The
Columbia
Restaurant has been a Florida
tradition since 1905 when Casimiro
Hernandez Sr. founded this now
legendary eatery on 7th Avenue in
Ybor City.
About
Gay and Lesbian Tampa - St
Petersburg (Bay Area), Florida
Ybor City (EE-borh)
in Tampa
Florida is a
historic neighborhood in
downtown Tampa, Florida. It was
founded in the 1880s by cigar
manufacturers and was populated
by thousands of immigrants,
mainly from Spain, Cuba, and
Italy. For the next 50 years,
workers in Ybor City's cigar
factories rolled millions of
cigars annually.
After WWII many of the
neighborhood's cigar factories
were abandoned and now the area
has been redeveloped into a
popular night club and
entertainment district that
includes restaurants, bars and
nightclubs, a
Muvico theater, shops,
offices and
hotels. The area boasts the
GaYbor entertainment district,
with several gay
and lesbian bars and
restaurants all within
walking distance of the very
conveniently located
Hampton Inn.
The Ybor City neighborhood has
been designated as a National
Historic Landmark District, and
several structures in the area
are listed in the National
Register of Historic Places. In
2008, 7th Avenue, the main
commercial thoroughfare in Ybor
City, was recognized as one of
the “10 Great Streets in
America” by the American
Planning Association.
Traveling to Ybor City from
South Florida is very simple.
Board Amtrak at any station in
Broward (Fort
Lauderdale),
Miami or
West Palm Beach counties,
relax for four hours and you'll
end up at Tampa's Union Station,
about four blocks from the heart
of the GayBor entertainment
district. Round trip tickets on
Amtrak are about $70. Once
you're in Ybor City everything
is no more than a few blocks
away and for longer trips you
can board the Teco Line, a
streetcar line that connects
Ybor City to Channelside
Village, a cruise port with more
shops and theaters. The
streetcar line also runs past
the Florida Aquarium,
St Pete
Times Forum, where the Stanley
Cup winners, the Tampa Bay
Lightening (NHL), play and ends
up near Harbor Island
and the
Tampa Convention Center.
Tampa is also the home of Bush
Gardens as well as Super Bowl
winners, the Tampa Bay
Buccaneers. The New York Yankees
Spring Training facility,
Legends Field, is located near
the Buccaneers stadium. The
Sunshine Skyway Bridge, spanning
Florida's Tampa Bay, is the
world's longest bridge with a
cable-stayed main span, with a
length of 29,040 feet (exactly
5.5 miles or approximately 8.85
km).
St. Petersburg
(often shortened to
St. Pete)
is a city in Pinellas County,
Florida. The city is known as a
vacation destination for North
American and European
vacationers. With a purported
average of some 360 days of
sunshine each year, it is
nicknamed "The
Sunshine City." In
recent years the population has
shifted in a more youthful
direction.
The city has a children's museum
(Great Explorations),
Museum of Fine Arts,
a History Museum
(which has a full-size replica
of the Benoist seaplane and is
located near the approximate
spot by the St. Petersburg Pier
where the first flight took
place), a Holocaust
Museum, and the
Salvador Dalí Museum,
which houses the largest
collection of Dalí's in the
world, including a number of
famous and large-scale paintings
such as The Discovery of
America by Christopher Columbus.
There are also various other
smaller art galleries and
entertainment venues, such as:
The Midtown Royal
Theater, The
Arts Center,
Florida Craftsmen Gallery,
Mahaffey Theater complex,
The Coliseum,
and Palladium Theatre,
especially in the Downtown area,
which has seen a boom in
development since the mid 1990s.
The St. Petersburg Pier
is a popular tourist attraction.
It contains a small aquarium
open to the public, retail
shopping, adventure activities,
and both casual and fine dining
restaurants. Various sightseeing
boat rides are also offered.
Frequently docked at The Pier is
the replica of HMS
Bounty used in the 1962
MGM movie starring Marlon
Brando. The Bounty charges a fee
for tours, and has recently
returned from filming the
sequels to Disney's Pirates of
the Caribbean.
Downtown is the location of the
BayWalk
shopping complex which contains
an
IMAX Muvico 20 screen
movie theater, as
well as many chain restaurants
and retail shops, catering to
more of a middle and upper class
audience. Baywalk is also a
nightlife destination. North of
downtown is Great Explorations,
The Children's Museum, an
interactive museum featuring a
Children's Village with giant
pretend stores, Fire House and
Pet Vet Clinic, and preschool,
science, music, art, and water
exhibits. The museum is located
next to the Sunken
Gardens. Nearby
restaurants on 4th Street
include local specialties.
