Advertisement

She lives above the Ritz but is still searching for her place

 
Lori Rosso, Ybor City On loud nights Lori Rosso's whole apartment shakes and she keeps an odd sleep schedule to accommodate this. She goes to bed by 9, wakes up around 11:30, stays up until 3 or so, and then goes back to sleep until morning. While she's awake in the middle of the night, her table shakes and the walls reverberate. She calls these "thumpa thumpa" nights. (Lisa Gartner  |  Times)
Lori Rosso, Ybor City On loud nights Lori Rosso's whole apartment shakes and she keeps an odd sleep schedule to accommodate this. She goes to bed by 9, wakes up around 11:30, stays up until 3 or so, and then goes back to sleep until morning. While she's awake in the middle of the night, her table shakes and the walls reverberate. She calls these "thumpa thumpa" nights. (Lisa Gartner | Times)
Published Nov. 25, 2017

YBOR CITY — The bouncer was already at the door, checking IDs, when Lori Rosso came home from work on a recent Friday. The sidewalk outside her building is usually lined with cross-legged adolescents waiting for a show to start at the Ritz Ybor; Lori lives above the club, on the party strip of Tampa Bay. As she opens a special door for residents to the left of the bouncer, the teens point, whisper. Lori thinks they must think she's cool, this 51-year-old woman with a key to the Ritz.

She thinks, they must wonder who she is.

But the sidewalk is mostly empty now, just before 8 p.m., and Lori figures it will be a quiet night in Ybor City. This is to say, it will be loud.

It's 30 steps to the top. She sits down, pours a glass of chardonnay, holds it as she watches whatever's on the television before Dateline. She lights candles she leaves burning on strategic surfaces.

Lori calls these nights — Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, but sometimes random Tuesdays and seemingly all week surrounding Halloween — "thumpa thumpa" nights. The pulse of the Ritz below will invade her loft, shake the walls and floors, knock over whatever's on her coffee table. Between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m., when police shut down the party on Seventh Avenue, Lori can't sleep.

So she won't. She has made a new routine, going to bed early, then waking up to watch the people down below until the street empties out. Lori knows it's not a normal way to live. But she's not sure who she is without it.

At 9 p.m., Lori kicks off her peep-toe pink slippers. "I'm going to tank out in a second," she says to Nemo. "Isn't that right, booboo?" The chihuahua's eyes are black marbles starting to close. She puts her palm against his head and massages his fur with her fingers. She climbs into bed, pulling the blanket to her chin.

• • •

Lori grew up near Long Island, with a politician for a father and a familiarity with the public eye. At American University in Washington, D.C., she studied political science and got her first job with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, scheduling lobbyists' visits to Capitol Hill.

During George H.W. Bush's presidency, she worked in the West Wing with a very D.C. title: the special assistant to the assistant to the president for public liaisons and intergovernmental affairs. Eventually, she was planning out every second of the president's time when he was out of the White House. She worried, perhaps with the unique right to, that he would get assassinated if she screwed up and directed him to the wrong exit.

After Bush lost his bid for re-election, she worked for the Eisenhower World Affairs Institute, then the U.S. Senate committee on small business, then for a coalition for international development and advocacy. She was always staging events, and figuring out how to make other people look good.

Keep up with Tampa Bay’s top headlines

Subscribe to our free DayStarter newsletter

We’ll deliver the latest news and information you need to know every morning.

You’re all signed up!

Want more of our free, weekly newsletters in your inbox? Let’s get started.

Explore all your options

The final thing she did in D.C. was schedule the entertainment for George W. Bush's inauguration, arranging every flight, hotel and stage cue for a host of musical acts and celebrities.

Lori says she worked for three weeks straight, then walked home to her condo in Dupont Circle and collapsed on her bed. For three days, she says, she couldn't stop shaking. The adrenaline and exhaustion did battle in her bloodstream. "It was terrifying," she says, "that I stressed myself out to that extent."

