The mysteries of history: A bus trip into St. Pete’s past

Standing at the front of the bus, Monica Kile addressed 56 attentive passengers with a handheld microphone. “We’re going to visit a couple of old St. Petersburg sites today, places that you’ve probably never heard of,” she said. “And then we’re going to figure out how one goes about researching history — how do we know what we know?”

Kile, the director of Eckerd College’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, had organized an ambitious “mystery trip” around the city. None of the 52 paying members (about 98 percent of them women) knew in advance where the luxury coach was headed.

An admitted history nut, Kile said her goal was to “show people the interesting places [where] they can do some ‘sleuthing,’ and the interesting people throughout the city that may be able to help them.”

To that end, the tour was joined, at specific locations, by representatives from St. Petersburg Preservation, the St. Petersburg Museum of History, St. Petersburg's Urban Planning and Historic Preservation Division and others who share Kile’s passion for the city’s history.

“I’m going to make you all history detectives,” Kile announced before the bus arrived at “The Deuces,” the historically African American corridor of businesses and homes along 22^nd St. S.

Former city councilman Jeff Danner, another local history buff and a key player in recent revitalization efforts, took the microphone to explain that “The Deuces,” before desegregation and the arrival of the Interstate, was the thriving hub of black St. Petersburg. In the city’s first half century, blacks — and Jews, for that matter — were forbidden from owning businesses anywhere else.

The ladies (and gentlemen) learned about Jennie Hall, namesake of the area’s community pool, who — tired of the white bureaucracy’s hemming and hawing (Hall was white herself) — donated $25,000 of her own money to get the thing built in 1954.

The bus huffed to a stop outside 1852 Central Ave. Right there in the thriving Grand Central District sits a dilapidated theater, shuttered for more than a decade. Kile and Danner led the crowd inside.

It was built in 1925 as the Patio, an open-air movie house (“High Class Motion Pictures! Centuria’s Celebrated Orchestra!” read an advertisement from the period). A solid year of rain, bugs and humidity led to the installation of a steel roof 12 months later. Air conditioning followed. Many of the tour participants remembered it as the Playhouse Theatre, the name it bore for 30 years, before going “adult” for a while in the late 1960s.

It also served time as the Golden Apple Dinner Theatre, a Christian youth club, and — before it closed for good — a Rays-themed sports bar called Extra Innings.

This was certainly the most visceral part of the tour. Insider the cavernous building, the air was thick and musty, the floor strewn with pulled-up plywood sheets and sections of old and rotting lumber (it’s in the early stages of yet another renovation; the new owner wants to turn it back into a performing arts venue). Every surface carried a half-inch of dust. The theater seats, of course, are long gone, but the green-painted proscenium arch is still visible behind what’s left of the sports bar.

There were ghosts in the walls, too, of musicians from Centuria’s Celebrated Orchestra, of the faded TV stars who trod the stage of the Golden Apple, of the porn enthusiasts and the Christian youths and the beer-chugging baseball fans.

Walking outside again, everyone talked about how marvelous it was to not only learn about history, but to feel it, to stand in it.

“I’m from Tampa and I don’t know a thing about St. Pete,” said Maggie Stambaugh. “It’s very interesting — I didn’t know all this history was over here.”

Bus chatter was animated. Someone else remembered watching Fantasia back in the ’40s at the Playhouse. One of the men saw the Richard Burton potboiler Night of the Iguana.

“At least they have one toilet that works,” smiled another lady, glad to be back in the a/c. “One working hole in the ground — that’s all you need.”

Next stop was Lang’s Bungalow Court, a nearly 100-year-old utopian dream community — 14 tall wooden homes facing a thin central courtyard — built by St. Pete visionary Al Lang.

The Lang properties are still inhabited, and the homeowners have kept up their shrubbery and flower beds so that it looks a lot like it probably did in the 1920s. Historic preservationist Howard Hansen met the bus and discussed his own research into the storied history of the old enclave.

Laurie Clement, a veteran of Kile’s previous (non-mystery) tours, said she enjoyed learning something new every time.

“I think Monica is a great tour guide,” Clement beamed. “She has a lot of energy. I’m a member of the Unitarian Church downtown, which is an almost 100-year-old building, and I’m very interested in historic preservation.”

After lunch, the group walked a short distance to the St. Petersburg Museum of History for another discussion of research methodology.

In the end, nobody did any "sleuthing." Still, after a good meal and a rest, spirits were up. The day trip was a success.

It seemed like a good opportunity to ask Kile if St. Pete had any mysteries left to solve.

“My goodness, yes,” she said, and explained that she’s determined to find out what became of a 7-by-10 mural that was ripped from City Hall’s grand staircase wall on Dec. 29, 1966.

The oil on canvas painting, by famed Works Progress Administration artist George Snow Hill, was titled "Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille." It depicted a white family on a beach pagoda, enjoying fried chicken and watermelon.

In the picture, they’re being entertained by two black musicians, playing banjo and fiddle. Hill, who created the work in the 1940s, gave the men stereotypical “negro” faces, with wide white eyes and oversized white lips. They could easily be white men wearing minstrel show blackface.

A group of six young black men took issue with what they perceived — understandably — as an offensive, racist image. They tore the canvas out of its frame and marched down Central Avenue with it. According to the St. Petersburg Times, the men shouted, "We’re gonna take this picture down where all the black people can see it!”

They were arrested, and ringleader Joseph Waller, 25, spent two years in jail on felony theft charges before being released. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Waller later changed his name to Omali Yeshitela, and he resides in Petersburg to this day. Governor Jeb Bush restored his rights in 2000.

But what of "Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille?" Allegedly, the mural disappeared from an evidence locker during one of Waller’s hearings. And, Kile says, she has it on good authority that it’s in the possession of a former judge, hanging on the wall of his Colorado ski chalet.

“I’d really, really like to find that mural,” Kile said.

These are the things that keep historical researchers up at night.

Editor's note: If anyone would like to talk about the missing George Snow Hill mural, please contact Creative Loafing or call 813-739-4864, or send an email to A&E editor Cathy Salustri.

Bill DeYoung was born in St. Pete and spent the first 22 years of his life here. After a long time as an arts and entertainment journalist at newspapers around Florida (plus one in Savannah, Ga.) he returned to his hometown in 2014.