This month brings St. Pete’s last chance to screen, ‘Razed,’ a must-see documentary about the Gas Plant District

Late last February, as the lights came up inside an auditorium on the University of South Florida’s Tampa campus, Dr. David Ponton III, held back tears. Attendees at the Institute on Black Life’s inaugural Festival of Films had just collectively exhaled following a screening of “Razed,” a new documentary about St. Petersburg’s Gas Plant District.

Ponton was readying himself to moderate a talk back with Andrew Lee, the film’s director, and its assistant director Tara Segall. The trio sat down, which is fitting because the documentary is an emotional rollercoaster.

The 75-minute movie takes viewers all the way back to the late-1800s when there wasn’t a baseball team on the 85-acre parking lot that’s home to Tropicana Field. That’s when the Orange Belt Railroad brought with it Black laborers who built a neighborhood that eventually became rich with beautiful two-story homes, ranch houses, bungalow-style dwellings, and businesses, too. Close to two dozen former residents appear on film to talk about growing up there, playing in Booker Creek, and being raised by neighbors who created a place for kids to almost forget about how Jim Crow informed society outside.

The joy of it all is not unfamiliar to the film’s producer, Gwendolyn D. Reese, a Gas Plant resident herself.

“Some people cried and I smiled,” Reese told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay, adding that it was good to be reminded of the happiness.

Some residents in the film laughed as they described taking a bath in a tin tub on the back porch, playing hopscotch in the dirt, cooking crabs in the backyard and taking mangoes from neighbors’ trees. They talked about their aspirations of attending Gibbs, Pinellas County’s first high school for Black students, and how their teachers—all successful in their own right—showcased an example of the possibilities.

“We experienced racism, but we didn’t actually know that we were deprived—because we weren’t,” Reese added. “Because in our own way, our community, our family, our friends, experienced so much play and joy, even if other people looked at it and saw it as deprivation.”

That communal spirit in the face of an ugly world is why there’s an alternate spelling for the film’s title: “Raised.”

But there are dark parts of the documentary, which does not flinch in bringing viewers to the 1980s as the neighborhood was mischaracterized as blighted by officials and The St. Petersburg Times—when in fact the blight was mostly happening where white landlords had property. Residents, there largely because of redlining, fell victim to eminent domain, and more-or-less kicked out so the neighborhood could be redeveloped.

They were promised a chance to return, but of course, plans changed and a municipality ended up building a baseball stadium for a team that didn’t even exist yet. Some residents interviewed in the film called that promise a straight up lie.

There is also the specter of more heartache at the Trop site where Rays ownership just reneged on a promise to build a new stadium, but Reese declined to talk about the team at this time, and remained focused on the stories in the film. While there’s been much reporting on the old wounds and broken promises at the Gas Plant, she told CL that for many of the old residents, the film was the first time anyone had actually given them a chance to take the mic and tell their side.

Even Reese, who organized the interviews, learned something new when Carlos Lovett, one of the youngest people in the film, talked about how moving out of the Gas Plant district—named for the columns of fuel that towered over the neighborhood—affected his family.

“I really wasn’t aware of a family that had actually experienced homelessness because of the displacement,” she said. “When I was interviewing Carlos, and I heard his story, he and I were both crying. That has been the most powerful story for me.”

The whole story—the one that balances the horrors with stories of a neighborhood that thrived socially and economically—is right there in “Razed.”

And after two sold-out screenings in St. Pete, and the one at USF, there’s just one more chance for locals to see the film before filmmakers decide if they’ll enter the documentary into film festivals in other parts of the country. The screening, set for Sunday at Palladium Theater, is organized by Sen. Darryl Rouson, who saw the premiere and told Reese that he wanted to help more people see the work.

“I think that one of the neat things that came out of the making of this film is reconnecting folks to other people who lived in the neighborhood,” Segall recently told WMNF public affairs program The Skinny. Segall was also unaware of the full picture until she started to make this film.

And while there’s still no place in present-day St. Petersburg quite like the Gas Plant, its spirit lives on when its former residents get back together. That energy is perhaps the biggest reason to see this film, which skips the current Rays drama in favor of capturing the essence of the neighborhood.

The storytelling was paramount, Reese, and the filmmakers agreed—especially at a time when there’s an effort to suppress truths about Black life in America. Their stories, Reese explained, will find a way to the surface.

“If you don’t want to teach it in school, OK, then we’ll do films about it, or we’ll do a play like ‘When the Righteous Triumph,” Reese said. “There are other ways for us to tell our stories and make sure that history is not hidden, is not erased, is not whitewashed—and you can hear it from the people who lived it.”

There’s no cover to see “Razed” at St.Petersburg’s Palladium Theater on Sunday, March 30, but registration is required. UPDATED 03/25/25 5:37 a.m. Corrected the headline to point out that March 30 is the last screening of “Razed.”

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This article appears in Mar 13-19, 2025.