Neighborhoods don't come much more picturesque than Pass-a-Grille. The friendly neighbors, the cute little craft stores, the public shuffleboard court – Pass-a-Grille's charm hits you over the head at every turn.
And then there's the beach.
Come out to Pass-a-Grille on a Saturday afternoon and it will be tough to resist the urge to lie down on the sand – even though an hour later you'll be too tired to do anything but struggle to the Seaside Grill for a beer, your eyes hardened into a permanent squint. The beach is beautiful, of course, especially now that it's been dredged, making it 10 yards wider than it was before the hurricanes tore it apart.
But the beach will always be there. It's the small one-story fishing bungalows, the ones that have lined Pass-a-Grille's alleys for decades, that are disappearing. Property values are soaring, and all over the neighborhood small old houses are being torn down to make room for luxury ones.
"The march of the monsters keeps coming," says Jeri Fishback, who moved out to Pass-a-Grille in 2003 after 24 years as a lawyer in downtown St. Petersburg. Fishback refers to the alley in front of his modest one-story house as his "front yard," and says he wishes the neighborhood was more like the Pass-a-Grille where he vacationed as a kid – an unassuming fishing village out of touch with the rest of the world. Still, the large homes on his alley haven't curbed Fishback's enthusiasm for his new hood.
Beyond a weekly trip to Publix, "I just don't have any desire to leave the island," he says.
A strip of land a block wide, 34 blocks long and surrounded by water on three sides, Pass-a-Grille is dotted with historic facades, fishing rods and Benzes. Life is lazy; wealthy retirees, pacified hippies and blue-collar locals move casually along the main street during the day, stopping each other for a quick joke or an opinion on the new restaurant opening up.
Just 15 minutes from downtown St. Petersburg and within sight of its touristy beach-town neighbors to the north, Pass-a-Grille still has a small-town feel. There are no franchises. There's one traffic light. There are two places to eat breakfast, a few more to eat dinner, and a bell on the beach that gets rung every night at sunset.
People don't lock their doors; crime is practically non-existent.
While tourism is an important part of the local economy, many shop owners can't afford to live in Pass-a-Grille themselves. If they could, they'd probably feel the same way the locals do. "Don't say anything good," one guy told me when I asked him why he lived in Pass-a-Grille. "Say it's horrible here. Tell 'em it's the pits. Just keep 'em out."
Truth is, Pass-a-Grille probably couldn't handle too many more people. Real estate is in such high demand that most houses never make it to the open market, says Denise Reilly, a realtor with the Premier Group. "There's just nothing here," she says.
According to Reilly, small lots on the interior without a water view go for about $800,000. And that's just the introductory price. Most people buying in Pass-A-Grille these days are either knocking down the one-story house sitting on their lot and building a new one, or they're raising up the one-story, in accordance with FEMA flood regulations, and building on top of it. Either way, the $800,000 is paying for location and little else.
Start looking on the water, and the price jumps to $1.5 million. At the lowest.
The secret's out. Folks are flocking to Pass-a-Grille, escaping the cities for one of the few remaining slices of old Florida. But with every historic one-story that gets torn down or built upon, this small community has to fight a little bit harder to stay the same.
The Way We Were: Harry Metz
Harry Metz still remembers how the temperature dropped when you drove through the Australian Pines that used to line Pass-a-Grille Way.
He remembers the local fish fries and the pick-up football games, too. For Harry Metz, who moved to Pass-a-Grille 50 years ago, every spot is a link to the past.
Now 64, the retired shop owner and 23-year Army veteran is getting involved in politics for the first time, running for the District 4 City Commissioner seat against fellow Pass-a-Grille resident Nancy Markoe. With the neighborhood in the midst of a real estate boom and an identity crisis, the campaign has become heated – or at least as heated as a campaign can get in a cozy beachfront community.
Metz's politics are guided principally by his attachment to the Pass-a-Grille he grew up in. Tour the neighborhood with him and he'll point out every house that's been built in the last 15 years and what used to stand in its place. While he misses the old neighborhood, Metz isn't so nostalgic that he wants the big houses torn down. He just wants them done tastefully. "It don't matter if [they are] colonial style or Key West style – just let everything blend," he says.
