FLORIDA: TAMPA

June 9-18 2017

The only benefit I can see of being grounded from travel because of COVID -19 is that I can catch up on posting about some of my previous travels that I have never gotten around to writing about. This adventure happened three years ago--a trip to Tampa Florida to score AP English Composition exams.

I've posted before about the experience of scoring AP exams for the College Board, so I won't go into that very much this time. My focus will be on Tampa, a city of about 400,000 people on the western/Gulf of Mexico side of Florida.

I shouldn't have been too surprised by all the lakes/ponds, but I was!

The College Board always books nice rooms for us, usually in a Sheraton or Hilton or Marriott.  I can't remember which hotel I was in, but I had a nice view from various hotel windows.

The hotel was within a few blocks of the Tampa Convention Center, where I spent eight hours/day for the next seven days.

Considering that there were a couple thousand people to feed, I think they did a pretty good job of providing us with an assortment of mostly healthy, tasty food.

HOWEVER, how could it compare to the Henry Waugh Dessert Room, a place I went with my AP friends on our first night in Tampa?  Yes, that's an entire menu of desserts.

Do we look like we just experienced Nirvana in Shangri-la? That's how we felt. This is my regular group of AP buddies: Chris, Jane, and Joyce.

Tampa has LOTS of hidden gems, including these quotes embedded in the sidewalk:

Or this freeway underpass that says "Stay Curious."

At the end of a day spent reading hundreds of essay responses to the same prompt, we were always anxious to get out and explore.  One of the first attractions we visited was the Tampa Theatre, built in 1926 just as the movie business was taking off. It is called a "movie palace" because of its opulent interior.

The ceiling, the walls, the fixtures--all over the top.

 

The theatre is supposed to resemble a Mediterranean courtyard at night . . .

. . . complete with twinkling stars.

Just being there made us feel like royalty.

Another main tourist attraction in Tampa is the Henry B. Plant Park.  Henry Plant (1819-1899) was a businessman who made a fortune building railroads along Florida's west coast and who became a hotelier later in his life.

The park is full of things to see, starting with the John F. Kennedy Memorial.  Four days before he was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963, Kennedy rode through downtown Tampa in his motorcade. This life-sized statue memorializing the President and his visit was erected in mid-1964 and is facing down the main boulevard in town, which was renamed John F. Kennedy Blvd.

Plaques embossed with the eloquent words of Kennedy surround the statue.

After Henry Plant's death in 1899, the city of Tampa bought one of his larger and most exotic hotels--511 rooms--that was built in 1891 at a cost of $3 million. It had the first elevator ever installed in Florida and the rooms were the first in Florida to have electric lights and telephones. It has Moorish-style architecture, complete with half-moon toppers on the minaret-like turrets.

Seen from across Tampa Bay, it looks enormous--because it is.

The grounds of the hotel included 150 acres and 21 buildings.

It continued to operate it as a hotel until 1930. Its many famous guests included Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, Sarah Bernhardt, Clara Barton, Stephen Crane, the Prince of Wales, Winston Churchill, Ignacy Paderewski, and Babe Ruth.

Sadly, the hotel had to close during the Great Depression when tourism took a deep dive. In 1933, the Tampa Bay Junior College moved in and used the old suites as classrooms. Soon the college grew into the University of Tampa. The University partnered with the Tampa Municipal Museum to preserve the building and grounds, and the south wing of the hotel became a museum in 1941.

Because we could only visit in the evening, the museum was closed and we were not able to take a tour of the museum rooms, supposedly stuffed with the art that Mr. and Mrs. Plant purchased during their extensive travels. The lobby had to suffice. 

 The grounds are beautifully landscaped and well-cared for. I especially like this fountain, a tribute to Henry Plant. He was obviously an over-the-top kind of a guy.

According to legend, the Native American meaning of the word "Tampa" is "Bringing the light of knowledge and the warmth of feeling to a people who don't just wish to exist, but to excel."  That's a long translation for a single word. This sculpture, called Sticks of Fire, is supposed to represent that definition. It is also located on the University of Tampa campus.

Another very popular tourist spot in Tampa is Ybor City, a historic neighborhood near downtown. It was founded in the 1880s by some cigar manufacturers and populated by immigrants from Cuba, Spain, and Italy.

The first thing we encountered in Ybor City was not cigars, however, but the  9/11 Fallen Heroes Memorial, unveiled on September 11, 2014.  The rusted iron beam was salvaged from the wreckage of World Trade Center Tower 2 and given to Tampa as a gift from New York City.

From there we walked into the downtown district of Ybor City.

It's immediately evident that this is a city built by immigrants.

Exquisite Spanish tiles lined the exterior walls of the historic and award-winning Columbia Restaurant, built in 1905. It is Florida's oldest continuously-operating restaurant.

 I especially loved this tile of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

We returned to the Columbia later in the evening for a delicious dinner. 

We were seated on the balcony with a great view of the dining room.

Of course, there were plenty of cigars, Ybor City's speciality, for sale.

Even some supposedly preferred by Ernest Hemingway.

Ybor City is a window shopper's paradise. Here is one relic left over from the previous year's Presidential election.

Some shop windows were intriguing enough to draw us inside, like this taxidermy/antiques shop.

Occasionally it got just a bit too weird.

There is a kind of New Orleans-style vibe here, a bit of exoticism, a bit of voodoo . . . 

. . . and a big dose of humor.

Door handles at a restaurant:

 Our "nights on the town" were pretty rejuvenating.

We tried to get in early. We needed plenty of shut-eye so that we could be rarin' to go in the morning.