PINELLAS PAST & PRESENT
View of Salt Lake (now Lake Maggiore) in St. Petersburg,
on a post card from an earlier time.
[From the collection of Frank Peters, Times
staff artist]
By Betty Jean Miller,
staff writer
©St. Petersburg Times, published November 18, 1991
This Website is used solely for my personal,
non-commercial use!
They called it Salt Lake in St. Petersburgs early years,
because the body of water now known as Lake Maggiore was a tidal
lake. It was connected to Tampa Bay by Salt Creek, passing an
odoriferous salt marsh along the way.
When Charles Hall developed Lakewood Estates during the boom
of the early 1920s, it is thought, he found the old plat
of the area drawn up in 1884 by one of the countys earliest
settlers, William B. Miranda. Miranda called the lake Maggiore
Lago, after the famed lake in Italy.
During the Depression of the 1930s, Works Progress Administration
paid money for draining the salt marshes along the creek and
beautifying the Bartlett Park area, thus stopping the tidal flow
to Lake Maggiore. Lake Maggiore Park was created on land bought
by the city from Sam H. Mann and James R. Bussey in a transaction
initiated by Mayor R. J. McCutcheon Jr. in 1941. The land was
beautified through the Post War Fund in 1947.
The sender of this post card, (above picture) though, had no thoughts of
the lake, but of politics.
The campaign all the way down seemed very lively,
G.E.B. wrote to Fred Walker in Otsego, Mich., on Nov. 5, 1916.
Two candidates for governor here had open air meetings
last night. All the papers here assure us of a Democratic landslide.
Information in this story came from The Story of St. Petersburg
by Karl H. Grismer.
Lake Maggiore today. | [Times photo -- Maurice Rivenbark]
|