We’ve all heard the jokes. “God’s Waiting Room.” “World’s Largest Above-Ground Cemetery.” “Home of the newly wed and the nearly dead.”
St. Petersburg was once world famous as a haven for old people. Heck, they even made a movie about it, a blockbuster at that: Cocoon
But where did this image come from?
Welcome to Gerontoville
The 1960 United States Census helps tell the story. It reveals a dense concentration of older citizens living in Census Tract 15, which stretched from Ninth Street (today’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street) to the bay, and from Fifth Ave. N to First Ave S; basically the downtown core. The age statistics in this tract of 3,000 residents were so striking that it earned the area yet another dubious nickname: Gerontoville.
In Gerontoville in 1960, there were more residents over the age of 85 than there were under the age of 45. Nearly 60 percent of the 3,000 residents in the census tract were over 70 years of age, compared to the state average of 6 percent. One-third of them were widows, and an additional 321 were widowers. Only 558 of the 3,000 residents worked. All but one woman in her 50s and one baby were white.
The residents of Gerontoville exclusively lived almost exclusively in old buildings. Nearly 90 percent of the rental units in the tract were built before 1940, and 651 of those units shared a common bath.
An Aging Downtown
So, how did downtown St. Petersburg become Gerontoville?
From its earliest days as a resort city, St. Petersburg attracted an older demographic. Who else could afford to spend the winter months relaxing in Florida? Affluent, or at least comfortable, retirees flocked to St. Petersburg beginning in the 1910s. The population exploded in the 1920s, where the count of year-round residents grew from 14,000 to 40,000, a number that doubled in the winter months.
In the 1910s, most visitors stayed in hundreds of tourist apartment buildings or dozens of small hotels. During the 1920’s boom, several large masonry hotels were built in the city, bringing the hotel-room inventory from fewer than 500 to more than 3,000. Visitors played leisurely games of shuffleboard, ate their meals at one of a dozen downtown cafeterias, and whiled away the rest of their time sitting on the thousands of green benches that dotted the city sidewalks.
During the 1950s St. Petersburg’s population boomed again, with a large influx of former soldiers returning to the place where they trained during World War II, their home purchases subsidized by the GI Bill. Others came because of the glut of new, affordable homes, made possible by air conditioning. (These younger homeowners were the “newly wed” in the old saw “the newly wed and the nearly dead.”) This presented an unanticipated problem for downtown: Most of those new residents were moving to the suburbs and shopping in new shopping centers built nearby. By the 1960s, downtown was dying.
Those empty tourist apartments and small hotels called out like a siren song to older retirees on fixed incomes. Many were converted to retirement homes. Air conditioning now meant they could be occupied year round, and the same things that attracted earlier, wealthier, tourists now entertained new residents. Shuffleboard, cafeterias, and the green benches made for a relaxing, and inexpensive, retirement.
A Growing Reputation of Decrepitude
Newly available public financing for subsidized housing contributed to the trend. Between 1961 and 1982, ten federally subsidized apartment towers for senior citizens were built downtown. Funded through a variety of government mechanisms, including Section 202 of the Housing Act of 1959 and FHA Sections 221 and 231, buildings like the John Knox Apartments, Peterborough Apartments, Graham-Rogall, and the Lutheran Apartments began sprouting up downtown, contributing to the city’s geriatric reputation.
National magazines began commenting on St. Petersburg’s image. In 1958, Life magazine wrote: “Lonely and bored, old people pass the time listlessly on a St. Petersburg, Florida sidewalk.” That same year, Holiday Magazine reflected on the green benches: “The old people sit, passengers in a motionless streetcar without destination.” The clincher, though, was when Swift’s Premium meats refused to place a full page ad in the St. Petersburg Times because an advertising executive in Chicago thought that the residents of St. Petersburg were too old to chew bacon!
From Green Benches to No Benches
City leaders decided they needed to change that image. Beginning in 1961, the green benches were taken out to be painted in pastel colors. Many never returned. Streets were turned one-way to facilitate traffic into the downtown, inadvertently making them less pedestrian friendly. Old buildings were demolished for parking lots. Cafeterias closed. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was an attempt to remodel downtown into Bay Plaza, a reimagined city center, to be created by demolishing much of the former Gerontoville. Nothing seemed to work.
It wasn’t until the 2000s that the city saw a true renaissance. Former St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker has called the revival “a 25-year, overnight success story.” Its ingredients are the subject for another article, but they once again include wealthy retirees living downtown, now mixed with a healthy dose of young professionals in their 20s and 30s living in thousands of new apartments. But one has to wonder: Do all of the residents of the beautiful new condominiums and apartments in the downtown core know that they moved into Gerontoville?
