Tampa
— — the bay that holds the afternoon storms.
Not only on a wall.
“Tampa folds around the head of its bay, on Florida's gulf coast. The Hillsborough River runs through the downtown, brick streets in Ybor City still carry the Cuban and Spanish names of the old cigar makers, and Bayshore Boulevard runs four and a half miles along the water, the longest continuous sidewalk in the country. Afternoon storms come in off the gulf almost every summer day and leave the air washed clean.
Tampa, 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.
Tampa sits on the western coast of Florida at the head of Tampa Bay, an estuary that opens to the Gulf of Mexico through the mouth between Egmont and Mullet Keys. The city proper holds roughly 410,000 people, with about 3.2 million across the wider Tampa Bay metropolitan area, which makes it the second-largest urban region in the state after Miami. The Hillsborough River runs out of the central highlands and empties into the bay at downtown. Average elevation is only about 14 feet above sea level.
Tampa's air carries the gulf in it almost year-long. Summer days run hot and saturated, with afternoon thunderstorms forming inland over the heat and drifting back toward the coast. The central Florida corridor sees more lightning strikes per square mile than anywhere else in the United States. Winter days settle into mild dry stretches with morning fog along the bay. The breeze off the water keeps the downtown a few degrees cooler than the inland suburbs, and the salt edge stays in your clothes for an hour after you leave the shore.
Ybor City, just northeast of downtown, was founded in 1885 by the Spanish-born cigar manufacturer Vicente Martínez-Ybor, who moved his operation from Key West and brought Cuban, Spanish, and Italian workers with him. The brick streets and wrought-iron balconies still carry that era; a few historic factories operate as social clubs and restaurants. Downtown, the Tampa Riverwalk runs about 2.6 miles along the Hillsborough, connecting the Tampa Museum of Art, the convention centre, and Curtis Hixon Park. Across the bay to the west, the white-sand beaches of Clearwater and St. Petersburg are about a forty-minute drive.