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.
What’s with the first airline? On New Year’s Day in 1914, a crowd of three thousand packed the St. Petersburg waterfront to watch something the world had never seen. The first ticket on a scheduled airline was auctioned off on the sand and won for four hundred dollars by a former mayor, A. C. Pheil. He climbed into a small open Benoist flying boat beside a young pilot named Tony Jannus, and twenty-three minutes later he stepped out in Tampa — the first paying passenger on the first scheduled commercial airline in the world. The whole age of air travel began here, a few feet above the bay, in the Sunshine City.
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.
