The Photo Shoot Attack

When my husband and I had decided to take a walk around downtown Tampa to soak up its history, little did we know that we might stir up some hostile ghosts.

First, I had shot photos of Tampa’s artistic murals, next we would move several blocks over near the Tampa Theater, one of my favorite historical buildings to photograph. Tampa’s downtown landscape has changed a lot over the years.

Our city now is a thriving community with a river walk and high-rise condominiums. However, with growth, unfortunately, often historical buildings disappear for new ones. Historical societies work hard to save our history and fight to save old buildings from being torn-down, but alas, progress is inevitable.

I wanted to get photographs of many of the old buildings left standing as a photographic journal of the past. I had heard about Tampa’s Kress building, an impressive Renaissance Revival style structure, and its long battle to save it from developers wrecking ball. I especially wanted to photograph it, however, I did not know much of its history at the time. I would research it later.

We walked toward the Kress building block and positioned ourselves directly across the street from its doors. I held my camera up to frame my shot and within seconds, we were attacked. A small tornado-like wind with whirling debris and dirt slashed at our faces like a whip. It felt like stones and sticks pelting us from all angles. I tried to ignore the pain as I aimed my camera and focused but the violence increased. I could barely open my eyes to take a shot. I clicked my camera once, twice, maybe three times before my husband yelled, “We have to get out of this”. We ran, crossing the street catty-corner from the Kress building with the wind following us. Once across, and a few feet along, the wind slowed and finally stopped altogether. An eerie calmness draped us.

Was it just a dust devil? Maybe. Or perhaps, the ghosts of the past who thought we were taking pictures for a developer to schedule the building's destruction.

Here’s what my research found: The block of buildings where the Kress building still stands has an interesting past connection to an event in national history.
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In 1960, many five and dime stores across the nation allowed African-Americans to shop and buy hundreds of dollars' worth of merchandise at their stores but they were not allowed to sit at the lunch counter and be served, including the F. W. Woolworth’s in Tampa, next to the Kress Building. The civil rights movement was at its peak and it had scheduled a “sit-in” at lunch counters in many states; lunch counters the same as the one in Tampa. Our city did not remain idle during this time, teens from Blake and Middleton high school marched on the scheduled day, walking for twenty minutes from St Paul AME church to the store on Polk Street between Franklin Street and Florida Avenue for a sit-in. Unlike many cities across our nation where protestors met opposing violence, our fair city of Tampa had a peaceful protest.

​Had my husband and I experienced a violent weather phenomena, or was it a ghostly encounter? I will leave it up to you to decide.

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