The Planet begins its series on these shifting urban landscapes with a glimpse into the weekday life of downtown Tampa and St. Pete.
Two downtowns. Two distinct identities. Twenty-four miles from one another, yet worlds apart.
Tampa is tall, gleaming and full of commerce. St. Petersburg is squat, inviting and full of tourists.
Tampa is dead at night. If more than a few dozen people are downtown on any given evening — outside of a show at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center — they are doing one helluva job hiding.
St. Petersburg's nighttime scene is alive. Bands rock Jannus Landing. Theater fills a park for an outdoor performance. Glassy-eyed 20-somethings stumble from the Independent to Mastry's and back as they take in drinks and sexual partners.
The two downtowns do have one thing in common: The condo boom.
The popularity of buying condominiums over the past decade — as investment or as domicile — has led to plans for an unprecedented number of new residential units in both downtowns. The prices range from the affordable ($170,000) to the luxurious (more than $1.7 million to hang your hat at Trump Tower Tampa; $4 million for the penthouse at Signature in St. Petersburg).
With the condo boom come challenges.
For Tampa, the question is whether a residential neighborhood can be created in a downtown that currently empties at 5 p.m. For St. Petersburg, the issue is one of integration; adding expensive condos (and their thousands of residents) to a functioning downtown could change its bohemian flavor and raise property values out of reach of the arts groups and small businesses that give the city its distinctiveness.
A desirable downtown can help forge a city's identity and provide an important urban core for a metropolitan region. And Tampa Bay has the kind of populace that would seem drawn to such a core: According to a May 2006 Impresa study done for Creative Tampa Bay, we have far fewer jobs in manufacturing than do most other urban areas. Our strong employers (outside of service and tourism) are the banking and insurance companies that make up the lifeblood of downtowns.
Yet that same study suggests a disconnect between what the two cities are striving for and what many residents want. The study found that Tampa Bay residents ranked 37th out of 50 metropolitan areas among those who would rather live in the city than in the suburbs.
This week the Planet begins an ongoing look at the problems and possibilities arising in these two "Downtowns on the Verge." Think of this initial story as a collection of impressions — our attempt to take the temperature of the two downtowns on an average working day. On two recent mid-week afternoons, the entire editorial staff fanned out, first in Tampa and then in St. Pete, to experience the state of the city in such areas as condo growth, transportation and parking, arts and culture, downtown living, dining, the waterfront, and life along Central and Franklin.
Here is what we found on those two days in May, before the heat of summer set in.
THE "MAIN" STREETS
At a pedestrian glance, the respective daytime personae of Tampa's Franklin Street and St. Petersburg's Central Avenue — the thoroughfares that, in the classic urban sense, serve as each downtown's spine, center of activity, promenade — couldn't be more different.
Beginning at Tampa City Center's smoked-glass modernity, Franklin Street's brick-paved mall runs only half a dozen blocks of skyscraper-walled canyon before petering out amid a cluster of condos-in-progress, empty storefronts, the Hillsborough Regional Services Center and the first signs of decaying peripheral sprawl. By day, the northernmost two blocks are peopled only by construction workers and those returning to their cubicles from grabbing lunch; the only current potential magnet for leisure, Herman Massey Park, sits going to seed behind locked fence gates. Southward, things are positively bustling. Suit-clad cubicle denizens briskly cruise the sidewalks in packs, chatting on cell phones. They grab hot dogs or gyros at several food carts, or steam in and out of myriad restaurants that stretch the definition of the word "deli." They sit one-to-a-bench in Gaslight Square Park, reading supermarket checkout-aisle novels, or half-glance into the windows of the few shops not selling chow or convenience.
But only until 1:30, when what could only graciously be called "the crowd" disappears completely, back into the handful of high-rise hives until the working day is done.
St. Pete's Central Avenue, on the other hand, retains various degrees of vitality all the way to the Treasure Island Causeway, at the peninsula's western shore. Downtown, Central's low-slung, wildly varying architecture (modern, Mediterranean, classic Florida, downright old) strongly contrasts with Tampa's urban heart. St. Pete's center has its share of empty storefronts, too, but its eclectic old-school-beach-town assortment of restaurants, bars, antique boutiques and specialty shops sustains an all-day flow of tourists, errand-runners, shoppers and gawkers. The density unarguably lessens after the lunch-hour rush, but couples remain lazily grazing at outdoor tables all afternoon. Gaggles of consumers stroll from window to window, and soccer moms fill Central's metered parking lots in the name of paying the utilities. Each of its four or so bars serves more grizzled retirees and parched locals than downtown Tampa's sole populist watering hole, The Hub.
