With a population now estimated at 80,000-plus, Largo grows ever larger, and city officials are determined to extend that growth trend.
Almost all municipalities are pro-growth in varying degrees. Largo’s most specific aim is to grow its downtown neighborhood with more apartments and retail, and a ginormous new City Hall.
Construction in all three of those areas is ongoing, with work on the City Hall complex and a new strip center directly across the street — a few lots down from the mayor’s chiropractic offices — nearing completion. All these concrete examples of the city’s growth ambitions share something not uncommon for downtown projects but eminently lamentable nonetheless: little to no street setback or greenspace provisions.
Welcome to Manhattan, the Ugly Version.
For anyone who thinks my judgment of these projects’ collective aesthetic sounds too harsh, drive a few blocks west on West Bay Drive, below Seminole Boulevard/Missouri Avenue. In addition to being plopped atop the passing traffic, these structures seem constructed solely to make Stalinist architecture look good by comparison.
I’ll note in passing that Pinellas School District’s new conference center, situated two blocks south of the strip center on a residential street, also sits almost curbside and is similarly unlikely to win many architectural awards. But let’s leave any grumbling about school district planning for another time.
Sticking with Largo’s recent projects, it’s hard to know who among the city’s current officials would be best to blame for the apparent lack of architectural taste or planning prowess — though the buck tends to stop at City Commission, and the city Planning Board certainly has a voice in such matters. The problem is, city officials’ decisions often are constricted by provisions of Largo’s Comprehensive Plan, a long-term municipal code framework that’s effectively a subset of similar codified plans at the regional and state levels.
Still, don’t I remember hearing that where there’s a will there’s a way?
Let’s start with the City Hall monolith known as Horizon West Bay, a cutesy name premised on its prospective inclusion of sundry retail and restaurant tenants, in addition to the city brass and their hard-working minions. My reaction: Good luck with that. I lived for many years in Los Angeles— a city of similarly questionable taste in planning matters — where its longstanding goal of “cleaning up” downtown Hollywood resulted late last century in the wedging of a behemoth shopping mall in an historic strip of Hollywood Boulevard that’s home to the venerable Grauman’s Chinese Theatre — above which this largely failed shopping center now towers, sadly dwarfing the building and its famous-footprints sidewalk.
Meanwhile, let me also acknowledge that my carping over all of the above may strike some as nothing more than Monday morning quarterbacking. To which I only can say in defense that I had held out the hope that my worst fears would be proven wrong once the projects took shape. Also, there would seem to be some tiny chance that by grumbling now it will give pause to somebody in city government, seated behind a shiny new desk high above West Bay Drive, and more careful attention will be given to the design and aesthetics of future city projects and not solely the prospect of a fattened tax base.
Carl DiOrio is a semi-retired journalist who lives in Largo.