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 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.
