St. Petersburg
— — the city the sun forgot to leave.
Not only on a wall.
“The Sunshine City, holding the south end of the Pinellas peninsula between Tampa Bay and the Gulf. Light here is the long pearl light that comes off shallow water, and the downtown waterfront keeps it — Vinoy Park, the new Pier, the Dalí Museum's helix on the seawall. Pelicans work the pilings in the morning. The old shuffleboard club still puts out chalk on Friday nights. A city built around the water it sits beside, and the warmth it has talked about for a hundred years. from the studio
St. Petersburg, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
St. Petersburg sits on the Pinellas peninsula between Tampa Bay to the east and the Gulf of Mexico to the west, the second-largest city in the Tampa Bay metropolitan area with a population near 260,000. It was founded in 1888 when John C. Williams of Detroit and Peter Demens of Russia brought the Orange Belt Railway to its terminus and named the new town for Demens's home city. The geography is flat and shallow-water — the downtown grid runs straight to the seawall at Bayshore Drive, where Vinoy Park, the St. Pete Pier, and the Salvador Dalí Museum line a single mile of frontage.
The Sunshine City nickname is earned by record. The St. Petersburg Times once held a Guinness entry for the longest run of consecutive sunny days — 768, from February 1967 to March 1969 — and the paper gave away the edition free on the few cloudy mornings that broke the streak. The light is the long pearl light of subtropical coast: low haze over Tampa Bay at dawn, hard white noon, and a soft west-facing burn off the Gulf in the evening. The Dalí Museum's glass helix, the Enigma, was designed by Yann Weymouth in 2011 to catch and bend exactly that light against the seawall.
Tampa Bay is the largest open-water estuary in Florida — about 400 square miles, fed by the Hillsborough, Alafia, Manatee, and Little Manatee rivers, and shallow enough through most of its area to wade. The downtown waterfront runs roughly a mile and a half from Coffee Pot Bayou south to the new St. Pete Pier, which opened in July 2020 after the inverted-pyramid pier of 1973 was taken down. North Shore Park, Vinoy Park, and the Pier district all sit on reclaimed bayfront the city has kept in public hands since the 1910 Waterfront Charter, an early American urban-planning protection that still holds.