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


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They called it Salt Lake in St. Petersburg’s 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 1920’s, it is thought, he found the old plat of the area drawn up in 1884 by one of the county’s earliest settlers, William B. Miranda. Miranda called the lake Maggiore Lago, after the famed lake in Italy.

During the Depression of the 1930’s, 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]



Lake Maggiore, 1953


Rains flooded 9th street by Lake Maggiore, 1969



Playground



Picnic shelters



Lake Maggiore boat ramp, 2019

See Also: What’s in a name, Boyd Hill: Landscape architect, nature lover



 

 

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