St. Pete-Clearwater International

Marker on the St. Petersburg waterfront where, on January 1, 1914, pilot Tony Jannus took off in a Benoist XIV flying boat with St. Pete's Mayor Abram Pheil aboard, landing 23 minutes later in Tampa across the bay. The St. Petersburg–Tampa Airboat Line — fare $5 — was the world's first scheduled commercial airline flight. Operated four months, then folded; but the precedent stood. The Tony Jannus Award is given annually for distinguished commercial aviation contribution. The memorial sits at Spa Beach Park near the modern Pier.

The Salvador Dalí Museum holds the largest collection of Dalí works outside Europe — 2,140 pieces including 96 oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, sculptures, and what is left of the artist's library. The collection was assembled by Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, a Cleveland industrialist couple who met Dalí in 1942 and spent the next four decades buying his work. By the late 1970s they had run out of room in their home and began looking for a museum. They wanted the collection kept together. Several major cities turned them down. St. Petersburg said yes, and the original Dalí Museum opened in a converted marine warehouse on the downtown waterfront in 1982. The current building opened January 11, 2011 at 11:11 AM. Designed by Yann Weymouth of HOK, it pairs a 68,000-square-foot concrete "treasure box" — 18-inch-thick hurricane-rated walls protecting the collection up to Cat 5 winds — with a free-form geodesic glass structure called "the Enigma." The Enigma is 1,062 unique triangular glass panels rising to 75 feet, an homage to the geodesic dome of Dalí's Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain. The Michelin Guide rates it the highest-ranked museum in the American South. The American Institute of Architects placed it on its 20 Most Beautiful Museums in the World list. The St. Pete waterfront immediately around the museum is the city's signature urban space. The Pier (rebuilt in 2020 after the controversial demolition of the 1973 inverted-pyramid Pier) is a 26-acre waterfront park with a fishing deck, a pavilion, restaurants, and an underwater observation gallery. The Museum of Fine Arts and the new James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art are within a six-block walk. KSPG Albert Whitted Airport sits at the south end of the waterfront — one of the few city-center GA fields left in the United States.

Henry Bradley Plant built the western half of modern Florida. While Henry Flagler was running the East Coast Railway from Jacksonville to Key West, Plant was running the South Florida Railroad from Sanford through Tampa to Port Tampa, and steamships from there to Havana. The two men did not get along. In 1891 Plant opened the Tampa Bay Hotel — a 511-room, 250-acre Moorish Revival fantasy resort meant to outshine anything Flagler had built. The building stretches a quarter-mile along the west bank of the Hillsborough River and is topped by six silver minarets, four cupolas, and three domes — all designed to evoke an Alhambra-by-the-Gulf. Plant paid $2.5 million in 1891 dollars (roughly $90 million today). He brought in furniture and art from his world travels — five steamships full. The interior was wired for electricity, included an early elevator (the first in Tampa), telephones in every room, en-suite bathrooms, and a 2,000-volume library. Rooms cost $5 a night; Plant's wife Margaret personally welcomed every guest. The hotel hosted Frederick Remington, Stephen Crane, Clara Barton, Theodore Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill. During the Spanish-American War (1898) it served as the staging headquarters for the US Army's Cuba expedition; Roosevelt and the Rough Riders trained on the grounds. Babe Ruth signed his first major-league contract here in 1919. The hotel struggled after Plant's death (1899) and the rise of automobile travel; by 1932 the City of Tampa owned it. In 1933 the south wing reopened as the University of Tampa, which still occupies the building today. The Henry B. Plant Museum, which opened in 1933 in a portion of the ground floor, preserves the original furnishings and Plant family artifacts in their original rooms. The minarets — wrapped in stainless steel for hurricane resistance, topped with bulbous onion domes — are the most distinctive skyline feature in central Tampa, visible from miles up the river.

Sarasota (KSRQ) has the Ringling on the bayfront, a 36-acre estate that's clear from the air. John Ringling, of the circus, was one of the richest men in America by the 1920s, and he poured it into Sarasota: he bought up barrier-island land, built the causeway, moved the circus's winter quarters here, and put up Ca' d'Zan ("House of John"), a Venetian Gothic palazzo on the bay, in 1925. Next to it he built an art museum and filled it with European Old Masters, Rubens and Velazquez and Titian, bought during a 1920s market collapse and meant for the public from the start; Florida State runs it now. There's also a circus museum, with a 3,800-square-foot miniature of a 1930s circus. John and Mable both died before it was finished, and the estate went to the state of Florida in 1946.