March 29, 2021
Monday
Remembering the Aquatarium
There aren't many good photos available of the old Florida Aquatarium that used to sit on the property our condo is on now. I've found a couple over the years but not many. Tonight, we stopped in the "library" in the condo to find some good beach reads and I noticed this photo hanging in the corner. It's been there all along, I'm sure, but I've never noticed it before. I love it!
The Aquatarium : one of Florida's Lost Tourist Attractions (lostparks.com)
This article gives a brief history of the Aquatarium, and includes a couple of decent photos.
Aquatarium (Florida) - Wikipedia (wikipedia.org)
Wikipedia has some details on the history of the Aquatarium, too.
Remembering the Aquatarium on St. Petersburg Beach (stpetecatalyst.com)
Bill De Young's article on St. Pete Catalyst has the most detail on the Aquatarium I've been able to find online.
The story of the Florida Aquatarium is short and sad, but I'm sure people all over the world have fond memories of that place. I've always viewed it as an "in between" attraction—bigger than a roadside attraction, but not quite the destination attraction that Disney ushered in.
I think my grandparents took me there once as a kid, likely after it had become Shark World based on the dates and my age at the time. Weirdly, my dominant memory is of the distinctive radial parking lot.
Renee has memories of walking along the sea wall you see in the picture posted above.
The Aquatarium is old school, beach town Florida, for sure. I miss the simplicity of it a bit, and I say that as I sit on our balcony in the air above that old parking lot in the photo above.
To complete the walk down memory lane, here's a shot from our balcony, looking straight down Beach Plaza. In the picture of the Aquatarium above, this is from inside the parking lot looking through the entrance to the parking lot at the bottom right of the photo, down the street.
And to prove that progress isn't all bad, here's another shot from our balcony looking over the preserve at Upham Beach. In the Aquatarium photo above, you can see the beach is only...a beach. At some point they established a preserve between the beach near the water and the street. Now it's lush, green, and full of birds and other wildlife. It's a beautiful and functional buffer.
Another photo, from the Florida Memory Project.
Required notice: This work is from the Florida Memory Project hosted at the State Archive of Florida, and is released to the public domain in the United States under the terms of Section 257.35(6), Florida Statutes.