Metz is pitching himself as the political outsider. "I don't eat lunch with developers, city officials or ex-city commissioners," he says. But his opponent, art dealer Nancy Markoe, thinks that's a problem.
"It takes the experience of getting educated on how a city works and a county works [to do the job]," she says. "And you can't learn those things overnight." Markoe, 60, has lived in Pass-a-Grille for 20 years and is on the Planning Committee, has led community workshops and studied the master vision laid out by the Orlando consultant the city brought in to guide the transition.
"Everybody wants to keep the old neighborhood feel," Markoe says. "But things change. Cities change. And you have to stay ahead of it – you have to steer it, not be steered by it."
Markoe's plan is to present buyers with neighborhood-friendly options before they build. If they choose to keep their house historic, residents could be offered tax relief and breaks from the strict FEMA regulations.
But it's their choice.
"Bottom line, if someone wants to change [the house] from an elephant to a giraffe, we are not going to stop them," she says.
Metz isn't quite so accommodating.
"Why should everyone give up and roll over?" he asks. "Pass-a-Grille should stay the way it is. If commissioners in [other] districts want high-rise condos, that's fine. Just keep the concrete walls north of the Don [Cesar Hotel]."
As for the knocks on his experience, Metz says that 23 years running military police units taught him plenty about organization and management. His plan may not be as detailed as Markoe's, but the two do share one opinion. Both say that Pass-a-Grille isn't getting a fair share of tax money from City Hall.
Metz says that's been the case ever since Pass-a-Grille was incorporated into St. Pete Beach in 1957. "Worst thing that ever happened," he says.
He knows the big houses are going to keep getting built – the folks moving to Pass-a-Grille want to live in luxury, and they'll find a way around any new regulations.
But that doesn't mean he won't remember what came first.
What´s In A Name?
According to Frank Hurley, Pass-a-Grille´s resident historian, the town´s name derives from the Cuban fisherman who used to grill their catch ¨over a slow-burning buttonwood fire.¨ Halfway between Cuba and Louisiana, the Suncoast was also inhabited by Cajuns, who would float by the fires on their way south to what is now Manatee County in the early 1800s. They named the area ¨la passé aux grilleus,¨ or ¨grillers´ pass.¨ But when the town started showing up on maps in the 1870s, the name had been sufficiently mangled to become ¨Pass-a-Grille.¨
Source: Surf, Sand & Post Card Sunsets, by Frank Hurley
Spontaneous Civility: Maria Saraceno
If you're gonna spend your time hanging out in front of the Circle K, you should probably possess at least three of the following: long hair, scrubby jeans, a hatred of your parents, a love of people old enough to buy you beer, a skateboard, a guitar, a severe distrust of The Man, and/or nothing better to do.
Unless you're Maria Saraceno.
If you're Maria Saraceno, you plunk yourself down on the southwest corner of Pass-a-Grille's busiest intersection every Sunday afternoon and start cooking pasta. And then you wait for people to come.
The 54-year-old Italian immigrant, a sculptor just six months away from her Masters in Fine Arts at USF, launched her project on the Sunday after Thanksgiving last year.
Though she and her husband Mel moved to Pass-a-Grille six years ago for its tight community, something was still missing. "I wanted to create a public space where people could get acquainted with each other," she says. "Like the piazzas in Italy."
The idea is simple. Start cooking on the street, not for the homeless (there's not many of them in Pass-a-Grille anyway) and not to raise money for the local school's baseball team – just to bring the community together. Let neighbors meet neighbors. With all the folks moving into Pass-a-Grille, Saraceno's corner is a place for the new guard to get to know the old. It's also a way, she says, to get normally stiff wealthy folks out enjoying themselves on the street.
That first Sunday Saraceno drew about 10 people, though most of them just ate and took off. Three months later, she's built up a group of almost two dozen, including a pair of girls who play the violin, an amateur accordionist and a team of women helping her with another project – a tablecloth knit from pearls and her mother's old dishcloths. Saraceno hopes that sewing the tablecloth, which will be used on Sundays, will foster people's attachment to the weekend get-togethers, and to each other.
