I’ve lived in St. Petersburg since I was four years old. And that was a pretty long time ago! When I was a kid, we lived in a neighborhood called Sheryl Manor, close to the Northwest Rec Center and just minutes from what is now Tyrone Square Mall. On weekends, we would always go to visit my Grandparents, who lived out in South Pasadena. Believe it or not, 66th Street, south of 22nd Avenue, was a rutted dirt road with power poles in the middle of the road. So we rarely took that route, choosing, instead, to take 22nd Avenue North to Park Street, then taking Park Street to South Pasadena.
And whenever we made that trip, just after we turned onto Park Street, I would see an old, large wooden sign that read, “Here Landed Narvaez”. There was some more information etched into the sign, but I couldn’t read it as we drove by. We moved too fast and the writing was too small. But it always fascinated me to see it there, ’cause it felt an awful lot like something that I was supposed to see in a history book, not in real life.
That sign didn’t last forever, but it’s been replaced by a fancier one now, and it’s been moved a little further south to Jungle Prada (to see a post that I published a few months back about a little piece of Jungle Prada, check out this link.) And somewhere during those years in which the old sign deteriorated, I managed to grow up and learn that there was actually a great deal of interesting history in St. Petersburg’s long-ago past, and that Narvaez and his 350 men were just one small piece of that history.
Here Landed Narvaez (Please click on photo for larger image)
