A Brief History of St. Petersburg, Florida: The Sunshine City

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 south between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, was inhabited for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples. By the time the first Europeans arrived, the dominant group on the lower peninsula was the Calusa, a powerful Native nation whose territory stretched down the southwest Florida coast. Spanish explorer Pánfilo de Narváez landed near present day St. Petersburg in 1528, followed by Hernando de Soto in 1539, but neither expedition produced a settlement, and disease and conflict had largely destroyed the local Native population by the eighteenth century.

Florida passed to the United States in 1821, and the first non Native pioneers began arriving on the Pinellas Peninsula in the 1830s and 1840s. Among the earliest settlers was Odet Philippe, a French Huguenot from Charleston who is credited with planting the area’s first commercial citrus grove. The McMullen family from Georgia and the Booth family from Britain raised cattle and farmed nearby. After the Civil War, more settlers came, including the area’s first Black residents, John Donaldson and Anna Germain, who arrived in 1868.

The Coin Toss and the Birth of a City

Two figures, one a Detroit businessman and the other a Russian aristocrat in exile, brought St. Petersburg into being.

John Constantine Williams, a wealthy Detroit native looking for a warmer climate, traveled to Florida and in 1876 purchased some 2,500 acres of waterfront land on the southern tip of the Pinellas Peninsula. He envisioned a town there but lacked the one thing that could make it real: a railroad.

That came courtesy of Peter Demens, born Pyotr Dementyev into Russian aristocracy in Tver Oblast. Educated in St. Petersburg, Russia, Demens served as a Tsarist officer and once commanded the sentries at the Winter Palace before being exiled in 1880 for political activities critical of the regime. He arrived in America with $3,000, anglicized his name, and built a lumber business in Florida that gradually grew into a controlling interest in the Orange Belt Railway. In 1888 Demens extended the line all the way to Williams’s land on Tampa Bay, giving the embryonic settlement its first connection to the wider world.

Local legend holds that Williams and Demens flipped a coin to decide who would name the new town. Demens won and chose St. Petersburg, after the Russian city of his youth. As a consolation, Williams named the town’s first hotel after his own birthplace. The Detroit Hotel, built in 1888, still stands downtown, though it has long since been converted into condominiums.

On February 29, 1892, Leap Day, the town of St. Petersburg was officially incorporated. It had a population of roughly 300 people. In 1903, having grown to a few hundred more residents, it reincorporated as a city.

The Sunshine City Sells Itself: 1900 to 1929

In its first decades, St. Petersburg was a struggling resort town competing for the same northern dollars as a dozen other Florida communities. Its leaders responded with marketing genius. In 1908 the Evening Independent newspaper made a famous promise: it would give away every issue free on any day the sun did not shine. The paper had to deliver on that pledge only on a handful of days over the next 78 years, generating priceless free publicity. The nickname The Sunshine City stuck.

The 1910s were a remarkable decade of firsts. On January 1, 1914, pilot Tony Jannus lifted off from the St. Petersburg waterfront in a Benoist XIV flying boat, carrying former mayor Abram Pheil 23 minutes across Tampa Bay to Tampa. The St. Petersburg to Tampa Airboat Line is generally recognized as the world’s first scheduled commercial airline service. The Tony Jannus Award is still given annually for outstanding contributions to commercial aviation.

That same year, a former mayor named Al Lang persuaded baseball executive Branch Rickey to bring the St. Louis Browns to St. Petersburg for spring training, beginning a relationship between the city and Major League Baseball that has now lasted more than a century. The first spring training game was played on February 27, 1914, between the Cubs and the Browns. The city’s first library opened on Mirror Lake the following year.

The 1920s Florida land boom transformed St. Petersburg almost beyond recognition. Construction of the Gandy Bridge in 1924, the world’s longest automobile toll bridge at the time, slashed travel time across Tampa Bay and brought a flood of tourists and speculators.

