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.”
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.
