Final Day in Tampa

Saturday, May 25, 2013--Tampa

We headed to the Saturday Market held at Centennial Park every Saturday.  I expected a farmer's market.  Although there were a few stands with food products, it was mostly an arts and crafts market.  It was rather quiet which made it easy to see what was there.  Most interesting was a table with woven baskets made from pine needles.  Also interesting were yard sculptures made from metal in the shapes of animals--alligator, dragonfly, a man on a Segway, etc.  

The park is in Ybor City which is an historical area of Tampa which was settled by immigrants from Italy, Spain, and Cuba and has been named a national historic site.  After seeing the market, we walked up and down the streets seeing the old business center which once housed cigar factories and now serves mostly as the dining and entertainment center for Tampa.  Some shops had people in the window making cigars by hand to draw the tourists toward them, but cigar manufacturing is no longer a major business of the area.  People come here to party for the most part.  There are several venues with live music.  There are lots of restaurants.  And there are shops selling items that will appeal to those who come to dine and party.  There is also a new mural we saw which was dedicated just this past week.

In the early afternoon, we explored the Channel District of downtown which is also an entertainment district with an aquarium, a terminal for passenger ships, a large arena for hockey and concerts, etc.  We also turned onto Harbour Island, an area of very expensive homes on the waterfront downtown.

We stopped at the University of Tampa campus which is across the river from downtown Tampa and is housed in what was originally the defunct Tampa Bay Hotel, a large Moorish looking hotel that was built in the late 1800s.  The Henry Plant Museum that tells the story of the hotel and showcases original furnishings from it is located in one portion of the lower floor of the building.  We toured the museum, then we walked all through the old hotel building seeing the old dining room, the music room, etc., which are all facilities still used by the university.  The campus now has many other structures, but it is the old hotel building that draws people there, and it still houses many offices of the university as serves as a symbol for it.

Before returning to our hotel in Clearwater, we explored two more near-downtown affluent and trendy neighborhoods with nice homes and shops.  One was Hyde Park and the other was SoHo.  We drove up and down Bayshore Blvd.  in the area of both which is like Ocean Drive in Corpus Christi with fancy homes and condos facing the water.