As you walk through the Snell Arcade, you cannot help but notice the amazing fresco of Venice high on the wall. It is a reminder of a time 100 years ago when C. Perry Snell and other city leaders used architecture, art, and our waterfront to transform St. Petersburg into an Italian paradise.
Homes, hotels, and high schools were built in the Mediterranean Revival style. Even Coffee Pot Bayou had its own gondola dock.
So why not our post office?
St. Petersburg’s early post offices included John Bethel’s Big Bayou home—the only post office on the lower Pinellas Peninsula from 1876 to 1885; E.R. and Ella Ward’s general store in Wardsville, the name given to the area near Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street and Central Avenue, when the Orange Belt Railway arrived in 1888; and, in 1905, a creatively designed wooden open-air post office built on Central Avenue by philanthropist Edwin Tomlinson.
As development accelerated and people poured into St. Petersburg, it became clear that the growing city needed a new main post office.
And not just any cookie-cutter, Washington-ordered, boring square building.