Urban History Part One

As promised,  I am now posting about the location of the company that made the insecticide from the day we went to the Army Navy Surplus Market plus a little background on why this is even important.

One of the things that I like to do is research urban history.  Sadly, when I lived in Cincinnati, Boston, and Miami I wasn't in to it.  Those places are full of old, old, old buildings, fascinating bits of history, unique architecture, Native American pockets, historical battles...  But, no.  I wasn't interested in any of it.  My dad even had a professor colleague who was officially an "Urban Historian".  My uncle has a small museum of Civil War artifacts and he also writes papers about historic factoids.  Nope.  Not interested.  Boston:  a little.  Miami:  mostly not.  I liked looking at vacant buildings and imagined what they were like in their hey day.  But, I never actually bothered to actually do any actual research other than just drive by the building thinking, "Huh.  I wonder what it's like inside."  Now, I am interested though.  Luckily, Tampa has quite a rich and diverse history.   And, the even better part is that Tampa's history is a manageable period of time that I can commit to memory.

During my first few years of teaching and when we didn't have kids, I was an avid bike rider.  I'd get on my bike and ride around for ages.  I've been all through down town Tampa (the Port of Tampa before there was anything as Homeland Security, around the Oak Lawn Cemetery, up and down every street in Y-Bor City).  I road my bike from here to The Pier in Pinellas County, ridden my bike to Brandon just to go to the mall, and on and on and on.  Because I am a bit of an explorer, I discovered Tampa's urban history simply by accident.

Flash forward about fifteen years...

A few weeks ago my husband and I went to the Army Navy Surplus Market and while I was snooping around, took a photo of a bottle of insecticide.  I love the antique "text talk"  X-L-N-T  (Excellent).  I looked up the company, "Graham's Sanitary Supplies" and found out that I know exactly where this building is/was.

Here is the building when it was in its hey day at the corner of Nebraska and Zack Streets.

And here is the building today.  (Thanks to Google Street View I was able to get the almost 100% identical angel of the shot...and never even leave the comfort of my chair.)

The building has been modified over the years although you can see that it is clearly the same building.  It is part of the "Tampa Mafia Tour"  After it was Graham's it was famous for being the Silver Meteor Bar.

Silver Meteor Bar (612 N. Nebraska Ave., Tampa)On the night of June 6, 1953, two shotgun blasts tore through the front window of the bar and blew off the face of Henry Hicks, a janitor who was mopping the floor. The shots were intended for Paul Ferraro, who had just walked out the front door. Ferraro was the bartender at the Silver Meteor, as well as a gambling figure with a long record of arrests. At that time, the Silver Meteor was owned by gambling figure Ciro Spoto Bellucia. Ferraro, now deceased, subsequently went into hiding and Hicks became the 20th victim of gangland violence in Tampa. The murder remains unsolved.


And that is not even the best part of this location!  
Be ready to read more about this in a future post.