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Curious to learn more about preservation or ways to get involved in your community, but don’t know where to start? We’re here to help. In our blog, our preservation experts break down current advocacy issues, ways to get involved, and local St. Pete happenings.
If a building could talk, one would certainly want to sit down with the Snell building, anticipating a fascinating and unique conversation. The hard part would be how to choose the topics to fit into a single conversation! Should the conversation include how the Snell managed to rise in 1928 as the bust was taking over St. Petersburg, and include stories about the building’s original owner/developer, C. Perry Snell, whose second career as a developer raised the value of more property on the Pinellas Peninsula than any other individual or group over a nearly forty year time span? Or, one could easily spend a day discussing the Snell’s architect, Richard Kiehnel, and the architectural style and detailing he chose, including the arcade that banker Hubert Rutland closed off after he purchased the building in 1943! Finally, the Snell could explain to you how today’s owners have used existing preservation incentives to again make the building one of the downtown stars and a building fit for modern times.
As downtown St. Pete continues to boom, it’s sometimes hard to keep up with every project and, with so much happening so quicky, we often don’t have time to step back to see things in totality. Here then, is a roundup of what’s happening around Mirror Lake.
Our tagline is “Keep St. Pete Special.” It’s an effective earworm that has seeped into the local discourse. Residents and politicians often repeat variations of this mantra, telling audiences that we “can’t lose sight of what made St. Pete special in the first place.” Indeed, at a forum hosted last year by the St. Petersburg Downtown Partnership, mayor Ken Welch related the sentiment of one of his constituents who asked him if we’re “maybe loving St. Pete to death.”
