Hidden Tampa: The Best of an Often-Overlooked Florida City

I stay quarter-hour from Tampa, Fla., however I rarely visited the Gulf Coast metropolis once I moved to close by St. Petersburg in 2019. My pals in St. Pete dismissed the place as a sprawling, sun-baked assortment of strip malls, and the site visitors on the Gandy and Howard Frankland bridges connecting the 2 cities was an incentive to remain on “our” facet of the bay. Then the pandemic got here and with it extra time within the space and lots much less site visitors.

My preliminary forays to “their” facet of the bay have been aimed toward discovering issues my new hometown lacked, starting with tennis, Turkish meals and tamales. I found Racquet Heads, an exquisite little tennis store hidden beneath a freeway overpass. Then I turned hooked on the kebabs and lahmacun (Turkish pizza) at Istanbul Mediterranean Grill & Restaurant close to the Busch Gardens theme park, and the irresistible tamales at Lolis Mexican Cravings, a superb fast-food Mexican restaurant with 5 places in Tampa.

I wasn’t the one one testing Tampa. In 2020, Tom Brady got here to city, and it hasn’t simply been the realm’s wonderful sports activities groups which have been on a profitable streak of late. The flood of Northerners looking for sandals-and-shorts winters accelerated throughout the pandemic. Zillow, the true property web site, not too long ago forecast that Tampa would be the hottest housing market within the nation this 12 months, and Forbes named Tampa the primary rising tech metropolis within the nation final summer season. Town’s revitalized downtown will get one other enhance with the eco-friendly Water Road Tampa undertaking, which can carry 3,500 new downtown condos, together with retail and lodge developments, together with the soon-to-open EDITION, a putting luxurious lodge, steps from the Hillsborough River.

Lengthy overshadowed by Miami, Orlando and Key West, Tampa is rising as a cool place to stay. However is it actually a spot to spend your trip?

From a tourism perspective, this metropolis of 400,000, tucked right into a metro space of about three million, stays a little bit of a secret, regardless of its latest progress. Many guests nonetheless fly into the Tampa’s award-winning airport and head straight to the seashores in St. Petersburg and Clearwater. However as I’ve present in my latest travels, they might be lacking one thing.

The early days

William Drysdale was a peripatetic author who wrote greater than 50 “journey letters” from Florida within the late nineteenth century for The New York Instances. On his first journey to Tampa Bay in 1884, the 12 months the railroad magnate Henry Plant launched rail service to Tampa, Drysdale prolonged a one-night keep right into a fortnight. “After visiting practically all the nice and cozy international locations frequented by Individuals, Cuba, Mexico, Bermuda, Yucatan, Texas, Louisiana, and most of the smaller West India islands,” he wrote, “I just like the West Coast of Florida better of all.”

Florida Historic Quarterly credit Drysdale’s Florida dispatches with serving to “create a winter tourism bond between New York and the sunshine state which has remained firmly in place for greater than 100 years.”

Earlier than Plant opened the Tampa Bay Lodge — his lavish, “fireproof,” 511-room, Moorish-style palace — in 1891, Drysdale was given a preview and wrote a gushing dispatch, claiming “its domes and spires … its 150 acres of groves, its 2,000 electrical lights, its brick partitions and metal beams” made it, together with Henry Flagler’s Ponce de Leon lodge in St. Augustine, one in every of “two nice lodge wonders of the world.”

The Tampa Bay Lodge put town on the map, however it fell on onerous occasions inside a decade of Plant’s dying in 1899. In accordance with the ebook “Tampa’s Folks with a Goal,” the once-grand outdated dame turned “a crimson elephant that was at occasions occupied by vagrants who burned a few of (Plant’s costly) furnishings to remain heat.” It closed its doorways throughout the Nice Melancholy and is now a part of the College of Tampa.

The previous lodge stays Tampa’s most Instagrammable landmark, although many guests go away with out visiting the wonderful Henry B. Plant Museum inside, which provides a colourful account of the lodge’s early days. (In case you plan to go to different sights alongside town’s Riverwalk, just like the excellent Tampa Bay Historical past Heart, the Glazer Kids’s Museum, the Florida Aquarium or others, think about shopping for the brand new Riverwalk attraction cross.)

