Joe Marzo

By Joe Marzo When Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in March 1933, Tampa was already several years into hard times. Florida's land boom had collapsed in 1926, well before the rest of the country plunged into the Great Depression, and the cigar industry — Tampa's economic engine — was reeling from declining demand and labor unrest. By the time the New Deal arrived in Florida, roughly one in four Floridians was on some form of public relief, and Mayor Robert E. Lee Chancey had already slashed...

By Joe Marzo The Tocobaga were a Native American people who lived along the shores of Tampa Bay in west-central Florida from roughly 900 CE until the early 1700s. Their territory encompassed one of the most ecologically rich estuarine environments in the southeastern United States, and for more than eight centuries they built a society uniquely adapted to the bays, rivers, and pine flatwoods of what is now Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco, Hernando, and Citrus counties. The name Tocobaga refers...

By Joe Marzo Few American cities have reinvented themselves as completely as St. Petersburg. Founded as a railroad terminus on a sleepy peninsula, sold for decades as a haven for the elderly, and now reborn as one of Florida’s most vibrant arts and waterfront destinations, the Sunshine City has spent nearly 150 years selling itself, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, on a single resource: the weather. The Pinellas Peninsula Before the City The long, narrow Pinellas Peninsula, jutting...