Monument to mark entry into Temple Terrace

An idea that had been on the city's back burner for has finally taken root.

It is a 40-foot glazed ceramic tile tower with a Spanish tile roof in the median on the north end of the 56th Street Bridge. It was proposed by the city almost a decade ago and is now finally on its way toward completion.

Meant as a gateway into Temple Terrace, the structure was designed in 2002 by Don Cooper of Cooper Johnson, Smith Architects in Tampa and architect Grant Rimbey of Temple Terrace, who used to work with the firm.

Cooper said city officials wanted the monument designed in a Mediterranean Revival-style to compliment the architecture the community's founding fathers envisioned for the city in the early 1920s.

"After we designed it along with other smaller monuments to be used at some secondary road entrances into Temple Terrace they all went into the drawer and sat and sat until landscape architect David Connors called me one day when they we getting ready to make some improvements on 56th Street," Cooper said.

It is a nice addition, Cooper said, because Temple Terrace, similar to other communities in the county, tends to blend in with the landscape, making it difficult to identify it as a separate city.

"Good towns have a good center and a good edge," Cooper said. "So it's exciting to see a project that was conceived so long ago finally rising out of the ground."

City engineer Joe Motta said the monument should be finished by April in conjunction with the other 56th Street improvements.

"It will be a really nice entry feature," he said.

Rimbey, who has kept tabs on the tower's status over the years, said it will also feature a wrought iron lantern below its roof. The design of the structure is modeled after the city's first entry gates built in the 1920s and that have since been destroyed, he said.

"As the downtown redevelopment idea cranked up it was decided that the entry towers should be put on hold for a bit so that the city could make more progress on the redevelopment," he said. "Without the redevelopment project that is now taking place, the tower on 56th Street would merely mark entrance into the blighted downtown area."

The timeline and placement of the smaller monuments have not been determined.