Let's Go to the Mall!

Mulling Over a Downtown St. Pete Mall

By Jim Schnur

As holiday shopping revs up and COVID-19 numbers tick down, much of Central Avenue is abuzz. During the depths of the pandemic, city officials approved parklets for outdoor dining. Although parked vehicles have replaced tables and chairs, Car-Free St. Pete and others envision a vibrant, gridlock-free urban core that welcomes walkers, bikers and mass transit riders.

The idea of creating a walk-friendly downtown St. Petersburg is hardly new, however. It happened once before, nearly a half-century ago.

Empty storefronts and a declining tax base overshadowed the Sunshine City’s core in the early 1970s. An aging and economically disadvantaged population lived in older apartments, rooming houses and declining residential enclaves in Bayboro, Historic Uptown, Methodist Town, Roser Park, and other nearby neighborhoods. Mayor Herman Goldner and others wanted to reinvigorate downtown. On Nov. 1, 1972, Goldner led a celebration, re-branding a portion of Central Avenue between 3rd and 6th Streets as the “Downtown St. Petersburg Mall.” They called this destination the “Suncoast’s Largest and Most Complete Shopping Area.”

Crews removed parking spaces, narrowed traffic lanes and installed plants and shrubbery. With the Inverted Pyramid Pier slated to open in early 1973 on the site of the former Million Dollar Pier, officials had long-term plans to create a three block, car-free zone.

What prompted this desire to maul the asphalt and put a pedestrian mall in its place? For the answer, visit the intersection of 66th Street and Tyrone Boulevard: Tyrone Square Mall. The mall had opened a month earlier, offering shoppers more than 1 million air-conditioned square feet. Twenty years before that, in late 1952, Central Plaza had started two decades of downtown decline.

Aware of what the September 1968 grand opening of Sunshine Mall on Missouri Avenue did to downtown Clearwater businesses, as well as how Gateway Mall stole away shoppers beginning in March 1968, city leaders worried that Webb’s City and other merchants could not survive a new exodus to Tyrone. Ultimately, plans to create the Downtown St. Petersburg Mall failed. Ironically, litigation by some merchants the city hoped to help convince a judge to abandon this plan by August 1973.

Downtown St. Petersburg’s decline, which included Webb’s City closing in 1978, continued for decades.

HERITAGE VILLAGE

Downtown store owners wanted more pavement, not pedestrian pathways.

Undeterred, reporters at St. Petersburg’s afternoon newspaper, the Evening Independent, spent the fall of 1973 formulating a plan to save the remaining retailers in the city’s core. The lead story of the paper’s December 3, 1973 edition ran with the headline, “An Idea Born in a Newspaper Office.” Robert Stiff, editor of the Independent, wrote, “I think newspapers should report news and not make news, but I’m bending this belief this week to present the idea of a Bayfront Mall.”

Working with noted local architects William Harvard Sr. (who designed the Inverted Pyramid Pier) and Blanchard Jolly, journalists ambitiously proposed an “air conditioned, fully enclosed, high-rise shopping mall, right in the heart of St. Petersburg” with multilevel parking, some large department stores and 100 smaller shops. They envisioned new commercial space that rivaled Tyrone Square, anchored on the south by the Hilton and continuing to the Maas Brothers department store that once sat along 1st Avenue North. Two shopping levels would perch atop large parking garages as well as the connecting corridors above city streets.

Time was of the essence. Soon after the Evening Independent published this series, the Vinoy Park Hotel closed. This majestic structure would not enjoy its reopening renaissance until 1992. The Inverted Pyramid Pier failed to reinvigorate the downtown throughout its history.

Sunshine Mall hurt downtown Clearwater’s businesses; St. Petersburg businesses wanted to avoid the same fate with Tyrone Mall.

PINELLAS MEMORY

What killed the Bayfront Mall concept? An oil embargo beginning in the fall of 1973 led to long lines at gas stations and much energy uncertainty. The same December week the paper made this proposal, the enclosed Sunshine Mall considered closing on Sundays (during the holiday season!) to save electricity. The following week, Gov. Reubin Askew mandated a statewide maximum 55 MPH speed limit.

Downtown decline continued into the 1980s. Webb’s City closed in August 1978 and most of its multi-block shopping facilities were demolished in early 1984. Between 1978 and the opening of a Winn Dixie at the unrelated Webb’s Plaza in 1987, downtown St. Petersburg was a food desert.

The city endured a fumbling redevelopment partnership after a May 1987 deal with the Kansas Citybased J.C. Nichols Co. created the Bay Plaza Company. Seven years, more than $50 million invested and an empty South Core Parking Garage later, the city pulled out of the deal.

Today’s excitement along Central Avenue from downtown west to the Grand Central District far exceeds the dreams of those who unsuccessfully tried to spark a vibe 50 years ago. Would a pedestrian mall take the ‘Burg to the next level?

It’s a conversation worth having.