St. Petersburg's museums are better than a city this size should have

St. Petersburg holds the largest collection of Salvador Dalí's work outside Europe. That sentence tends to stop people, because there is no obvious reason a mid sized Florida city should have it.

How the Dalí got here

The collection was assembled by A. Reynolds Morse and Eleanor Morse, who began buying Dalí's work in the 1940s and became friends with the artist. When they went looking for a permanent home for the collection, St. Petersburg made the case and won it. The museum opened here in 1982 and moved into its current purpose built waterfront building, with its distinctive glass structure, in 2011.

The building is designed to survive a hurricane while holding a world class collection on the edge of Tampa Bay, which is a specific engineering problem most museums do not have.

What else is within walking distance

The Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg holds a broad collection spanning antiquity to the present. The Chihuly Collection presents large scale glass work by Dale Chihuly in a space built for it. The James Museum focuses on Western and wildlife art. The Florida Holocaust Museum is one of the larger institutions of its kind in the country.

Most of these sit close enough together that a day on foot covers several.

Sunken Gardens

A little north of downtown, Sunken Gardens is one of the oldest roadside attractions in Florida, developed from a drained lake bed beginning early in the twentieth century. It is now owned by the city and operates as a botanical garden. Mature tropical plantings that have been in the ground for generations look different from new landscaping, and that is the appeal.

The waterfront is the reason

None of this would be arranged the way it is if St. Petersburg had sold its downtown waterfront to developers. The city kept it in public hands, which is why the museums, the parks and the St. Pete Pier form a continuous public edge along the bay rather than a wall of towers with a service road behind it.

Cover photo: Taty2007 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0). Source.