He’s preserving St. Pete

Who? Will Michaels

Sphere of influence: Historic preservation, neighborhood issues and social services. Michaels is the president of the nonprofit St. Petersburg Preservation Inc. He is a board member and former executive director of the St. Petersburg Museum of History. He has also served as vice president for the Council Of Neighborhood Organizations and worked with Pinellas County's Juvenile Welfare Board for over 20 years.

How he makes a difference: "One of the founding fathers said, 'It's hard to argue with a battery of hard facts,'" Michaels says to explain his influence. The Bahama Shores resident prefers a quiet approach to city issues, using research to bolster his case for various neighborhood or preservation initiatives. Through CONA, he distributes information about new developments to various neighborhoods. His work with St. Pete Preservation has helped save several historic structures. While executive director of the St. Petersburg Museum of History, Michaels renovated and expanded exhibits, brought back school tours and secured funding for several years.

CL: Recently, St. Pete Preservation has succeeded in efforts to save elements of the First Baptist Church and Crislip Arcade. With that in mind, what is the current state of preservation in St. Pete?

Michaels: I think we've come a good way, but we have a lot farther to go.

One of the problems has been that part of it was caused by these latest zoning regulations; that's why you had this flurry of development activity in the downtown area. The developers were buying up property and submitting applications for redevelopment for projects that are very, very iffy, and may very well never happen. Unfortunately, a number of historic properties got caught up in the middle of that. The Garden Cafeteria being one of those. It's been, in a sense, like putting out fires in the last year or two. No sooner do you get set to move in a certain direction, and all of a sudden something else pops up.

[The] Crislip [Arcade is] an example of this. We didn't have the Crislip on our immediate radar screen until we heard the owners/buyers of it wanted to immediately demolish it. That just popped up like a mushroom and it required an immediate response. And, of course, that takes away from other programs that we're viewing as being strategic, or perhaps in the greater scheme of things of higher historic importance.

I kind of feel this is the same with the city. The city is in more of a reactive mode than they are in a proactive mode. I hope that will change. We had a meeting this week with the new Community Preservation Commission. It was interesting to hear David Bacon, the current chair of the CPC, talking about the commission having a role in fostering and promoting historic preservation in St. Petersburg. Where I think the mode of the commission in the past has been more like a court, you know. They being the "impartial deciders." You don't have to have a background in historic preservation to be on the commission. But it was not proactive.

I think the next stage for St. Pete Preservation and the city, and hopefully this can be done to some extent collaboratively, is to put together a plan for comprehensive historic preservation in our community both in the near term and the long term.

What's the next historic project for St. Pete Preservation Inc.?

We're working on several things. … In terms of the landmarking of buildings, we have suggested to the city a number of buildings for consideration for landmarking in the near future. We're continuing to work with them to try and get positive steps taken to accomplish the landmarking of those buildings.

The building that we're most interested in, that most deserves landmarking, is the Detroit Hotel. That is the most historic building, without a doubt, in the city. It's virtually the very first building that was built in St. Petersburg. The original part is still standing and even the wings that have been added on are historic. [There's the] two brick structures; you got a 1910 structure on one side and a 1914 structure on the other side. That used to be the social center of the city. It certainly sparked the economy of the city. That was the terminus of the railroad, and if you were going to bring all these tourists and businesspeople to St. Petersburg, they had to have some place to stay so we had the Detroit Hotel there. And if you go back and look at its history, over the years we've had everybody from William Jennings Bryan to Eleanor Roosevelt stay there, and people like President Kennedy before he was president making campaign speeches there. So it just has a wealth of history. We did have some meetings with some of the owners there a while back. We plan to have another meeting with the owners there in the near future, and hopefully convince them to proceed with the landmarking of the Detroit hotel on a collaborative basis.

What's the biggest hurdle that you find when trying to landmark some of these historic buildings?

I think it's partly not appreciating the contribution that historic preservation makes to economic development to the city. We have a mindset out there that the two don't mix. I don't think that's true. I don't think research will support that oil-and-water theory of historic preservation and economic development. So I think we need to overcome that mindset.

I think that, again, part of the hurdle is that we do not have the plan and we need to build that plan, and to the extent possible that needs to be a plan that's supported by the total community. Not just historic preservation folks, but the city folks and the developers.

Looking back at your years with the Juvenile Welfare Board, what happens to children and families when these social service budgets are cut?

That is sad when you see children services and family services cut back the way they are. We have so far yet to go in this community in meeting the needs of our children and families. We keep looking at the glass being half filled up, and we don't look at the fact that it's half empty and now we're trying to cut back on that half-filled glass some more. Unfortunately, I think while there are many important public services, the services going to our children should be among the most important and priority should be established there. The psychology that one size fits all and we'll just reduce everybody's budget by 10 percent or an equal amount doesn't make sense. And one of the places where that doesn't make sense is in respect to children and families in the community.

