Credit: Vival Tours / Shutterstock
With the sun warming the dock at Sail Plaza, and the Hillsborough River flashing that particular early-spring blue, the Pirate Water Taxi will ease away from shore and point its bow north. For the next 90 minutes, Tampa’s skyline will be a syllabus.
On March 13, local architects and urban designers will lead a floating seminar on how the city came to look the way it does, and where it might be headed next.
Urban designer and Tampa native Josh Frank will co-lead the tour with architect Ross Tisdale of Traction Architecture. The pair have hosted versions of the ride a few times before, sometimes for industry fundraisers, sometimes for small groups of curious locals. Each time, Frank said, they step off the boat thinking the same thing: we should do this more often.
“It’s not purely about historical facts and figures, but it’s also not just ‘look at this building,’” Frank told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “It’s a little bit of both.”
Similar to Chicago’s famous architecture cruises, Tampa offers a looser, warmer alternative, occasionally fueled by an open bar.
The boat glides upriver at a leisurely three to four knots, sometimes as far as Armature Works or the North Boulevard Bridge, depending on wind and tide. Guides point out the shifting downtown grid, underappreciated bridges and the layered history embedded in the waterfront.
“Not every city has a river that runs right through the middle of it,” Frank said. “The city grew up around it—there’s some really amazing details to the way everything is laid out.”
That’s not poetic exaggeration. Over time, the Hillsborough River has served as a shipping lane, dividing line, gathering place and more recently, a yardstick for growth. Entire districts have reoriented themselves toward the water in the last decade, transforming once industrial stretches into parks, apartments and pedestrian corridors.
“There’s been so much investment and attention along the river in recent years,” Frank said. “It’s kind of how we measure the city’s success.”
The tour is hosted by the Tampa Bay Community Design Center (TCDC), a nonprofit dedicated to celebrating the region’s architectural heritage while advocating for thoughtful, forward-thinking design. The organization facilitates everything from walking tours to gallery talks and public installations, all with a focus on historic preservation, sustainability and civic engagement.
Linda Saul-Sena, vice president of the TCDC, former Tampa City Council member and occasional architectural boat tour host, frames the tour as an opportunity to bring awareness to historical preservation as part of civic identity.
“It is going to be a combination of history, urban planning and architecture, because it’s all connected,” Saul-Sena told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “If we don’t value our history, we don’t know who we are.”
While many passengers are architects, builders and industry insiders, the event is open to the public. And Frank hopes more curious locals and design amateurs hop aboard to get a new perspective of the city and the river that shapes it.
The tour zigzags between origin stories and contemporary debates, preservation wins and losses, grand civic gestures and small design details. Sometimes guests chime in with corrections or insider knowledge.
For Saul-Sena, that exchange is the point. Spaces, she has long argued, shape how we live together.
“My whole passion is for people to know more about Tampa’s history and about good contemporary design, so we will stop tearing down significant buildings,” she said.
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This article appears in Feb. 19 – 25, 2026.
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