Mediterranean Revival architecture rose along the waterfront and into new neighborhoods like Snell Isle, developed by C. Perry Snell beginning in the 1920s. The grand pink Vinoy Park Hotel opened on New Year’s Eve 1925, and the lavish Million Dollar Pier the following year. In 1925, James “Doc” Webb opened the modest drugstore that would grow into Webb’s City, “the World’s Most Unusual Drug Store,” eventually sprawling across seven city blocks.

Bust, War, and Reinvention

The Florida real estate bubble burst in 1926, and the Great Depression that followed in 1929 hit the tourism economy hard. Recovery came partly through New Deal projects: St. Petersburg City Hall, built with Public Works Administration funds, opened in 1939 and remains in use today. Sunken Gardens, a remarkable subtropical garden that had grown out of a backyard hobby on a sinkhole lot, opened to the paying public in 1935 and became one of Florida’s iconic roadside attractions.

World War II again redrew the city. The U.S. Coast Guard Station on Bayboro Harbor trained sailors for the war, and St. Petersburg became a major technical training center for the Army Air Corps. More than 100,000 trainees passed through the city, filling every hotel and creating an acute housing shortage as their families followed. After the war, many veterans returned permanently, beginning the demographic shift that would define the city for the next forty years.

The Retirement Capital

From the late 1940s through the 1970s, St. Petersburg marketed itself relentlessly to retirees from the Northeast and Midwest. The strategy worked. The population reached 238,647 by the 1980 census, and the city’s identity, fairly or not, became synonymous with shuffleboard courts and early bird specials. A cruel local nickname circulated: “the city of the newly wed and nearly dead.” For decades that image stuck, and city leaders spent much of the late twentieth century trying to shake it.

The Modern City

The latter decades of the twentieth century were difficult ones for downtown St. Petersburg, as suburban shopping malls drained life from Central Avenue and the city searched for a new identity beyond retirement. Tropicana Field, originally the Florida Suncoast Dome, opened in 1990 in the hope of luring a major league baseball team. The hope was finally realized when the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (later just the Rays) played their first home game there on March 31, 1998.

The real turnaround came through culture. The Salvador Dalí Museum, drawing on the world’s largest collection of Dalí’s work donated by Cleveland industrialist A. Reynolds Morse and his wife Eleanor, opened in St. Petersburg in 1982 and moved into a striking new building on the waterfront in 2011. The Museum of Fine Arts, the Florida Holocaust Museum, the Chihuly Collection, the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art, and a thriving gallery district along Central Avenue have made St. Petersburg one of the South’s most concentrated arts cities. The Mahaffey Theater, American Stage, the Palladium, and a packed festival calendar fill out the cultural calendar.

Downtown’s renaissance accelerated through the 2000s and 2010s. The historic Vinoy was restored as a luxury hotel. New residential towers, restaurants, and the rapidly growing Edge District along Central Avenue brought thousands of new residents to the urban core. The St. Petersburg Pier, after years of debate over the fate of the iconic 1973 inverted pyramid, was rebuilt as a sweeping new waterfront district that opened in 2020.

The Sunshine City Today

Modern St. Petersburg is a city of about 260,000 residents, the seat of Pinellas County and the second largest city in the Tampa Bay region. The Trust for Public Land has ranked it first in Florida for its park system, and the downtown waterfront, an unbroken stretch of public green space stretching for miles along Tampa Bay, is the work of city planners more than a century ago who refused to allow private development to wall off the water.

The challenges are also unmistakable. Climate change and sea level rise threaten the very waterfront that made the city. Hurricanes Helene and Milton, in the autumn of 2024, struck the Pinellas Peninsula with unprecedented force, flooding neighborhoods, damaging Tropicana Field, and prompting hard conversations about resilience and rebuilding.

But the essential St. Petersburg story is one of patient self invention. From Calusa fishing camps to Russian railroad terminus, from sleepy retirement haven to vibrant arts city on the bay, the Sunshine City has, against the odds, become more interesting with every chapter.