She took out a legal pad and started to make a list. She was turning 35 and single, with no prospects of a relationship, and thought, If I'm ever going to get married and have a child, it's going to have to be soon. "What do I want?" she asked herself.

Lori wanted to slow down. She wanted to work for herself. She wanted to figure out who she was.

She wrote, "Water."

• • •

She traveled around the world, looking for an inn with a view. This was Lori's answer to her life in D.C. She thought that running a bed-and-breakfast would be easy, even relaxing. She would meet new people, all the time.

Lori purchased the Sea Breeze Manor Inn in Gulfport, a place she had never been before her search. She liked the slow pace. A 2011 Travel & Leisure article quoting Lori called the town "sleepy" three times in six paragraphs.

She ran the inn for 14 years, and volunteered with the city's Chamber of Commerce. Everyone in Gulfport came to know her. "It was me. I was Lori of the Sea Breeze Manor."

But then her ease and relaxation curdled into something else. "I was bored," she says. She had come to know how everything worked, why X was a good idea and why Y was a non-starter. She became the naysayer at chamber meetings. She stopped thinking outside the box.

At the inn, she couldn't sleep with her door locked, in case any of her guests needed anything in the middle of the night. (One went into labor.) She didn't meet a man, and she didn't have kids.

She was turning 50, and she still hadn't found Lori.

When she got wind that Ybor City's Chamber of Commerce was hiring a new executive director, Lori was immediately interested. Here was Tampa Bay's epicenter of culture, history and nightlife, where roosters roamed the streets. Ybor was exciting, loud, young. An apartment was opening above the Ritz — did she want it?

It was a "no-brainer," Lori says. "It was a life decision. A new persona. A new project.

"A new me."

• • •

The floor starts to rumble as the music picks up, just after 10 p.m. Downstairs, #POUND Friday is featuring someone named "Pixelsaur." In another wing of the Ritz, a watch party for The Big Lebowski is beginning. People on the sidewalks are screaming, stepping out of Lyfts in high heels, high-top sneakers, even barefoot.

Lori is snoring softly. A tin lamp on her bedside table begins to rattle. Her old ID badges from D.C. are hanging in the kitchen, falling over a purple bottle of Nexium. There's a painting of her old inn, tapping slightly against the wall.

The DJ's words are muffled in the living room: One, two, one two three four.

Bum bum bum bum bum, the loft goes.

Over the next hour, on the street below, heels stumble on cobblestones, friends carry friends, an elderly couple revs the engine of a motorcycle; hats are flat-brimmed or backward or both, a woman in a black cap with a cigarette asks a group where they are heading, "You want to have fun?"; a skinny man in camo carries an empty tub of protein powder, the recruiter hooks a guy with "$2 beer??!"; hoods are up and chests are scratched and a hand lowers into a girlfriend's back jeans pocket, everyone ignoring the lights to cross the street, even diagonally.

Above it all, Lori opens her eyes.

• • •

The Ritz has been here for a century, figuring things out, too.

In 1917, it opened as the Rivoli, one of the first silent picture theaters in the United States. Men and women paid 35 cents to see black-and-white movies. The theater was renamed and expanded in the 1930s, and the Ritz introduced Tampa to Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. It became "the spot" for date nights and soldiers returning from the Second World War.

But by the 1960s, the Ritz fell into decline with the rest of Ybor City. The theater's managers played movies with the house lights up to avoid riots. Moving vans rolled away from homes, and businesses boarded up.

To survive, the Ritz sought a new identity. It showed dirty movies and hosted burlesque shows. Dancers with nicknames like "Minnie the Mermaid" and "48-24-36 Queen of the College Campus" graced the stage before being arrested for showing too much, uh, flesh.

But that didn't work out, either. So the seats were ripped out, and the Ritz was rechristened the Masquerade nightclub, hosting alt-rock acts like Nine Inch Nails and guests who tagged the walls and trashed the bathrooms. The mosh pit turned into a brawl during a 2005 concert by heavy metal band Corrosion of Conformity, and in that mess of sweat and noise, a man stabbed four people, killing one.

