Central Avenue: Tampa's Historic Black Business District — Tampa, Florida

Central Avenue was the main street of Black Tampa for most of the twentieth century. It ran along the western edge of The Scrub, a neighborhood that the City of Tampa calls the city's oldest and largest African American community, and it served as the place where segregated Tampa's Black residents shopped, ate, banked, worshipped nearby and went out at night.

The district is gone today. The City of Tampa states that the stretch of Central Avenue south of I-275 has completely vanished and that only a handful of buildings survive on nearby streets. What remains is mostly commemoration: Perry Harvey Sr. Park, a group of public artworks inside it, and a Soulwalk historical marker for The Scrub.

The Scrub dates to the years just after the Civil War, when newly freed people built homes in a thicket of scrub palmetto outside the Town of Tampa. The City's Soulwalk marker places the settlement just northeast of the old town, and the city's public art page describes it sitting between the growing downtown business center and the cigar-making enclave of Ybor City. Its founders came both from the immediate area and from the wider Tampa Bay region, and by the late 1800s The Scrub was home to most of Tampa's African American population.

Commerce followed. A Tampa Bay History Center historian told ABC Action News that Central Avenue began developing in the 1890s as Tampa's Black business district, starting with about seven businesses. Black customers were unwelcome in many downtown Tampa stores, and as the cigar industry and the railroad drew newcomers to the city, the historian said, Black arrivals learned that Central Avenue was where to go.

Between 1900 and 1930 Tampa's Black population quadrupled, from 4,382 to more than 21,500 (the City's park page gives 21,531 and the Soulwalk marker 21,551). Over the same years the number of African American businesses on and around Central Avenue rose to more than 200, according to the City of Tampa.

The City dates Central Avenue's heyday from the early 1920s to the late 1950s, when the street held restaurants, professional offices, hotels, movie theaters and night clubs. Hillsborough County, describing the Tampa Bay History Center's exhibit, notes that by the 1940s Central Avenue had more Black residents and Black-owned businesses than any other area of the county.

Prosperity on the avenue sat beside neglect in the neighborhood. A 1927 report co-authored by the Tampa Urban League, titled A Study of Negro Life in Tampa, documented unpaved streets, inadequate water and sewer service and a lack of parks and playgrounds in The Scrub and Tampa's other segregated neighborhoods, according to the Soulwalk marker.

The City of Tampa's account of Central Avenue's business leaders names Clara Alston's Helping Hands Day Nursery, Moses White's Palmetto Dinette, Watts Sanderson's Blue Room and C. Blythe Andrews' newspaper, The Florida Sentinel, as examples of how Tampa's Black community could obtain whatever it needed on and around the street. Hillsborough County describes C. Blythe Andrews Jr. as chairman of the Florida Sentinel-Bulletin, a family-owned semiweekly that has focused on Black residents for more than 75 years.

Labor leadership mattered as much as storefronts. Perry Harvey Sr. was a founding member of Longshoreman's Union Local 1402 and its president from 1937 until shortly before his death in 1972. The City credits him with better wages and working conditions for Tampa's predominantly Black dock workers, with helping build a Black middle class, and with helping create the first Black-owned apartment building and plaza in Tampa, which included a bank, a supermarket and a restaurant. Gov. LeRoy Collins appointed him to the state's bi-racial committee, where he helped desegregate the county school system.

The area was also Black Tampa's social and religious center, and several historic church buildings still stand. The City notes that downtown Tampa's lunch counter sit-ins of 1960 were planned in those churches and in the NAACP office near Central Avenue. The same circle produced the civil rights leaders the City names on its LIFETILES Civil Rights panel, among them Rev. A. Leon Lowry and Helen Saunders, who worked with others to bring Martin Luther King Jr. to Tampa in 1961.

Schools and care came from inside The Scrub as well. The City's Health and Education panel honors Blanche Armwood and Christina Meacham as leaders in education, the St. Peter Claver school, and Clara Frye, who brought medical care to Black Tampa residents barred from the city's facilities.

The district was taken apart in stages. Federal money for so-called slum clearance led in 1959 to the demolition of The Scrub's single-family homes and the construction of the Central Park Village public housing project, according to the Soulwalk marker. In the 1960s, the construction of Interstate 4 and further urban renewal projects disrupted business along Central Avenue and scattered the customers who had supported it.

The City of Tampa reports that the business strip itself escaped demolition at first, but it did not survive the decade that followed. The last business on Central Avenue closed in 1974, and the portion of the street south of I-275 no longer exists.

The housing that replaced The Scrub has itself been replaced. Central Park Village gave way to Encore!, a mixed-use development built by the Tampa Housing Authority, and its first building, The Ella, opened in December 2012.

Perry Harvey Sr. Park, at 900 E. Scott Street, is the main memorial. The City of Tampa describes four major artworks there, made with the Tampa Bay History Center as partner and funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. James Simon's gateway sculptures of musicians, dancers and a jukebox stand 12 to 16 feet tall. Rufus Butler Seder's eight LIFETILES murals turn historic photographs of The Scrub and Central Avenue into optical tile panels, one of which morphs from a horse-drawn wagon into a Bro Bowl skateboarder. Joel Randell's 8-foot bronze portrays Perry Harvey Sr., and Mike Parker's Leaders' Row uses a Sanborn map and plasma-cut aluminum to honor community leaders. Fourteen inset timeline pavers run through the park, and Natalie Blake's three ceramic tile murals at The Trio in Encore! carry the story east of the park.

In February 2023 the City unveiled Soulwalk, a trail of nearly 100 sites across 46 miles and 26 Tampa neighborhoods built with the Tampa Bay History Center and the University of South Florida, and The Scrub is one of its historical markers. The History Center's permanent exhibit, Travails and Triumphs, also covers Central Avenue's place in Hillsborough County's Black history.