St. Petersburg is young as cities go. The Pinellas peninsula between Tampa Bay and the Gulf had been fishing ground for the Tocobaga people long before Europeans came, and a few pioneer families raised citrus along the shore in the mid-1800s. The town itself arrived with the railroad: in 1888 Peter Demens’s Orange Belt Railway reached the end of the peninsula, and a settlement grew up around the terminus. It incorporated as a town in 1892 and as a city in 1903 — a small, sun-struck place almost surrounded by water, looking for a reason to be found.
St. Petersburg shares its name with the great Russian city, and that is no accident. When the new railroad town needed a name in 1888, the story goes that its two founders settled it the simplest way they could — with a coin toss. Peter Demens, a Russian émigré, won, and named the place for St. Petersburg, the imperial capital of his homeland. The man he beat, General John C. Williams of Detroit, got to name the town’s first grand hotel, and called it the Detroit Hotel. The Florida St. Petersburg has gone its own sunlit way ever since — though locals long ago shortened the whole mouthful, fondly, to “St. Pete.”
Why People Visit St Petersburg
St. Petersburg mixes sunshine, shoreline, and a genuine arts scene in a way few Florida cities can. Visitors come for the waterfront museums and murals, the pier and the bayfront parks, the nearby Gulf beaches, and the easy, bright pace of a city that has earned its Sunshine City name for more than a century. History sits comfortably beside everyday life here, from the spot where the first airline took flight to the gardens and galleries downtown, and the water is never more than a few blocks away.