The Masquerade was finished in 2006.

The owners decided to try — one more time — to reinvent the Ritz. After a $750,000 renovation, it reopened in March 2008 as a four-room event venue. People held weddings, the Electric Slide curling up toward the ceiling and into the lofts above. Bar-mitzvahed tweens were hoisted in chairs to Hava Nagila. And concertgoers packed the auditorium, testing the limits of their voices against Jessie McCartney, Ben Folds and a new artist named Lady Gaga.

Most weekends, though, #POUND Fridays are followed by AMP!D Saturdays, and Thursdays host electronic dance music acts like Tiësto. Other weekdays are fair game, too. The Ritz dubbed Nov. 22, the night before Thanksgiving, "Twerksgiving." The poster featured the heavily muscled backside of a vaguely clothed female and promised free drinks for ladies until midnight. The party would go until 3 a.m.

• • •

Waking up in the loft, Lori puts her slippers back on. The bottle of chardonnay is empty. She opens the fridge and finds another, unscrewing the cap and pouring a fresh glass. Nemo has urinated on the pee pad pinned under a chair leg. She walks him down the hall, to an oversized terrace overlooking the corner of Seventh Street and 15th Avenue.

It's cold tonight. She goes to get a sweater. The loft is pulsating, the bass pummeling the furniture, and still the DJ demands his audience make some noise!

She sits out on the terrace, where she likes to take notes on what she sees. She calls it "a blog, except it's not on the computer." She's named it "Life Above The Trees."

"Ahh the things I have seen and heard," she writes.

She does not have plans to move, but she isn't sure how long she'll stay here. She knows she can't do this forever, the floor buzzing up into her bones. She had a hip replacement in July. Friends had to carry her up the stairs in a chair.

And the things that were unfamiliar when she started the job have become routine, even her novel nights. "I think in some way I thought this transition or change would bring back my identity. I would be me again. It's funny," she says. "I was Lori at the Sea Breeze. Now I'm Lori at the Chamber."

Another glass of chardonnay. She leans against the siding, watching everyone below.

Midnight: A woman in a low-cut blue dress and yellow heels passes. "Those are great shoes. And I love shoes. Would you look how high those are?" A car cruises by, the music crooning. "Show off." A police horse. She smells weed. A truck backs up and crashes into another car. They peel off, one chasing the other. Lori puts her hand to her mouth.

1 a.m.: Couples slope against each other. A young man wears blue swim trunks and a yellow cap and nothing else. A woman is in shredded black jeans. Girls who don't look older than 14 try out midriff tops. "Just look at all the fashions. You've got 'em all."

2 a.m.: A guy is throwing up, one hand against the brick. A friend rubs his back. Cars honk at the jaywalkers. Two men share a goodnight kiss. A girl recognizes a guy from the tea shop at the mall. The terrace is vibrating now, too. A goth teenager is in chains, hair dyed red on one side of her part and black on the other. A drag queen in a beret and glasses rolls her suitcase of fashions toward her car. A woman is wearing a black leather bra as a top. "That's an interesting outfit," Lori says. "An interesting self-expression."

"I guess it's better to have some kind of identity and sense of self," she says, "than to not."

And now it's 3 a.m., and Ybor City is kicking itself out, police cars blocking off Seventh Avenue. Every other person is holding a personal-sized pizza box. A man carries a woman across the street, her shoes in her hands. He puts her down in the back seat of an Uber. "Taxi!" someone cries out. A woman is looking for her friends.

Everyone is going home but Lori, who lives where others come to sing and dance and drink and scream for a few hours. She goes inside and lies down in bed.

It still startles her, how dead quiet the street can be, after all the noise.

Times researchers John Martin and Caryn Baird contributed to this report. Contact Lisa Gartner at lgartner@tampabay.com. Follow
@lisagartner.