Does the waterfront stack up?
Architect and designer Vikas Mehta sizes up downtown St. Petersburg’s piece de resistance
In the early 1900s, at a time when most waterfront cities had ports and industrial plants, a crusading editor named W.L. Straub pressed this city to make its waterfront a public park.
Today, 100 years later, St. Petersburg has the third largest waterfront park in North America behind only Chicago and Vancouver. A spiky skyline has taken shape with six new condo towers rising in the last decade alone.
So we wondered, with so many new skyscrapers and such varied architectural styles, did we do a good job of framing the unique waterfront park that Straub and other city pioneers left us?
View the interactive graphic
