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Will Linda Do The Box Step On YouTube?

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By STEVE OTTO, The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 16, 2008

Let me see if I have this straight. Tampa City Councilwoman Linda Saul-Sena is unhappy with the design of the proposed Ikea furniture store in Tampa, saying it is a "cookie-cutter template."

To show she is not just upset but means business, she has written a letter to the president of the company's North American division, saying, "Please save yourself and the City of Tampa the shame of mediocrity and redesign your Tampa store to be sustainable."

But the big hammer in her letter is her threat to make a video of the proposed Ikea project and post it on YouTube to "embarrass" the company.

You see, we have a lot of visitors to the Bay area, and they might not realize that this is the way business is done around here.

In her letter to Pernille Spiers-Lopez, the division president, Saul-Sena notes that she is a loyal customer and has shopped at Ikea stores in Atlanta, Orlando and New Haven, Conn., which makes you wonder about the councilwoman's taste. My boys, who are not only hip but broke, have been talking about the new store with its simple, boxy and cheap furniture and can't wait for the scheduled opening in the summer of 2009.

We Got Taste

Meanwhile, city administrator Mark Huey also fired off a letter to Ikea, assuring them that the city has no taste and doesn't care if the store looks like a box, so please, come on down.

You do have to wonder what came over the councilwoman.

We are talking about Tampa, aren't we? We are talking about the same town that can't get an art museum, a town about to line up by the hundreds of thousands to catch beads thrown by faux pirates, a town where the only way you can get money for education is to build a sports arena.

The Ikea project is scheduled to be built on Adamo Drive, which is about as ugly a strip of road as we have. Its redeeming grace is as a free alternative to the Selmon Crosstown Expressway.

The Big Ugly

If the councilwoman wanted to rail against ugly, she ought to drive over to West Tampa, where the Interstate 275 widening project continues. I can't quite figure out how many lanes they are intending to stretch out, but parts of it look more like a parking lot than an interstate.

It's not just the concrete swath. There are great, towering columns for billboards lining the expansion. This thing is not just going to be ugly, it is going to be Big Ugly.

Where was the YouTube expose on the boxy buildings that help define Dale Mabry Highway as the disaster it is? Why isn't there some YouTube bit on Gandy Boulevard, where the new Wal-Mart is on its way and where the council has approved so much condo and town home development at one end of the boulevard it likely will sink the next time it rains? The only thing that might save it now is the collapse of the real estate market.

"Save yourself the shame of mediocrity," Saul-Sena warns the Ikea people. To tell you the truth, I thought the retailer made its living on mediocrity, but that's another issue.

What you wonder is how many places in Tampa would love to raise themselves to at least a mediocre level. We don't have to worry about the shame of mediocrity around here. What we have to worry about is what we're going to look like after Saul-Sena unleashes her talents on YouTube, coming soon to a laptop near you.

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