St. Petersburg businessman Bill Edwards died Thursday morning, following a brief illness. He was 81.<\/p>\n
Edwards, whose birth name was Edward Francis Sylvia, was known for his 15-year stewardship (as Big3 Entertainment) of the city-owned Mahaffey Theater and his contributions to theater in education through the nonprofit Bill Edwards Foundation for the Arts, which operated out of the theater.<\/p>\n
He spent $2 million of his own money in Mahaffey Renovations.<\/p>\n
Edwards bought the struggling Baywalk shopping plaza in 2011, renamed it Sundial, and after paying for extensive renovations, sold it in 2022.<\/p>\n
He owned the Tampa Bay Rowdies between 2013 and 2018.<\/p>\n
Raised in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he served with the United States Marine Corps in Vietnam, where he was wounded in combat and awarded the Purple Heart.<\/p>\n
Edwards made his fortune through ownership of Mortgage Investors Corp., serving military veterans in the state of Florida.<\/p>\n
This is a developing story, and will be updated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"St. Petersburg businessman Bill Edwards died Thursday morning, following a brief illness. He was 81. Edwards, whose birth…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":382926,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-382925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382925\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/382926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}