Features
Touring Tampa’s Past
| USF News
Barbara L. Berglund, associate professor of history.
Photo by Aimee Blodgett | USF News
In April, USF will lead a series of walking tours in downtown Tampa that will showcase the city’s frontier history, its past political foibles and a look back at a time when mob bosses and crime lords flourished.
The lunch-time walks on Friday afternoons will be led by USF graduate students who have been building the scripts since the fall. Using vintage photographs and story-telling techniques, the tours will provide a compelling narrative of what used to be. The walks are part of a series of tours hosted by the Tampa Downtown Partnership.
The walks will focus on:
- Frontier Tampa: A look back at the diversity and early history of Tampa, exploring old Fort Brooke and Indian mounds.
- Tampa’s Illicit Past: Downtown Tampa was once a hub of mob activity. Relive the drama on this tour.
- Shopping on Franklin Street: Visit 1950s Tampa, where Franklin Street was the vibrant heart of downtown, with shops, eateries and throngs of shoppers.
- In the Line of Duty: Visit the monuments and memorials around town that honor military and civic service.
“I think Tampa is really fascinating,” says Barbara L. Berglund, associate professor of history whose graduate students will be conducting the walks. “It’s so diverse and it shows it’s a place of possibility and continual re-invention.”
USF’s history department has a number of programs and projects under way related to Florida history, and the USF Libraries has remarkable special collections that feature early maps, political writings and records on the roles of African Americans and women in building the modern Florida.
Robert Alicea, an adjunct who teaches Florida history to future history teachers, says the state has an intriguing past and a present that continues to churn.
“Even people who are not native, or someone who just moved down here, just in the span of the last 20 years they have watched Florida transform,” Alicea says.
Fraser Ottanelli, professor and chair of the USF Department of History, says the walking tours and other initiatives are part of what’s called “public history.”
“It is a real attempt to take parts of our past and make them relevant and accessible,” Ottanelli says. “Community outreach is a critical part of our mission as an institution. Our aim is to make Florida history available to those outside the walls of the institution.”
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Shopping on Franklin Street: A bustling nighttime street scene on 1940s Franklin Street. The “Mid-Century Shopping on Franklin Street” walking tour will visit the street’s vibrant past as Tampa’s place to shop, and see and be seen.
Photo by Burgert Brothers, photographers. c1947 -
Frontier Tampa: The heart of 19th-century downtown Tampa — Kennedy and Franklin, looking southwest toward the river. The “Frontier Tampa” walking tour will explore the city’s early history, focusing on the people and places that laid its foundation.
Photo by Burgert Brothers, photographers. c1890 -
Illicit Tampa: The walking tour “Tampa’s Illicit Past” will illuminate Tampa’s historic role as a center for organized crime. Below, right, the county sheriff poses with confiscated liquor stills in Prohibition-era Tampa.
Photo by Burgert Brothers, photographers. c1925