To get a special perspective on the lodge’s iconic domes and Tampa’s skyline, you possibly can lease an electrical boat from eBoats Tampa and take a spin on the Hillsborough River, making pit stops at watering holes like Rick’s on the River and gliding by the Davis Island mansion previously owned by Derek Jeter and rented by Tom Brady earlier than it bought final 12 months for $22.5 million.

I bought the electrical boat advice and lots of others from Steven Hoffstetter, a fifth-generation Floridian and a Tampa native. “We hate St. Pete they usually hate us,” he joked. “Severely, I desire Tampa.”

Mr. Hoffstetter careworn that guests should spend time on the water to grasp the tradition. He recommends taking a constitution tour through Tampa Bay Enjoyable Boat to boozy Beer Can Island (a.okay.a. Pine Key) which has a bar (“open when the climate is sweet, the water is calm and the hangover is manageable”), however no everlasting inhabitants.

To know Tampa’s watery geography, you need to be taught the legend of José Gaspar, a Spanish pirate who seemingly stole a ship in 1783 and sailed to the Gulf of Mexico, the place he and his crew raided with abandon till 1821, when their ship, the Gasparilla, was sunk by the usS. Enterprise. Gaspar, the legend goes, wrapped himself within the ship’s anchor chain and threw himself out to sea, proclaiming, “Gasparilla dies by his personal hand and never his enemy’s!” Gaspar was largely forgotten till 1904, when Louise Frances Dodge, a society editor on the Tampa Tribune, cooked up the thought for a pirate-themed parade primarily based on his legend.

In case you occur to be right here in late January, you possibly can social gathering with 1000’s of revelers, many wearing pirate garb, who end up for the Gasparilla parade alongside Bayshore Boulevard, which is changed into a “moist zone” the place open containers of alcohol are permitted. Lots of of pirates carry out a ceremonial invasion, by which the mayor fingers over the keys to town. However what many guests don’t notice is that the Gasparilla revelry continues after the preliminary invasion with a season price of actions, together with music and humanities festivals and the Sant’Yago Knight Parade. The debaucherous celebrations are only-in-Tampa spectacles price anchoring a visit round.

One other singular Tampa expertise is taking a ship to the Sunday morning Thai market at Wat Mongkolratanaram, a surprising Buddhist temple with boat docks on the Palm River. Come early to beat the crowds who flock to this fashionable marketplace for low cost, do-it-yourself Thai meals and delightful orchids and different flowers.

Cigars, baseball and barbecue

In a contemporary metropolis, the pure tendency is to seek for one thing outdated. One of the best place to expertise Outdated Tampa is Ybor Metropolis, a neighborhood that was as soon as well-known for producing high quality cigars. Its predominant drag, East seventh Avenue, is town’s pulsating nightlife hub. Guests hardly ever stray off seventh Avenue, however a number of treasures are hidden across the neighborhood. Begin with the Ybor Metropolis Museum, the place you’ll be taught the fascinating story of the neighborhood’s founder, Vincent Martinez Ybor, a Spanish businessman in Havana who ran afoul of Spanish authorities in 1868 for supporting Cuban independence.

Dealing with the prospect of dying by hanging, he escaped to Key West, which lacked satisfactory transportation hyperlinks for his cigar enterprise. He constructed Ybor Metropolis in 1886 as a deliberate industrial neighborhood at a time when Tampa had simply 2,735 residents. (The realm’s earliest inhabitants have been the Native American Calusa, and the phrase Tampa comes from the Calusa phrase “Tanpa” which meant sticks of fireside, a reference to the realm’s legendary lightning strikes.)

Tampa got here to be known as “Cigar Metropolis” as legions of Cuban, Spanish, Sicilian and Romanian Jewish immigrants streamed into Ybor to toil in its cigar factories. The trade drifted right into a gradual decline beginning within the Twenties, however you possibly can tour the J.C. Newman Cigar Firm, town’s final cigar manufacturing unit, and luxuriate in stogies at many neighborhood institutions.

