Fort Homer Hesterly Armory — Tampa, Florida

The Fort Homer W. Hesterly Armory is a concrete National Guard armory on North Howard Avenue in West Tampa, completed in 1941 and today home to a Jewish community center. Built for the Florida National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve, it doubled for five decades as a Tampa community venue, where wrestling cards, proms, rock concerts and political rallies shared the same floor. The Clio entry for the building lists its address as 522 North Howard Avenue.

The armory is best remembered for who stood on its stage. WUSF reported in 2016 that the Fort Homer Hesterly Armory hosted Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, the Doors, and President John F. Kennedy four days before he was assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke there in 1961. After the Guard left in 2005 the building sat empty for a decade, then reopened on December 8, 2016, as the Bryan Glazer Family JCC.

The ground has a longer story than the building. The Benjamin Field historical marker at North Howard Avenue and West Gray Street states that in 1896 George N. Benjamin, an early West Tampa leader who served four years as its mayor, gave the land to the City of West Tampa as a public park. Two years later Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders camped there during the Spanish-American War; Clio dates that camp to June 1898.

In 1911 the Howard Avenue property became an airfield, and small planes took customers on sightseeing rides. The marker states that one of the first night flights in aviation history took off from Benjamin Field. In 1921 the City of Tampa leased the land to the Armory Board as a National Guard drill facility, and during the 1920s a large wooden boxing arena went up on the site and hosted matches for several years.

The man behind Benjamin Field shaped West Tampa itself. The reverse side of the same marker states that George N. Benjamin settled in Tampa in 1875, opened what became the largest pharmacy in the city, and bought land west of the Hillsborough River for orange groves. After the freeze of 1895 destroyed most of the crop, he turned to developing the land that became West Tampa and helped persuade the Florida Legislature to incorporate the cigar town. He served 17 years on the West Tampa City Council and helped underwrite the Fortune Street bridge, the first crucial link between West Tampa and Tampa. The marker was erected by the Benjamin family on the armory grounds.

The wooden arena gave way to concrete in 1941. According to Clio, the New Deal and the Works Progress Administration supplied the labor and money to replace the wood buildings with a permanent armory and to expand the Guard base. The new West Tampa armory was dedicated after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and served the National Guard and Army Reserve for some 60 years.

Its namesake, Lt. Col. Homer W. Hesterly, was a Tampa civil engineer and World War I veteran who commanded the 116th Field Artillery Battalion, stationed at the armory from 1934 to 1954, and who helped reorganize the Florida National Guard after World War I, Clio states. The building WUSF photographed in 2016 kept its original Art Deco facade along Howard Avenue, with a historic entrance bearing the armory logo.

From the 1940s through the 1970s the armory was a leading Tampa concert hall. A WUSF history note recounts that on May 8, 1955, the Hank Snow All-Star Jamboree came to the old Fort Homer Hesterly Armory for an afternoon show with Faron Young, Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, and a young Elvis Presley. Tickets cost $1. WUSF adds that Elvis played the West Tampa armory four times in 1955 and 1956.

The Benjamin Field marker names James Brown, Johnny Cash, the Doors, Pink Floyd and the Ramones among the acts that performed there over more than three decades, and Clio adds Buddy Holly, Tom Jones, the Animals, Andy Griffith and the Allman Brothers. The hall also held high school graduations and wrestling championships.

The armory was a political stage as well. WUSF reported that on Nov. 19, 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Fort Homer Hesterly Armory on North Howard Avenue before his I Have a Dream speech, as the station put it. The marker also records that President Kennedy spoke at the Tampa armory four days before his assassination. Mayor Bob Buckhorn, speaking in 2016, summed up its role: this is where the wrestlers came, where Kennedy came, where King came, the big event center before Tampa had an events center.

The armory stopped serving the military as new facilities opened. Clio states that Reserve Centers and National Guard armories were built between 2001 and 2005 and that the National Guard closed Fort Homer Hesterly in 2005. Proposals for the vacant West Tampa building came and went: a film studio, an ice rink, a creative industries incubator, a commercial and residential project and a sports complex were all floated between 2005 and 2007, and a luxury development plan fell through in 2010.

The building stood empty through those years. When WUSF interviewed a former NAACP student leader at the armory in January 2013 for its King anniversary story, the station described the hall as now vacant. In 2015 plans were approved to convert the armory into a Jewish community center named for Bryan Glazer, a co-owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, according to Clio.

On December 8, 2016, the restored armory reopened as the Bryan Glazer Family JCC. WUSF reported that Glazer paid $4 million of the $30 million makeover, with the rest of the money coming from the State of Florida, the City of Tampa and Hillsborough County. State Rep. Dana Young and Mayor Bob Buckhorn joined Glazer for the ribbon cutting on Howard Avenue.

The renovation kept the Art Deco shell and added a new modernistic entrance beside the historic one. Inside, WUSF listed a members-only pool facing Armenia Avenue, a gymnasium and fitness club, and an arts center open to the public. Buckhorn told WUSF that for native Tampanians the armory was the gathering point for dances, homecomings and proms, and he predicted the project would spark the renewal of West Tampa as the western edge of an urban core spreading from downtown. Clio lists the center as the Shanna and Bryan Glazer Jewish Community Center.