bank, the Eagle Inn, the Paxton House hotel, and Williams' own drugstore. Waterfront parks followed. A trolley system. The Electric Pier. The weather cooperated: 360 days of sunshine a year. The city earned the nickname it still carries.

For a long time, St. Petersburg was a place people came to sit down. Green benches lined the downtown streets. Retirees gathered on them by the thousands. The city became famous for its quiet. Too quiet. "God's Waiting Room" was the joke, and the city spent decades trying to shake it. The benches came out in the late 1960s. The 1926 Million Dollar Pier, with its fishing, amusements, and radio station, went through several reinventions, including the controversial Inverted Pyramid design in 1973.

What replaced the benches and the waiting was art. The Dali Museum arrived with the world's largest collection of Salvador Dali's work outside Spain, pulling 400,000 visitors a year to a waterfront building that looks like it melted on purpose. The Chihuly Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts, the James Museum. Every fall, SHINE brings international muralists downtown, and a three-story portrait appears on a building between your Tuesday and Wednesday commute.

In 2020, the Pier District opened. Twenty-six acres of green space, the Marketplace, a splash pad, and Janet Echelman's aerial net sculpture "Bending Arc" suspended over the bay. Central Avenue runs three miles west from the waterfront through five districts that share almost nothing but a street name. Beach Drive is upscale waterfront dining. The EDGE District is craft beer and the crowd that shows up after midnight. Grand Central is the original gayborhood, Pride flags on every lamppost year-round, 300,000-plus people at Florida's largest Pride celebration each June.

The city that was once built for people who wanted to stop moving became a place people come to see what's next. The coin flip worked out.

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