According to the St. Petersburg Times, onlookers cheered as the production company for Lethal Weapon 3 blew up The Soreno Hotel in 1992.
Not everyone cheered, though — St. Pete Preservation (Preserve the Burg) lost a landmark preservation battle when the city council voted 5-4 to deny landmark status for The Soreno.
The hotel, at Beach Dr. NE and 1st Ave., was slated for demolition to make way for Bay Plaza. But what's there now? Condos.
For Gregg Perkins, what's there now isn't nearly as important as what was there, and his Museum of Fine Arts exhibit, Sunshine City, combines art and tech to give patrons an immersive view of yesteryear.
It started with a Barnhill postcard. In the early part of the 20th century, E.G. Barnhill hand-colored postcards for St. Pete's tourists, using photos he had taken (largely from southern Pinellas) and, without the benefit of Photoshop — or even Microsoft Paint — manipulated Florida's natural landscape to, if possible, make it even more spectacular.
Fast forward to the early part of the next century, when these uranium-colored postcards have become highly collectible. Add to that a curious professor finding one such postcard in the MFA's collection, and you have a dazzling exhibit that honors history and art.
Perkins, an associate professor of Film, Animation, and New Media at the University of Tampa, became fascinated with the area when he arrived. Professors may not rest on their laurels; being a professor in any discipline allows — and demands — the professor to continue to produce. Professors of history write books; art professors create art. For Perkins' part, he wanted to involve his new home in an exhibit.
"I wanted to make a show about the local," he says. And, one day, combing the MFA's collection, he found a Barnhill photo of the Soreno Hotel. "The artist's take on the St. Pete landscape" sparked his curiosity.
"I was more interested in how [the] painting was related to its environment, how artwork engages place," he says.
What can an artist do with a demolished hotel's postcard that's already fancifully colored in pastel hues?
The first step was finding where it was taken. Perkins used visual clues to try and ascertain the vantage point of the photo used for the postcard.
"I just drove and around" he says, to find the same vantage point.
Then, of course, he took a "now" photo to contrast against the "then" photo.
If that were all, it wouldn't be much of an exhibit — but this is where Perkins' background in film and new media came into play. Using the Barnhill postcard and his own present-day photograph, Perkins' exhibit includes a seven-minute animation to show how the landscape has evolved. The exhibit will "expand and contract around the timeline" of the 1930-ish postcard, he says.
What's more, he's dug up some crude sketches of the Soreno's interior layout, courtesy of the city of St. Petersburg, and created a mobile app that will allow patrons at the exhibit to use their phones to wander through a re-imagined Soreno Hotel.
It's not an exact recreation, he cautions. The sketches weren't exactly detailed blueprints, so there's a lot he couldn't recreate. Instead, he created what he imagined the inside of the Soreno might have looked like.
"There's no recreating the exact experience," he says. "Cityscapes change."
Instead, he strove for the idea of capturing "a moment in time," calling his exhibit "historically motivated art."
What fascinates Perkins and moves this exhibit out of the realm of art for art's sake and into the world of sociopolitical commentary is the notion of ownership and connection to place.
"None of us own the city, but we live in it," he says. "We kind of own the cityscape, the landscape."
Consider Sunshine City a meditation on place, not only for people who live in St. Pete but for anyone who has a strong sense of connection to a location. It explores, as Perkins explains it, "people's relationship to place; it's a meditation on space."
For him, it's also a grounding experience.
"The show is a way for me to reconnect with place," he says. "The Barnhill image opened the door."
In the present-day photo, cranes loom in the background, hinting at the ever-changing face of a cityscape and also prompting you to think about what gives a place it's character, what is worth preserving and what needs to change.
"I want to call the question," he says. And, when you consider the destruction of the Soreno, the loss of a city landmark, and all the future battles agencies like St. Pete Preservation will fight, it's a weighty question indeed.
"When it's gone," Perksins says, "it's gone."
Cathy Salustri is the A+E editor. Contact her here.
This article appears in Feb 1-8, 2018.