Fun in the Sunshine City, Save the Date!

SAVE THE DATE! The Society for Commercial Archeology has announced the dates for its 2014 conference, "Fun in the Sunshine City", to be held April 9-12, 2014 in St. Petersburg, Florida. I have attended four previous conferences and am working with folks in the Planning Department from the city of St. Petersburg to organize next year's conference. We are creating a blockbuster opening reception, two epic bus tours, and a fascinating paper session. Details will be released soon, but at this point we are hoping to make stops at three vintage attractions and have closing dinner at Florida's oldest restaurant. And there will be shuffleboard! Stay tuned!

The St. Pete Shuffle

I first learned about the St. Pete Shuffle when I was trying to rally support for saving Kissimmee's ill-fated KAST Club shuffleboard courts. I had connected with Chris Kelly and Christine Page, two of the members of the St. Petersburg Shuffleboard club who were instrumental in bringing new life to the venerable St. Pete institution. They were incredibly helpful and ever since then I have wanted to see how they managed to put a new spin on a game associated with senior citizens in their golden years.

So after Thanksgiving on Anna Maria Island, my wife and I drove across the Sunshine Skyway Bridge into St. Petersburg to meet Chris and Christina and attend their weekly Friday night shuffleboard event known as the St. Pete Shuffle.

My first impression was that the shuffleboard complex was much larger than I had envisioned; I'd seen pictures of the club but in addition to the shuffleboard courts there are storage buildings, a clubhouse, restrooms and other buildings. Chess and lawn bowling clubs occupy space at the back of the property and several dance organizations and a folk festival share the facilities in the building that holds the clubhouse. This is much, much more than your typical motel concrete shuffleboard court. In fact there were too many courts for me too count. And the buildings are all historic, built at different times – some have deco details but most are in the Mediterranean Revival style that was the rage in early 20th century Florida.

The club itself was organized in 1924 and has ranged in membership from 5,000 in its heyday to between twenty and thirty before Chris and Christine got involved. Today you see broad cross sections of ages and it is exciting to see hipsters shuffling with seniors and really enjoying themselves. When it was our turn to try out the game, we were tutored by a professional shuffleboard player named Mary, who I later learned is a member of the Shuffleboard Hall of Fame! She was extremely patient and supportive and I learned that while I had played the game before, I had never played it properly.

The triangle shaped scoring area on a shuffleboard court goes from 10 points at the top, 8 points for the top two quadrants, followed by 7 each for the next two and finally minus ten for the rear quadrants (known as the "kitchen"). A shuffleboard disk touching any part of a white line gets no score, no matter what quadrant it lies in. The game is played to 75 and teams alternating going first (the last turn is called the 'hammer").

The Friday Night Shuffle is free and there are beverages, snacks and t-shirts for sale. A sound system plays music ranging from vintage tunes from the golden age of shuffleboard to contemporary alternative rock for the hipsters. It provides a great setting for a game that can be intense and competitive but most of all is really, really fun. I looked around and all the lit courts at the complex seemed to be full of shufflers.

Membership to the St. Pete Shuffleboard Club costs is only $20 a year and it allows you to have access to club facilities beyond the Friday night event.

Chris explained that the city of St. Petersburg owns the property that the club sits on but the club owns and maintains all the buildings. The city has been supportive of the club and club members have been successful at winning grants for upkeep of the property. There is a great deal of work still needing to be done to the historic structures and they hope to earn a listing on the National Register of Historic Places so more grant money will be accessible.

My wife and I agreed that the Shuffle was the highlight of our action-packed holiday weekend. In addition to being incredibly enjoyable recreation, I was very inspired that a few dedicated individuals like Chris and Christine could see the value of this aging facility and restore it to new levels of vitality through their energy, effort and vision. I am hopeful that perhaps someday I can help to preserve aging parts of Central Florida and help others see their value. And I can't wait to shuffle again!

Biff Burger of St. Pete

My brother the photographer took this amazing image of the only operating Biff-Burger.

Save the World Liquors sign!

I am unabashedly a vintage sign lover. I like neon, funky mid-century type, a little rust and any sign that moves, spins or flashes. In my mind there's few too many of these beauties left in Florida and I was saddened to learn that one of our best examples of mid-century signage is threatened. It actually may be gone already.

The authority on all things roadside, Debra Jane Seltzer has this to say about the World Liquors sign in St. Pete: "The 22' tall World Liquors sign was built in 1961. The globe stopped revolving in the 1970s. It was also internally illuminated originally."

She also posted a link to this article written last year with the headline "Retro liquor store sign must come down." The owner wants to expand his business and that means the sign must go. I'm not alone in my distress over loosing the roadside icon, here are some of the comments posted at the end of the article:

"Save that sign! Too many of St Petes wonderful old signs are fading away. Soon nothing with any character will be left!"

