For the April 16, 1988 inaugural issue of Creative Loafing in the Tampa Bay area, my cover story, “Metro Mind-Set: It Takes More Than a Bridge to Bridge the Bay,” probed the question: Could the counties and communities on both sides of Tampa Bay, linked mostly by bridges, ever coalesce as an interconnected metropolitan area?
“Historically, the communities in the Tampa Bay area have been like pages in a loose-leaf notebook, close enough to almost touch, dependent on each other in a disconnected way, but never bound together,” I wrote then.
Now, 25 years later, pretty much all I could say is … um, ditto.
Back in 1988, many across Tampa Bay dreamed of luring a Major League Baseball team to the area, an idea that actually wasn’t that farfetched. The only sticking point was where a home for the team would be located.
The debate sparked chatter among area leaders (particularly in Hillsborough and Pinellas counties) about closer cooperation and especially the need for better mass transit to get fans to the new baseball stadium wherever it landed.
Then history and reality stepped in. Rather than working together to achieve a regional goal, Hillsborough and Pinellas engaged in a bitter competition to lure a baseball team to their side of Tampa Bay. And both counties began making plans for light rail systems. Of course, they were completely separate plans, not integrated. And none of the plans even proposed the notion that the two would connect.
Still, a source quoted in the CL story predicted that the coming of a professional baseball team to either side of the Bay “would put an end to all the bickering and foster a new era of cooperation between the communities…” because “the real sports fan won’t care about where the team is located … all he wants is baseball in the area.”
Why hasn’t that happened? Some blame the sterile domed stadium, more point to the St. Pete location and the age-old regional “bridge-a-phobia.”
Since neither Pinellas nor Hillsborough ever followed through with an effective mass transit system, much less connect them, hardy fans are pretty much forced to drive to games. For many, that involves crossing a bridge, twice.
Now, current team ownership is seeking a new baseball stadium; and not necessarily in St. Petersburg, despite lease restrictions tying the team to the city for years to come. And that has provoked officials and civic leaders in Hillsborough County to declare the team a “regional asset” and offer to do everything possible to keep the team in the area (wink, wink) while tiptoeing around legal issues.
So, welcome back to 1988. But the future of major league baseball in the area is foggy. Leaders on both sides of the Bay are jockeying for position and sticking pins in maps to suggest new stadium sites. And there is no viable regional mass transit solution on the horizon, which would logically seem critical no matter where the team lands.
We still have our bridges, though; better bridges, in fact. But it seems clear after 25 years it’s still gonna take a whole lot more to bring the Tampa Bay area together to create a metro state of mind.
Steve Baal was a frequent contributor to Creative Loafing and Weekly Planet in the early years, including a series of “Dispatches from Bosnia” in 1994.
This article appears in Apr 18-24, 2013.