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Friend,
Under the dome of St. Petersburg’s Tropicana Field, home to the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team, lies a field of broken dreams.
A Black neighborhood once lay where the stadium and its vast parking lots stand. Known as the Gas Plant District for the two immense fuel tanks that rose over it, this Florida community’s churches, homes and businesses were razed by bulldozers, the result of 1970s-era promises to revitalize the historically and culturally rich area with new housing and good jobs at a modern industrial park — then of the decision by city leaders in the 1980s to build a domed stadium to attract a Major League Baseball team.
By 1986, more than 280 buildings that once made up the Gas Plant neighborhood had been demolished. More than 500 families had been relocated. The sites of at least three former Black cemeteries, possibly with graves still underneath, had been paved over.
More than 30 businesses had closed or moved, and the neighborhoods within the Gas Plant District, known lovingly by residents — many of them descendants of the original Black settlers there — as Cooper’s Quarters, Methodist Town, Pepper Town, Sugar Hill, Jamestown and Little Egypt, were no more.
It was all billed as a community rebuild, paid for, in part, with $11.3 million in federal community redevelopment grants. But the rebuild never happened. Instead, the stadium initially known as the Florida Suncoast Dome went up and was later leased by the baseball team for the token sum of $1 a year. While the redevelopment grants did help some families buy better homes in other areas, neither the original project nor the $309 million baseball stadium that was eventually built made good on either the bulk of the affordable housing or the jobs that had been promised.
What happened to the Gas Plant District, once humming with the cacophony of cookouts, Black church services, grocery stores, jazz clubs — and also tenements, crime and vacant lots — is an old story in St. Petersburg, still one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. It is an old story across the nation, too, where bulldozers have torn through Black neighborhoods for generations, leaving Black communities from coast to coast with little more than abandoned promises.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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