Sulphur Springs Revisited

Video Panorama of Sulphur Springs | Interactive Map of Tampa Landmarks

Back when women wore petticoats and men wore straw hats called boaters, a village grew up north of Tampa around a bubbling spring thought to possess magical powers.

Sulphur Springs was a self-contained community where working-class households could walk to the bank, drug store or cinema. Barefoot youngsters ran across the hot Nebraska Avenue asphalt to get a soda at the Arcade, a building "Ripley's Believe It or Not" dubbed a "City Under One Roof" because it housed a hotel, grocery, post office and liquor store.

People who grew up in Sulphur Springs remember a simpler place and time, where honest people worked hard and enjoyed good, clean fun. Everyone knew everybody else and neighbors watched out for each other's children.

"You were raised to believe that any adult female was your mother, and unless she told you to do something illegal, you better do what she said," said Joseph Joeb, who grew up in Sulphur Springs during the late 1940s and early 1950s.

"It felt more hometownie" than the rest of Tampa, said Sarah Cannon, whose family moved to Sulphur Springs in the 1970s from Frankfort, Ky. "You had more of a community feeling to it."

The community's beating heart was the spring itself, bubbling up from underground caverns and jolting swimmers with bracing 72 degree water. The spring had a strong sulfur smell and was thought to have medicinal properties. Prehistoric Indians brought their wounded there to recuperate and performed mystical ceremonies around the spring.

Centuries later, a settler named Josiah Settle Richardson looked into the boiling sulfuric brew and saw a fortune to be made. Arriving at the spring with his family in 1898, Richardson would borrow money, buy land and build the community's most famous landmarks, including the arcade and a 214-foot-high concrete water tower.

Attracting 'Tin-Can Tourists'

Richardson was said to have a penchant for poker, women and fast horses. He was a dreamer who envisioned a resort for tourists built around the healing spring waters.

After working for several years as a painter and paper hanger, Richardson sold his business and bought 100 acres north of the Hillsborough River between Florida and Nebraska avenues for $10,000.

"He had a lot of vision; he knew it would develop," his daughter, Cecyl Roudabush, told The Tampa Tribune in 1989.

In 1925, Richardson began to build his entertainment complex centered around a hotel on the edge of the spring and the arcade. He created a swimming pool at the spring with white beaches, a platform diving board and a gigantic toboggan slide. A white, concrete gazebo nearby housed another spring. Tourists would go to the gazebo to fill bottles with the spring water, thinking it promoted health and longevity.

It was not unusual at that time for the rich and famous to vacation at resorts built around mineral springs. Perhaps the most famous was President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who swam in Warm Springs, Ga., in hopes of recovering some use of his polio-afflicted muscles.

Sulphur Springs, however, tended to attract a more working-class visitor, known as "tin-can tourists" because they often traveled in campers.

"They would close in the truck, take a bed, build a little camper on it and come down to Sulphur Springs," local historian Linda Hope said. "Sometimes they would winter here. That's how some of the housing grew up."

In 1927, Richardson made a fateful gamble. He mortgaged his property and the arcade to borrow $180,000 to build a water tower to supply the hotel and other businesses in Sulphur Springs.

The builders had to blast through 45 feet of bedrock to lay the tower's foundation. Richardson had steel railroad rails brought in from north Florida to reinforce the concrete. Old-timers say when the water was first connected, the pressure blew off all the spigots at the hotel.

Richardson's gamble went bust in 1933 when the Tampa Electric Co. dam on the Hillsborough River burst, flooding most of Sulphur Springs, including the arcade. Richardson lost everything.

Summer Memories

The arcade lived on for decades under other owners, serving as a town center in walking distance of the neighborhood. Joeb said he and his friends could park their bikes outside the sheriff's substation, where a man named Mr. Wages would watch them while they walked to Sanders Drugs for an ice cream soda. On Saturdays, neighborhood kids paid a quarter at Sulphur Springs Theater to watch Roy Rogers westerns and cartoons.

But the main attraction, especially for young people, remained the springs. Decades later, memories of those sultry summer days still evoke strong emotions in people who played there.

"It was summertime and all the people you had known throughout the school year, you'd make plans to meet there on a warm, sunny day," said Rich Guagliardo, a Hillsborough High School graduate who hung out at the spring in the late 1970s. "It was wonderful. Just remembering brings back the warmest and most wonderful memories."

Frederica Russell's family moved to Sulphur Springs in 1955. She still visits the pool regularly, drawn by the intensity of childhood memories and her love for the spring. Russell said she can still feel the hot white sand beneath her feet as she skittered down to the cool spring waters. Years later, she taught her children how to swim there.

"Everything in Sulphur Springs was magic to me," Russell said. "This is the heartbeat of the community."

No Swimming

Things have changed in Sulphur Springs, and not all for the better. The arcade was demolished in 1976 to create parking for the Tampa Greyhound Track. Many of the older residents moved out in the 1970s and 1980s and the neighborhood deteriorated.

In recent years, Sulphur Springs has had problems with drug dealing and other crime. Tampa police, with the help of the Sulphur Springs Action League, concentrated on bringing the crime rate down.

They have had some success, although the neighborhood is still an active area for lawbreakers, according to police Capt. John Newman. The number of serious crimes such as murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault decreased from 522 in 2001 to 441 last year.

Drug arrests last year totaled 174 compared with 74 five years earlier. Aggressive policing accounts for much of the increase, police say.

"It's still one of our three or four most-active areas," said Newman, who started working the area in 1985. "But it's a lot better than it was in 1986-87."

In 2000, community activists fought off a bid by Walgreen Corp. to build a store where the tower stands. The city eventually bought the 13 acres around the tower, and money from state and local agencies was used to restore the site. River Tower Park opened this year and The Florida Orchestra has held two free concerts there.

In 1986, high fecal coliform bacteria counts forced the city to close the spring to swimmers, along with the lagoon that carries the spring water to the river. The bacteria, which originate in waste from warm-blooded animals and humans, are carried to the spring via sinkholes north of Sulphur Springs, as well as in stormwater runoff from the surrounding area.

"The way to get it healthy is to invest in stormwater systems that will treat raw stormwater that's getting into the spring systems," said Tony D'Aquila, of the Hillsborough County Environmental Protection Commission. "It's a very expensive undertaking. That's probably why it hasn't been done."

The city has purchased land around one large sink north of the spring and built a gigantic retention pond to filter stormwater before it goes into the ground. Chuck Walter, Tampa's stormwater director, said the city is applying for grants for a large flood-control project between Busch Boulevard and Fowler Avenue that will include stormwater treatment.

The city built a 7,400-square-foot concrete pool at the spring in 2000.

Activists such as Russell hold out hope that someday the spring will be clean enough to swim in again. On a recent walk beneath the mossy live oaks around the spring, Russell stared sadly at the "No Swimming" signs on fences around the spring and lagoon.

"It's pretty bad when people have to put water in prison," she said.