Geography shaped all of it. St. Petersburg sits on the tip of the Pinellas peninsula, with Tampa Bay on one side and Boca Ciega Bay and the Gulf beaches on the other — so much shoreline that more than half the city’s area is water. Waterfront parks ring the downtown, Sunken Gardens has kept its tropical jungle growing in the heart of the city for a century, and out at the peninsula’s end Fort De Soto guards miles of quiet beach. This is a city you are never far from the water in, and it has built its best life right at the edge of it.
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.