One of those women, Maria Stella Pagnozzi, first noticed Saraceno in December when she stopped by the Circle K with her husband, Roland, who was sick with lung cancer. She felt a bond with Saraceno, Pagnozzi says; watching a fellow Italian whip up some pasta made her feel at home.
When her husband died on January 14, Pagnozzi became a regular not only at the corner on Sundays, but at Saraceno's house on Wednesdays as well, helping with the tablecloth.
"They're just a wonderful group of people," Pagnozzi says of the folks on the corner. "It's all about community and love."
The project, which is a part of Saraceno's thesis, was originally supposed to be called "Cooking in the Street." But she's thinking of changing it. A few weeks ago a guy walked by and called it "Spontaneous Civility."
That, Saraceno says, might fit even better.
Upstairs, Downstairs: The Evander Preston Gallery
There are no handles on the front door of Evander Preston's 8th Avenue gallery. If you want to be allowed in – and you should – you have to ring the bell and wait for the butler. It's not that Preston doesn't want your business, he just wants you to know that his shop's a little different.
Preston's pop-art inspired jewelry, which he advertises in the New York Times, attracts a wide range of customers. In addition to pendants, necklaces and earrings, Preston makes solid gold fly swatters ($895), electric trains ($80,000) and chopsticks ($495 and up).
Even if you can't afford this stuff, the gallery is still worth checking out. Three Great Danes roam the floor, and guests drink Preston's signature white sangria as they examine pieces from his vast art collection (the highlight is a totally realistic dinner jacket carved from wood), which serve as a backdrop for the jewelry.
Catching a glimpse of the man himself is tough; Preston guards his privacy fiercely and spends much of his time in his house above the shop. Described by many in town as a recluse, Preston looks more like the guys in the dive bar next door than a wealthy jeweler – he has a long beard and tends to wear scrubby jeans and a pair of beat-up New Balances.
Guess you can get away with that kind of thing if you're actually able to sell a solid gold fly swatter.
The Evander Preston Gallery, 106 8th Avenue, 727-367-7894, open Mon.-Sat. 10 a.m.-5 p.m.
Afternoon Light: Shadrack's
Walk through Shadrack's open wooden doors after a Saturday afternoon on the beach and you'll have to pause for a moment to let your eyes adjust to the dark and musty interior. Navigating the gloom, you'll most likely focus on the one sunlit corner of the wrap-around bar, a spot reserved for the regulars.
Pass-a-Grille's only dive bar has everything you'd hope for: three pool tables, a dart board, and a sassy ex-stripper pouring drinks.
"Every freak of nature that's out there comes down here," Biscuit Manuel says as she pulls on the tap. "I've seen guys pissing themselves, guys screaming at the top of their lungs at nobody." But she keeps a warm spot in her heart for the guys who come by every day and sit in the sun.
They show up when the place opens. Each one has his spot, and his drink. Walter Chappel, a Vietnam vet with long white hair and a black leather jacket, sticks with Busch in a mug. A former beat cop in the Bronx, Walter's lost some of the edge he needed to survive on the job.
"It's your turn," he says sentimentally to a young guy late on a Friday night in February. Walter's been in the bar all day – the Busch bottles have piled up – and it doesn't matter that the kid doesn't live in Pass-a-Grille, or that this is his first time in Shadrack's. Walter's making a point, albeit a partially slurred one. Pass-a-Grille is changing. Yuppies are coming in, and the older hippies and bikers that used to run the place are getting pushed out, he says.
Down the road, the Hurricane bar and grill, once a funky low-key place with cheap beer and good food, has lost its edge, too. It's four stories now and packed with tourists, and is dismissed quickly by many of the locals who have watched it grow.
"People just don't drink like they used to."
Maybe not. But, for now, they still know how to put 'em back at Shadrack's.
Shadrack's, 114 8th Ave., 727-360-8279
This article appears in Mar 2-8, 2005.