Sunken Gardens History — St. Petersburg, Florida

Sunken Gardens, located in St. Petersburg, Florida, is documented as one of the state's oldest continuously operating botanical attractions. The Florida Memory Project (State Library and Archives of Florida) records that George Turner Sr. established the site in 1903 by purchasing six acres and draining a shallow lake that sat approximately ten feet below sea level. That topographical peculiarity — the sunken quality of the land — gave the gardens their name and their horticultural character. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the site ranked among Florida's top-ten commercial attractions, drawing visitors along what the Sunken Gardens official history describes as the Old Florida roadside attraction era. Following a period of competitive decline and a community-led preservation campaign, the City of St. Petersburg acquired the property in 1999 using funds from a voter-approved one-time tax increase. The historic main entrance was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999, and the site today operates as a cultural, educational, and botanical institution under city stewardship.

George Turner Sr. purchased six acres of land in St. Petersburg in 1903. The parcel contained a shallow lake lying approximately ten feet below the surrounding grade — a feature that, once drained, created the distinctive sunken landscape central to the garden's identity. The Florida Memory Project documents that Turner, a plumber by trade and a gardener by avocation, cultivated exotic plants across the naturally low terrain, taking advantage of the site's sheltered microclimate.

By the 1920s, Turner was charging visitors a nickel for tours of the gardens, an early indication of the site's commercial potential. The enterprise grew across three generations of the Turner family, a lineage that the Sunken Gardens official history identifies as central to the property's character and its eventual preservation narrative. The Turner family's decades-long stewardship shaped the gardens' plant collections, built infrastructure, and public identity before the property eventually passed to city ownership at the close of the twentieth century.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, Sunken Gardens ranked among Florida's top-ten commercial attractions, as documented by the Florida Memory Project. During this period, the site exemplified what the Sunken Gardens official history characterizes as the Old Florida roadside attraction era — a category of destination that flourished before the construction of Interstate highways reorganized Florida tourism and before large, purpose-built theme parks began competing for the same visitor base.

As Walt Disney World opened in 1971 and other large-scale theme parks drew visitors away from older roadside destinations, Sunken Gardens faced sustained attendance pressure. The Turner grandsons listed the property for sale in 1989, signaling the conclusion of nearly nine decades of family management. The listing prompted a response from St. Petersburg residents and civic institutions who sought to prevent redevelopment of a site with deep roots in the city's twentieth-century identity.

Community preservation efforts following the 1989 listing produced concrete results over the following decade. In 1998, the City of St. Petersburg designated Sunken Gardens as a protected Local Historic Landmark, the first formal governmental recognition of the site's historical significance, according to the Sunken Gardens official history. One year later, in 1999, the historic main entrance was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, extending federal recognition to the property.

Also in 1999, the City of St. Petersburg completed its acquisition of the gardens. The purchase was funded through a voter-approved one-time tax increase, a mechanism that embedded public consent directly into the preservation transaction. The city's ownership transferred stewardship from the Turner family — which had held the property since 1903 — to the municipal government, repositioning Sunken Gardens from a privately operated commercial attraction to a publicly administered cultural and botanical institution. The City of St. Petersburg's official history situates this acquisition within a broader pattern of civic mobilization around culturally significant sites in the city.

The land surrounding the gardens carries its own layered institutional history. The building immediately adjacent to Sunken Gardens was originally constructed in 1926 as the Sanitary Public Market, designed by architect Albert Lee Hawes. The Florida Memory Project documents that the structure subsequently housed a Coca-Cola Bottling Company plant, then served as the Turner family's World's Largest Gift Shop and King of Kings Wax Museum during the gardens' commercial peak years. On June 27, 2002, the Sanitary Public Market building was added to the National Register of Historic Places, according to the Florida Memory Project. Today the building is home to Great Explorations Children's Museum, which occupies the same footprint that once held the Turner family's retail and wax museum operations.

The original 1940 entrance and gift shop building within the gardens complex now functions as the Sunken Gardens History Center, a separate institutional use that concentrates the interpretive and archival dimensions of the site's story within the physical structure where earlier visitor experiences began. These two adjacent buildings — the 1926 Sanitary Public Market and the 1940 entrance structure — represent the architectural continuity of the site across more than a century of changing uses.

The Sunken Gardens History Center occupies the original 1940 entrance and gift shop building on the gardens grounds. According to sunkengardens.org, the History Center was funded in part by a grant from the Florida Department of State, Division of Historical Resources, and by the Penny for Pinellas program — a Pinellas County sales tax dedicated to capital improvements and preservation. These funding sources situate the History Center within both state and county preservation frameworks, not solely within the city's municipal budget.

The History Center's interpretive focus encompasses the Old Florida roadside attraction era and the three-generation legacy of the Turner family. Its programming and exhibits document how a privately operated horticultural enterprise evolved into a publicly held historic landmark over the span of nearly a century. The building in which the History Center operates is itself part of the physical continuity of the site: constructed in 1940 during the commercial expansion of the gardens, it predates the National Register designations by nearly six decades and was in Turner family use for much of the period when Sunken Gardens held its top-ten ranking among Florida attractions.

Sunken Gardens exists within the broader historical geography of St. Petersburg, a city incorporated on February 29, 1892, with a population of approximately 300 people, as documented by the City of St. Petersburg's official history. The city's settlement followed the 1888 arrival of the Orange Belt Railway, controlled by Russian emigrant Peter Demens, whose extension of the rail terminus to the site preceded the gardens' founding by fifteen years. The waterfront land had been purchased in 1875 by John Constantine Williams of Detroit, Michigan, who acquired approximately 2,500 acres along Tampa Bay.

Turner's 1903 purchase of six acres for what became Sunken Gardens occurred during an early period of St. Petersburg's development, when the city's population and built environment were still forming. By the time the gardens reached their commercial peak in the 1950s through 1970s, St. Petersburg had grown significantly — shaped in part by the World War II era, during which more than 100,000 military trainees were quartered in the city's hotels, as the City of St. Petersburg's official history documents. The postwar population growth that followed contributed to the tourism economy in which Sunken Gardens thrived. As of the U.S. Census Bureau ACS 2023, St. Petersburg has a population of 260,646, and the gardens continue to operate under city ownership as both a botanical attraction and a documented site of the city's twentieth-century commercial history.