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Survey is just silly to call Tampa snobby

 
Published Oct. 22, 2014

Dear Editors at Travel + Leisure magazine,

For a publication dedicated to wayfaring, you people really need to get out of the office more often. How else to explain your recent judgment that Tampa ranks sixth in the nation for its snobbiness?

Look, we're many things good and bad.

We have a lovely Bayshore Boulevard and an emerging, revitalized downtown. We have one of the great world-class airports, not to mention the iconic University of Tampa minarets dominating the skyline. Very nice. But we also are famous for naked trollops cavorting on their brass poles and an annual drunkfest in honor of a fictitious rapacious pirate, which gives everyone an excuse to get randy.

But snobby? What pinched high-toned critics did you rely on for this assessment? The cast of Downton Abbey?

Sure, we're a big city and we certainly have our enclaves of wealth and privilege, often euphemistically referred to as the old money Palma Ceia Country Club crowd. But I wouldn't know for sure since I'm never invited within its confines.

But go spend some time in Seminole Heights, or West Tampa Cuban coffee shops, or Forest Hills, or perhaps take in the elegant charm of an area of town known as Palmetto Beach, and I'll bet you a cup of collard green soup, a nice boliche and some yellow rice you won't find a snob in the bunch especially after everyone sobers up.

It's not clear what rubric you imposed to arrive at Tampa's sixth-rate perch of pretension. Your brief description of the city seemed to be focused on a tiny, several-block-long stretch of the SoHo section of town, which would be a bit like arriving at the conclusion that Chicago is full of Irish tipplers based entirely on the city's far southside Beverly neighborhood.

Besides, we have the gagging rights to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, professional sports' answer to a nuclear winter. How can you call a city like Tampa snobby with everybody running around with a bag over their heads?

Your all-too-brief description of Tampa's pomposity seemed entirely centered around Bern's Steak House, its sister operation at the Epicurean Hotel and a few other SoHo establishments. That's it?

Based on what amounted to a drive down Howard Avenue, you concluded we're only slightly less snobbier than New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Washington and Boston, but much snootier than Dallas, San Francisco (SAN FRANCISCO!!!!!), Salt Lake City and Providence?

Look, you could have filled up your entire list with the state of Connecticut, whose official state symbol ought to be a turned up nose. And although I've never been there, a friend tells me Portland, Ore., is so stuck on itself it makes narcissistic cities like Paris look like Monrovia.

You folks at Travel + Leisure also noted Tampa's relative cleanliness as another reason for: "locals to feel superior." And we brush our teeth, too! So because the city does a fairly good job picking up after itself, that translates into the sixth most insufferable locale in the country? Maybe if we skipped one trash pickup a week we could make room for Dallas to move up a notch?

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This is probably damning with faint praise perhaps, but it says something about Tampa's emergence as a city with a national reputation that we now get to be included in silly surveys.

It is ironic that Tampa has also ranked high for such things as pedestrian deaths and even one listing by Men's Health for being among the saddest cities in the nation, probably after we learned we were among the most self-absorbed.

It's all enough to make one want to cry into our cafe con leche. But the editors of Travel + Leisure probably wouldn't understand that. It's a Tampa thing.