A photo of someone diving at Sulphur Springs in Tampa, Florida c. 1920s. Credit: Dunn, Hampton, "High Diving at Sulphur Springs, Florida" (1920). Hampton Dunn Collection of Florida Postcards. Image 3212.

In “Florida Springs,” one of the best new Florida books of 2024, Christopher F. Meindl categorizes the story of Tampa’s Sulphur Springs as “truly tragic.”

He wades into the history of a spring that in 1900 remained a “peaceful and lightly used recreational resource” for Tampeños living near the northern edge of the then-fledgling city. Serviced by the streetcar, bathing crowds grew larger as the city expanded, but sinkholes a few miles away “funneled all varieties of refuse and polluted runoff” towards the spring. By 1986, it was permanently closed. While a swimming pool was eventually built there, that, too, is now closed indefinitely, while the old spring bathing space is fenced off and mottled with floating algae.

The associate professor of geography and director of the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida’s St. Petersburg campus is in Sulphur Springs this weekend for a talk about “pumping, pollution, policy and the struggle for truth.”

There’s no cover to see Christopher F. Meindl speak at Tampa’s Sulphur Springs Museum and Heritage Center on Sunday, Jan. 12.