Across the nook from the museum, the not too long ago opened Tampa Baseball Museum chronicles the area’s baseball historical past within the childhood house of Al López, Tampa’s first professional ballplayer. Tampa has been the spring coaching house to seven groups, courting again to 1913 when the Chicago Cubs educated there. In the meantime, the legendary Yankees groups of the Twenties, ’30s and ’50s educated in St. Pete and have been in Tampa since 1996. Groups have been lured to the area to advertise tourism, and spring coaching video games, which run this season till April 6, are nonetheless a giant draw.

A great spot for lunch is Al’s Finger Licking Good Bar-B-Que, the place you possibly can sit on the counter and inhale the smoky goodness of pulled pork and ribs, or dine exterior, the place you’ll hear the neighborhood’s clucking chickens, which have their very own fan membership, the Ybor Chickens Society. One other close by hidden treasure is Barriehaus Beer Firm, which has wonderful German and Czech-style lagers and a kid- and dog-friendly beer backyard. You probably have a candy tooth, cap your Ybor Metropolis tour off on the century-old La Segunda Central Bakery, which is legendary for its three-foot-long loaves of Cuban bread, Cuban sandwiches and irresistibly buttery treats, however has an off-the-beaten-track location simply north of Ybor Metropolis’s historic district.

The easiest way to navigate Tampa’s sprawl of less-heralded neighborhoods is to eat and drink your method round city. Inflation is a buzz kill, however fortunately the immigrants who run the West Tampa Sandwich Store and the Saigon Deli haven’t obtained the raise-your-prices memo. The sandwich store is a hangout for Cuban immigrants, and their $4.50 Cuban sandwich is a discount, as is the $4 grilled pork banh mi at Saigon Deli (3858 West Waters Avenue), a wondrous, but humble, Vietnamese eatery hidden away in a strip mall alongside a Vietnamese market and cultural heart.

Whereas we’re speaking 4 buck treats in Tampa, put timeless Bo’s Ice Cream (7101 North Florida Avenue), a Seminole Heights establishment run by 4 generations of the Bosanko household since 1954, in your dessert itinerary. Bo’s has wonderful custard, and their ($4) “small” scorching fudge sundae with whipped cream and nuts is huge and appropriately sinful.

The Seminole Heights, Tampa Heights and Hyde Park neighborhoods are foolish with worthwhile hidden locals’ joints you must strive. Name forward to get a password to enter Ciro’s Tampa, a fantastically appointed speakeasy-style cocktail bar in an outdated hotel-turned-condominium constructing. On a residential avenue in Tampa Heights, you’ll discover maybe town’s greatest pizza and wings at Lee’s Grocery, a pizzeria and bottle store with a dog-friendly patio. And close to the airport, the standard, eight-table One Household Korean restaurant is hidden between a Korean grocery store and a Korean cultural heart on the finish of a strip mall the place you may get superior bulgogi (skinny, marinated slices of beef or pork) and scrumptious Korean barbecued quick ribs as a reward for locating the place.

Inexperienced areas

Tampa can seem to be a sprawling mess while you’re driving round busy six-lane roads looking for hidden $4 sandwich outlets, so make time to decompress in inexperienced areas like Lettuce Lake Park, the place you possibly can lease a canoe or kayak ($25 for as much as 4 hours, no reservations), and Hillsborough River State Park ($6 entry per automotive), the place you possibly can hike in an Outdated Florida jungle on a straightforward 2.5-mile loop through the Baynard and River Rapids trails.

As I made one rewarding discovery after one other whereas cruising Tampa’s broad avenues, I concluded that town’s hidden charms are inconceivable to catalog in a scientific method. Make your individual tracks and canopy them properly. I desire to depart some close by terrain unexplored so I by no means really feel like there’s nothing left to find in my very own yard. However for 2 weeks, I commuted throughout the Bay, dwelling the lifetime of a Tampeño, all of the whereas feeling a bit like a spy, even perhaps a traitor. I discovered that Tampa isn’t the tasteless and forgettable metropolis I used to be advised it was, and I loved each minute of my subversive travels to the opposite facet.