In recent decades it has remade itself again, into one of Florida’s great arts towns. The waterfront Salvador Dalí Museum — housed since 2011 in a striking glass-and-concrete building on the bay — holds the largest collection of the artist’s work outside Europe. Murals climb whole walls of the downtown arts district, galleries and studios fill Central Avenue, and the St. Pete Pier reaches out over Tampa Bay as the city’s front porch. The Sunshine City had quietly become a creative one.
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.
