Once I spent a year wandering up and down Nebraska Avenue, stopping in the bars and pawnshops and diners. Poking around the trailer parks and old motels. Watching. Listening to hookers, bikers, kids, barflys, street people, waitresses, scrappy entrepreneurs and all the other riff raff drifting along this asphalt river running through the heart of Tampa. In the wild and wooly days of early Florida, they called it The Great White Road. A year of peeling back the layers of grime and tawdriness to find the the diamond core of the place, hard and brilliant, forged by devastating heat and force.
I hated history in school, but Tampa's past utterly fascinates me. It haunts the old buildings, and I've been fortunate to have an intimate affair with three of the most fascinating old gals in Tampa: The glorious and dilapidated former Tampa Bay Hotel (aka University of Tampa's Plant Hall), Ybor City's venerable and disreputable El Pasaje and the phantasmagoric Tampa Theatre, whose very guts I have spelunked, from the Mighty Wurlitzer's pipe chambers high above the prosecenium to the backstage warrens and basement chambers where ghosts mingle with rock stars.
