In my last text from Andy Huse, shortly before his suicide, the food historian and University of South librarian told me where to go for bánh mì.
“Saigon Deli is solid,” he wrote, with a nod to the obvious. “But I think the Banh Mi Factory off North Dale Mabry may be the best. They also have an amazing bakery. They even make a sandwich with an oversized croissant.”
We were close colleagues, not really buddies. Andy was my go-to for Tampa eats. We share (or shared) a taste for informal joints, where food is culture. Many of his picks were classic. Mel’s Hot Dogs, and of course, the Columbia (“best Cuban in town … ask for it ‘smashed'”). Most were close to campus. For take-out, K-Deli, a Korean market tucked into a strip mall on Bruce B. Downs. And many, off my daily drive. Taaza Mart, up in Tampa Palms, “a giant Indian grocery store with a damn good restaurant inside.”
Being scholars with overlapping aims, our paths routinely crossed. Andy spoke with my classes. We mentored students together. He tracked down images and maps. For decades Andy helped cultivate USF’s Florida Studies collection, where he made his professional home. Holding down much of the library’s fourth floor, the archive of Floridiana is one of the university’s true treasures, a sparkling geode inside the building’s Brutalist shell.
Andy’s sudden death, a week after receiving a letter that his contract would not be renewed, leaves more questions than answers. The beloved raconteur, and world’s leading expert on the Cuban sandwich suffered from depression. Documents concerning his dismissal point to instances of anger and aggression on the job; in deanspeak, “behavior unbecoming of a public employee.” I will miss Andy’s ability to guide us deeper into a place. But it’s also “unbecoming” of an archivist, historian, or scholar to write down only what you wish to remember. I am torn between personal affection, a harsh termination, his suicide, and the grudging recognition that in releasing him from the library, maybe USF did the right thing. There’s no easy way out of this packet of grief.
Here’s a fact about libraries. Every good archive has at least one person who knows the stacks inside out. A special collections library is not just a repository of information but a sum of acquisitions, each with histories of their own. Scholarly research is kind of like playing 3D chess; to find out something new, you fare better knowing the deep history (or backstory) of a given collection. The technical term is “provenance.” How did a manuscript, photograph, or rare book wind up in the acid-free folder or box before you? Scholars depend upon the people who first sifted through a collection, who accessioned the files, who may know what has not even been catalogued yet. They tell you where to look. This institutional memory, which takes years to build, often resides in one individual. At USF, that person was Andy.
Being equal parts author and archivist, blessed with a keen eye for bullshit and genuine love for his adopted hometown, Andy understood research at a gut level. His mentor Gary Mormino reminds me that Huse’s books “rank as the number one and number two best sellers at the University Press of Florida.” He was, historian Evan Bennett notes, “irreplaceable.”
So how do we mourn this loss?
In the days after his death, I devised a vigil around two shared passions: Floridiana and food. I would eat a sandwich at a site of erasure.
To explain. (Because maybe my story speaks for you.) Last Spring, my wife Julie and I sold our house in St. Petersburg and moved into a Channelside apartment. We traded our beloved hundred-year-old bungalow on St. Pete’s southside, surrounded by native plants and kissed by Gulf breezes, for a city of parking lots, interstate, and glass. We are still trying to figure out this undeniably charismatic, manufactured district. There is no real community here; we inhabit, to quote archaeologist Eric Prendergast, a “terraformed artificial landscape.”
At one point shell middens lined downtown Tampa near the river. Long before it was a banana port or cruise destination, Channelside was a tidal estuary, populated by Florida’s first people. Nearby, the U.S. staged and waged its war against the Seminoles. Army barracks sat where concrete pillars now hold up the Selmon. Around Whiting Street, a spring ran into the river. Bodies probably lay buried in the shell under the hockey arena, though no one can say for sure. The shell midden disappeared in the late-19th century, mined for street fill or lime in Henry Plant’s hotel, I guess.
Looking for the place to eat my memorial sandwich, I studied predevelopment maps. The Fort Brooke area falls outside the early street grid. Today, the shoreline is unrecognizable. Davis and Harbor Island, shaped from dredge-and-fill, did not exist. West of Meridian, where the trolley hooks North up to Ybor, should be spartina, oysters, mangroves and seagrass.
Ironies of place abound. The Florida Aquarium sits on a site that was often underwater. You can still see the relic creek, near some celebratory public art, in a retention pond that drains the aquarium’s parking garage. Beneath the Benchmark International Arena, or the Ice Palace, under a building on its fifth name in 25 years, stood the former midden.
My plan came together. That night, on a stage over a Florida hockey rink, adjacent to a former shell mound, Katy Perry was to rise and sing.
What better way to honor this buried past?
Julie and I grabbed sandwiches at the Banh Mi Factory, the place in Carrollwood Andy recommended, then slogged through rush-hour traffic to the downtown exit. I nuked our sandwiches in the microwave. We picked up chips and drinks at the sparkling new, overpriced Publix. We found a picnic table off Riverwalk, right below the arena, in what an 1875 survey showed as Hillsborough Bay.
The sandwich did not disappoint. Spiced pork, pate, a cucumber slice, cilantro and the pop of a jalapeño laid on a crusty baguette. After dinner, we followed a train of KatyCats to the arena gate. In the serene twilight outside the Lightning’s home arena, Thunder Alley glistened with sequins, glitter, and banana-leaf skirts–paying live tribute to a music video. A bronze statue of hockey legend Phil Esposito lorded over the arena’s giant screens and glass facade.
Tampa is a city that paves over its past and reinvents its history, where even the History Center sits on fill. I can think of few things stranger than an ice hockey rink by a Florida shell mound. But the city also holds onto its pockets of culture. Without Andy’s tip, I would not have found the bánh mì—the bliss in a baguette, pork layered with cucumber, a cilantro and jalapeño zip.
Culture is a living thing. Without librarians, the terraform may lure us into historical amnesia. We are ghosted by erasure. Except for the archivists.
They help us remember.
Thomas Hallock is Professor of English and Florida Studies at the University of South Florida. Archaeologists Bob Austin, Kendal Jackson, and Eric Prendergast provided background about Tampa’s earlier history. If you are considering suicide, please call 211 or 988 to connect with the Crisis Center of Tampa Bay 24/7.
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This article appears in Sept. 4-10, 2025.