Our St. Petersburg logo carries the Florida alligator over “Florida Territory · Est. 1845,” the year Florida became a state — the shared emblem of every Merlin Classics Florida town. Printed in clean retro black-and-white that reads like an old crate stamp or travel decal, the alligator stands for Florida as a whole; what makes this one St. Petersburg is everything behind it — the sunshine and the bay, the green benches and the murals, and the New Year’s morning the airline age took off from the waterfront.
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.
