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.
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.
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.
