St Petersburg Florida — Retro Vintage History

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.

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.

It found that reason in the weather. St. Petersburg catches sun so reliably that an early paper, the Evening Independent, promised to give its copies away free on any day the sun failed to shine — and rarely had to make good on it. The nickname stuck: the Sunshine City. For half a century downtown was also known for its green benches, thousands of them lining the sidewalks and filling the postcards mailed north by winter visitors. Sunshine, a long bright waterfront, and an unhurried pace pulled tourists and retirees in by the trainload.

The 1920s land boom built much of the city you still see today, including the grand Mediterranean-style Vinoy resort that opened on the bayfront in 1925. Baseball came with the sunshine — major-league clubs have held spring training in St. Petersburg for more than a century, and the bayfront ballfields were a fixture of the season. Hurricanes and the Depression slowed the boom, and the city weathered both, but the climate kept bringing people back, and St. Petersburg settled into a long, easy life as a sunny Gulf-coast resort town.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

Today St. Petersburg is sun and saltwater, museums and murals, a pier out over the bay and a downtown that hums. Our St. Petersburg designs gather that identity — the alligator emblem, the Sunshine City, the waterfront and the arts — into wearable form. It is a Florida city that knows exactly what it is. St. Petersburg, Florida — the Sunshine City on the bay, where the first airline took flight and the murals never fade.

St Petersburg, Florida — Travel Guide

Visiting St Petersburg Today

St. Petersburg faces Tampa Bay from the tip of the Pinellas peninsula — a sunny, walkable waterfront city of museums, murals, gardens, and a pier reaching out over the water, with the Gulf beaches just minutes away on the other side.

The Waterfront, the Arts & the Beaches

For visitors looking for things to do in St Petersburg, Florida:

• Tour the waterfront Salvador Dalí Museum, with the largest collection of his work outside Europe.
• Walk the St. Pete Pier out over Tampa Bay, with its lawns, views, and family spaces.
• Wander Sunken Gardens, the century-old tropical garden in the heart of downtown.
• Explore the Central Avenue arts district, its galleries, studios, and downtown murals.
• Drive out to Fort De Soto Park for beaches, trails, and historic coastal ruins.
• Stroll the bayfront parks and the historic Vinoy resort along the downtown shore.

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.

Kindred Cities

Welcome, friends from Takamatsu (ようこそ) and Figueres (bienvenidos) — our partners in Japan and Spain.

St Petersburg pairs sunshine with surprising depth, and so do its friends abroad. Takamatsu, on Japan’s Inland Sea, is famous for Ritsurin, one of the country’s most exquisite gardens, and its Sanuki udon. Figueres, in Catalonia, is the birthplace of Salvador Dalí and home to his dreamlike museum — a fitting match for a city whose own Dalí Museum holds the largest collection of his work outside Europe. Sunshine and a touch of the surreal.

Takamatsu has been St Pete’s sister since 1961, its very first, marked by sixty years of student ambassadors crossing the Pacific; Figueres adds a fitting bond between the two cities that share custody of Salvador Dalí’s legacy.

Come from Takamatsu or Figueres and St Petersburg will win you over: the waterfront Dalí Museum, the pier out over the bay, murals through downtown, and the sun that earns the Sunshine City its name nearly every day. Come and visit us soon.

When you plan the trip, Visit St. Pete/Clearwater is the place to start.

For deeper reading on the St. Petersburg history described here — the Tocobaga shore and the pioneer citrus era, the 1888 founding at the Orange Belt Railway terminus and the coin-toss naming, the world’s first scheduled airline flight of January 1, 1914, the Sunshine City and green-benches era, the 1920s boom and the Vinoy, and the rise of the downtown arts district and the Dalí Museum — it may be useful to consult (1) the St. Petersburg Museum of History, (2) the St. Petersburg Public Library local-history collection, (3) the State Archives of Florida and the Florida Historical Society, (4) Preserve the ’Burg and the city’s historic-preservation office, and (5) the Florida Aviation Historical Society. For travel and visitor information, it may be useful to contact (1) Visit St. Pete/Clearwater, (2) the St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce, (3) the city’s parks and recreation department, (4) the Florida state-parks office, and (5) regional visitor desks and the St. Pete–Clearwater International Airport information desk.