We have issues of child abuse that need to be dealt with. We have issues of neglect and dependency that need to be dealt with. We're in the middle of a recession right now; we're having increasing unemployment throughout the country, including locally here. It's those social support programs that help enable a family to negotiate a job loss or a reduction in family income. And it's really short-sighted to cut back in those areas.

It's slamming families is what it's doing. It's slamming families and children. One of the things when I was a research consultant at JWB, we tracked juvenile delinquency and we tracked unemployment in Pinellas County. We found a remarkable statistical correlation between unemployment and youth delinquency throughout the community. Invest wisely now or spend a whole lot more later. I think what is happening is we are not investing wisely now and the consequences are that instead of spending a few hundred dollars to maybe a couple thousand dollars on a child through daycare or counseling program or foster care program that is of quality level, we end up spending $35,000 a year to incarcerate somebody 10, 15, 20 years from now. And that goes on year after year.

From a families perspective, it's really hard to get people to empathize. You know, it's more stories. It's the role for the press, the media, to do more stories. When you think of how many single parent women that we have that are caring for children, and some of them working two or three jobs just to make ends meet, and the lack of quality time that results between that mother and that child, it's a small wonder that the positive socialization that should be occurring gets replaced by TV sets or by some negative forces out on the streets. And it just compounds the problem.

To me, some of the lower income families — they must be magicians to be able to make it work. Just to keep food on the table, pay the bills and provide a decent shelter to their children, and over and above that.

You've been working with CONA on the "glitches" in the new land development regulations. What is the biggest glitch out there right now?

The one we just discovered this past week was that despite the fact that the City Council has agreed to start the process of putting Al Lang under the downtown park zoning, that while all the other downtown park zoning is limited to buildings 75 feet in height, the Al Lang site is not. Even if you zone it under parks, the way the land development regulations are written you can still build a 300-foot building on that particular site. That's being called a glitch, and it's a hell of a glitch. It does need to be corrected, and hopefully, there aren't any other reasons for the zoning regulations being written that way. I have no reason to believe they are.

Some of the other issues that [are] on the more technical side, but they are important, because the devil is always in the details.

One of the issues is if you have a development that was initially approved under the old zoning laws, at what point does it become approved or re-approved under the new zoning laws? Well, as long as no changes are made, or "no major changes are made," then it doesn't have to comply with the new zoning laws, which require greater setbacks and things of that nature. But the issue here is exactly how a "major change" is to be defined.

Have there been efforts, either through CONA or SPP, to get more young people involved in these organizations?

We want to have all parts of the community participate in these organizations. CONA to its credit has the leadership program and a number of young adults come through that leadership program. We also have older people who come through it. I went through it two years ago, I guess. …

We had a CONA meeting last night and it was impressive. One of the things that was interesting was the extent to which technology is being used. We had two neighborhood groups come in and they had their PowerPoints and their videos and all that. This never would have happened five years ago. So that technology is starting to reflect the lowering of the mean age of CONA as an organization.

The same thing with St. Petersburg Preservation. That is one thing we've tried to do in the last couple years is expand the organization, including the board. The board when I joined it had seven people on the board; we've doubled that to 14 people on the board and several of those are younger people who not only have that technology interest, but that passion for history. …

It's amazing the ideas that you get. They are fresh eyes and it's wonderful to have fresh eyes looking at not just the history but the way in which we present and interpret history in a more engaging and effective way.

There's that familiar saying, "You have to know the past to understand the future." How do you think that relates to St. Petersburg?

Well, I think we have just gone through it with the stadium and the waterfront park.

We have the finest waterfront park in the country here. That is the legacy, if you had to pick one individual, of William L. Straub, who was the editor of the St. Petersburg Times from the early 1900s to the 1930s. It was, in large part, his vision of what St. Petersburg needed to have in terms of a downtown waterfront. Was it to be shipping and industry like most cities or was it to be parkland and recreation and natural beauty? I think those of us who were involved in that issue here lately — at least those of us who were trained in our local history — were reviewing the project through that lens. We were kind of running through our minds what were the issues going on at that time. It was a fierce struggle, as some of the historians describe it, to establish the waterfront for parkland and public use. Straub himself was an interesting person in this regard, because he understood the importance of shipping and the importance of having a waterfront that can be enjoyed by tourists and local residents. He was, in a way, a broker there in finding an alternative site — magic words — for the shipping to occur, which occurred in Bayboro. By brokering that compromise, he was able to achieve both objectives. Some of those messages were running through the minds of at least your local historians here. … One lesson was the great sensitivity of the public to the waterfront, and that whatever happens to it is going to get tremendous scrutiny. So you better have done your research.

This article appears in Jul 23-29, 2008.