"Please save this sign! This is one of the last great pieces of "sign art" left in the city. We owe it to ourselves to keep such history."

"Save the sign! There is practically no Googie left in St Pete anymore..."

The last comment says "Thank you Dad, and my Landlord, Mary for saving the sign. This means a lot to a St. Pete native!!" So maybe it has been saved. Stay tuned while I continue to investigate....

All images © Kilby Photo

Post war Florida ads

I have a couple issues of the over-sized Holiday magazine, one from 1946 the other from 1954, which have great black and white ads promoting Florida cities. Florida was a self-promotion machine in the mid-twentieth century, drawing tourists and future residents in droves from northern states. John Rothchild speaks of Florida's self promotion in Up for Grabs as the real economic engine driving the state:
"Flora, fauna, literature, and architecture were all part of Florida's continuous advertisement for itself, the advertisement and the product being one. Florida had its orange groves and phosphate pits, cattle ranches and truck farms, manufacturing and light industry, but it's biggest businesses were tourism and land sales, especially around the coasts of the southern two-thirds."

"In Sunday newspaper supplements, on the radio, and through crude black and white televised images, the selling of Florida became big business" says author Gary R. Mormino in Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams. He reports that the state's efforts paid off according to a 1950 Gallup poll when Americans asked if they could take a vacation any where in the world, they picked Hawaii, California and then Florida, ahead of Europe.

Floridiana Festival

Gulfport, Florida is a suburb of St. Pete originally called Disston City after Florida's first land baron, Hamilton Disston. At one point, Disston owned enough land in Florida to make him the largest single landowner in the world. A typical Florida boom-to-bust story, Disston was found dead in a bathtub in 1896 and his family allowed his Florida lands to be foreclosed on.

Interestingly enough, the organizers of the Floridiana Festival chose Gulfport as the site of their big event. The Festival was held this past weekend in the Gulfport Casino right on the Boca Siega Bay. This historic structure is half ballroom, half gymnasium with a bar in front. Booths of great Florida kitsch and ephemera crowded the wooden floors and several Florida Highwaymen sold their paintings to energized patrons. I was pleasantly surprised at how many people seem to be collecting memorabilia from the Sunshine State and they appeared to be very serious about it, going through every box of postcards and looking at every Hawaiian shirt. There were books on Florida, old travel brochures, china, lamps and contemporary products made in the spirit of vintage Florida. Ambiance was added by the Florida Citrus Queen, aka Bre-elle from Winter Park, and the mood was set by an exotica soundtrack by Martin Denny playing in the background.

I resisted purchasing my favorite item, a $250 alligator lamp, and stuck to small paper ephemera and got some good deals spending less than $20 total. The biggest thing I came away with was a sense of validation that there were others like me who were mesmerized by our state's history and colorful past.

More images of Sunken Gardens

St. Pete's Sunken Gardens

In 1903 a plumber named George Turner bought four acres of land in St. Petersburg, Florida and promptly went to work draining a lake on the property. Once the lake bottom was exposed, he planted palms, crotons and exotic plant species from all over the world. Soon he was charging admission to see his garden and one of Florida's earliest roadside attractions was born. The Gardens added exotic animals like parrots, flamingoes and monkeys in the '50s and in the '60s added the World Largest Giftshop. In the '90s with the era of roadside attractions long since passed, the city of St. Pete stepped in and took over Sunken Gardens. 

Today the World's Largest Giftshop holds a children's museum and a Carrabba's Italian Restaurant. The Gardens are well maintained and some of the original plants still thrive and have grown to gigantic sizes. Traveler Palms are enormous, bougainvillea tower above oak trees and you can rest in the shade of once squat little Sago Palms. In many places the trees and plants come together overhead to create incredible outdoor rooms that maintain a sense of utter peacefulness. The amphitheatre that once held animal shows is empty as are many of the grotto-like animal cages. The site still has several large Macaws, Parrots and Flamingoes in captivity. The side of me that loves the kitsch of old Florida wishes the animal shows still existed, but I understand why the City of St. Petersburg no longer continues them. The Gardens overall is a beautiful, serene place and I'm glad the city is keeping it intact.

Finding the Fountain of Youth

Four or five blocks away from the Ponce De Leon Hotel in St. Petersburg is a drinking fountain in the corner of a parking lot, the site of the Fountain of Youth. In a past blog, I mentioned how this feature was originally created on the pier by Dr. Jesse Conrad and then moved to another location in 1946 after a hurricane. Today at this secluded spot near Al Lang Stadium, the drinking fountain takes center stage, flanked by two European-looking lion head water fountains that don't appear to have worked in quite a while and fronted by a sign that may or may not have been from the original attraction. I can report that I tasted the water and it was cool and refreshing, but biologically no reversal of age seems to have occurred. 

Many thanks to my friend Carol who purchased the vintage postcard of the Fountain of Youth for me at the Floridiana Festival this weekend.