St Petersburg: Florida's beachside cultural centre
Simon Calder finds a rich heritage in the waterfront city they call St Pete's
For a city of its size and youth, St Petersburg in Florida has an extraordinary breadth and depth of heritage.
The outstanding venue is The Dali Museum, which celebrates an artist like no other: Salvador Dali.
In the 1970s, Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, who were friends of the Catalan surrealist and avid collectors of his work, sought to donate the entire collection intact. As established art museums across America dillied and dallied over Dali, the people of St Pete's (as the locals call it) promised a home where the artist would be cherished.
Initially the collection was housed in a former furniture warehouse, but its new home is an architectural masterpiece – with a concrete and steel staircase spiralling its way like a Dali moustache to the sky. It is all part of a plan to help you liberate your mind and reinterpret reality. Works include Dali’s Lobster Phone and the comic-grotesque Average Atmospherocephalic Bureaucrat in the Act of Milking a Cranial Harp.
Out in the garden, the celebration continues with a sculpture of a moustache – which Dali said was the most serious part of his personality.
On the subject of gardens: St Petersburg has its own horticultural attraction, the Sunken Gardens. Fifteen feet below street level, this joyful jungle was created in 1903 by a plumber named George Turner Sr. The educational coordinator for the Sunken Gardens, Jennifer Tyson, calls it: “A paradise for people from all over the country and all over the world”.
The latest addition to St Pete’s blossoming range of cultural attractions is the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art. The dramatic new structure, opened in 2018, is designed to give the sense of wandering into an Arizona canyon.
The founders, Tom and Mary James, have chosen impressive paintings, including Andy Warhol’s Mother and Child. Some wilder times in the west are commemorated in sculpture, such as one capturing the moment when Wild Bill Hickok was shot during a game of poker when he was holding Aces and Eights – to this day known as the “dead man’s hand”.
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