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How coronavirus fits in St. Petersburg’s history of paradise and pestilence | Column
“No city has wrapped its identity around the promise of health and vitality more than St. Petersburg,” writes historian Gary Mormino.
 
The front page of the Oct. 17, 1918, St. Petersburg Times
The front page of the Oct. 17, 1918, St. Petersburg Times [ Provided ]
Published March 27, 2020|Updated March 27, 2020

“I CAME HERE TO DIE” ran as a feature column in the St. Petersburg Times in the 1930s. W.J. Ottaway provided one such tale of redemption. Hopeless and sick in Michigan, he set out for St. Petersburg in 1907, reporting in 1933 that his “health was never better.”

Sunshine cities incorporated old age, second chances and the promise of health. No city has wrapped its identity around the promise of health and vitality more than St. Petersburg. Its earliest identity coincided with a search for America’s “Health City.” In 1885, Dr. W.C. Van Bibber announced that “Health City” should be located on Point Pinellas. “Overlooking the deep Gulf of Mexico, with the broad waters of a beautiful bay nearly surrounding it . . . there is a large sub-peninsula . . . its air is healthy.” A paradise, it was Florida’s Mediterranean, an Italy without Italians!

“The fact that Dr. Van Bibber had already purchased a parcel of land near Maximo Point,” writes historian Raymond Arsenault, “led some observers to question his objectivity.”

Gary Mormino
Gary Mormino [ Times (2018) ]

Spanish explorers had marveled at the splendid health and physiques of Florida’s Native Americans, who were soon annihilated by Old World diseases. The Columbian Exchange was midwife to globalization, bringing strange, new animals to La Florida and Tampa Bay: Iberian pigs, brown Norwegian rats and African mosquitoes.

Feral hogs rarely kill people. The same cannot be said about the deadly Aedes aegypti mosquito. The species arrived aboard slave ships and thrived in human settlements and temperate environments. Nicknamed “Broken bone fever,” Yellow Fever scoured Southern port cities.

In 1887, the disease pummeled Tampa, killing nearly 100 persons, including three priests. Franklin Street, the business district, observed the Tampa Journal, “has been the gloomiest place of all.” A journalist lamented that “some of the places up the road seem to look at Tampa more in the light of a convict camp rather than that of an afflicted sister.” Sparsely settled St. Petersburg was largely spared the affliction.

For a moment in 1898, Tampa became a national byline. When the battleship Maine exploded in Havana Harbor, Congress declared war against Spain. The U.S. Army selected Tampa as the chief port of embarkation for Cuba. Sixty thousand troops overwhelmed Tampa. Ambassador John Hay anointed the conflict “a splendid little war,” while others cursed it as a “sickly little war.” A typhoid epidemic erupted in Tampa as soldiers died from unsanitary conditions. Battlefield casualties resulted in fewer than 1,000 American lives, while disease claimed 5,400 U.S. soldiers. More than 300 troops died in Florida.

The greatest pandemic in modern history occurred during the waning months of the Great War, in 1918. In a world without flu vaccines, physicians were helpless in treating Spanish Influenza. In Tampa, as the evangelist Billy Sunday was warning residents of the wages of sin, the Grim Reaper readied for harvest. More than 22,000 Tampans fell ill. The epidemic reached the most remote region of Florida, claiming 10 Seminoles. Most of the state’s schools, pool rooms and churches closed. A student died at Florida Southern College, then located at Sutherland, today’s Palm Harbor. Life insurance companies went bankrupt.

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In Pinellas County, the pandemic hopscotched across the lightly settled peninsula. Whereas Tampa and West Tampa suffered 283 deaths, only eight deaths occurred in St. Petersburg. A Nov. 6, 1918, St. Petersburg Times headline, mirroring the era’s conventions, announced, “City’s Record in Influenza Is Unequaled. But One White Man and Few Negroes Died of Disease Here.”

Not even a global pandemic could still the competition between Tampa and St. Petersburg. On Nov. 15, 1918, the Tampa Morning Tribune mentioned the flu epidemic “raging” in St. Petersburg. The St. Petersburg Independent headline responded, “Injustice Done Sunshine City.

When writer Philip Wylie arrived in Miami in the 1930s, he was dazzled by the natural beauty of the region but quickly realized paradise was tainted. “Raw sewage made Biscayne Bay a cesspool.” When his wife contracted undulant fever, local leaders told him that “standard health measures were not only impossibly costly here but needless.” The sun, they insisted, “killed all germs.”

Timeless, the core element to selling Florida was always the promise of health amid palm trees. The reality could be very unhealthy. Almost all the state’s selling points — sunny days, orange juice and tropical beaches — underscore health and happiness. Today, Florida’s beaches are closed, seniors represent the pandemic’s most vulnerable targets, and officials warn the orange juice industry not to mislead the public with claims that drinking a glass of liquid sunshine strengthens immune systems.

How will the coronavirus change Florida? One theory suggests that heat may slow the virus. In the 19th century, several politicians suggested that Florida become a national sanitorium. Will Florida become a new climate sanctuary?

The loss of paradise and news of pestilence have consequences. Perhaps the crisis will make us appreciate the sacrifices of health care workers and the beauty of life’s simplest pleasures: listening to the full-throated mockingbird, hearing laughter at public places, and reading the Sunday Tampa Bay Times at a coffee shop.

Gary R. Mormino is scholar in residence at Florida Humanities.