St. Petersburg is well regarded
for its beaches, including the
Gay and Lesbian Beach,
Sunset Beach. In
2005, Fort Desoto was rated the
number one beach in America by
the annual Dr. Beach rankings.
TripAdvisor also has the beach
ranked number one in the nation
for 2008. Also noted for its
arts community, St. Petersburg
regularly places top 25 in the
nation among arts destinations
Recently, St. Petersburg has
become known and regarded as one
of America's most livable
cities.
Sarasota is a
city located in Sarasota County
on the southwestern coast of the
state of Florida . Its current
official limits include Sarasota
Bay and several barrier islands
between the bay and the Gulf of
Mexico. These islands separating
Sarasota Bay from the gulf near
the city, known as keys, include
Lido Key and
Siesta Key,
which are famous worldwide for
the quality of their sandy
beaches. Sarasota is widely
recognized as the cultural
center of Florida and includes
The John and Mable
Ringling Museum of Art
with one of the largest
collections of Baroque art in
the world along with a bevy of
surprising institutions. A few
are included below.
Cŕ d'Zan, a
Mediterranean Revival residence
in Sarasota, Florida, was the
winter home of Mable and John
Ringling (roughly translated the
name means "house of John"). He
was a circus magnate, a
developer, and art collector.
Lovers of the Venetian esthetic,
the Ringlings chose the site
overlooking Sarasota Bay for its
vista, which reminded them of
the lagoon of their favorite
city. The Ringlings had been
renting the residence of Mary
Louise and Charles N. Thompson
on their extensive Shell Beach
parcel, and decided to purchase
some of the land to build a
permanent winter headquarters
that would include a residence
on the bay and a museum for
their extensive art and artifact
collection. An art school was
planned to abut the museum, but
it never was built. Mable's rose
garden was the first completed
portion of the complex.
In 1926, A. B. Edwards
built a theater that could be
adapted for either vaudeville
performances or movie
screenings. It is situated at
the intersection of Pineapple
Avenue and Second Street, having
been restored and used for
operas. It is listed on the
National Register of Historic
Places.
In the early 1950s, the John and
Mable Ringling Museum of Art
purchased a historic Italian
theater, the Asolo.
A. Everett "Chick" Austin, the
museum's first director,
arranged the purchase and
reassembly of the theater for
performances of plays and opera.
The theater was built in 1798
and disassembled during the
1930s and now resides among the
buildings on the Ringling
grounds Later, Stuart Barger
designed and oversaw the
construction of another Asolo
Theater. It is a multi-theater
complex, located farther east on
the John and Mable Ringling
Museum of Art property, being
placed between Bay Shore Road
and Tamiami Trail, and facing
Ringling Plaza. It was built
around a rococo, historic
Scottish theater, another
theater that had been shipped to
Florida. The new complex also
provides venues and facilities
for students of Florida State
University's theater arts and
film program.
In the 1960s the Van Wezels
enabled the city to build a
performing arts hall on the bay
front. The auditorium, the
Van Wezel Performing
Arts Hall, was designed
by Frank Lloyd Wright's
successor firm, Taliesin
Associated Architects team under
the direction of William Wesley
Peters. Wright's widow,
Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, selected
its purple color.
Other cultural attractions
include the Sarasota
Ballet,
Sarasota Opera,
Asolo Repertory Theatre,
Florida Studio Theatre,
the Sarasota Players,
the Banyan Theater
Company, and many other
musical, dance, artistic, and
theatrical venues. Since 1998,
the city has hosted the
Sarasota Film Festival
annually. The festival attracts
independent films from around
the world. It claims to be one
of Florida's largest film
festivals.
Sarasota is home to Mote
Marine Laboratory, a
marine rescue, research
facility, and aquarium;
Marie Selby Botanical Gardens;
G-Wiz Museum, a
science museum; and
Sarasota Jungle Gardens,
which carries on early tourist
attraction traditions.
Wanderlust is a comedy starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd as a married couple who try to escape modern society by leaving their cushy lives in New York. After an urban couple purchases a place in New York, the husband loses his job. With no other options, the couple leaves for Georgia to live with family. Along the way, they stay at a bed and breakfast hotel that turns out to be a hippie commune.
Other movies
out this
week:
Good Deeds is a romantic drama film written, directed by and starring Tyler Perry.
Gone
is a
thriller
starring
Amanda
Seyfried.
