Gandy Bridge — Tampa, Florida

The Gandy Bridge links the Interbay peninsula of South Tampa with St. Petersburg across the lower end of Tampa Bay. FOX 13 calls it the oldest bridge linking Tampa and St. Petersburg. Bay News 9 reported in December 2024 that the bridge opened in November 1924 as the first bridge to cross Tampa Bay, making 2024 its centennial year. The name comes from George Gandy, the developer who paid for the first span.

The structure drivers use today is not the 1924 original. The crossing has been rebuilt and widened several times, an earlier span lived a second life as a trail for walkers and cyclists, and the Tampa end of the bridge now connects with an elevated toll road above Gandy Boulevard. The sections below follow the crossing from the 1922 groundbreaking to the toll road built over Gandy Boulevard in 2021.

At the start of the 20th century there was no road across the bay. FOX 13 reported in February 2025 that a trip from Tampa to St. Petersburg was a 50-mile, all-day trip around the water. Bay News 9 quotes Andy Huse, curator of Florida Studies at the USF Library, saying the journey could take nine or ten hours, depending on the roads.

George Gandy's idea, as Tampa Bay History Center historian Rodney Kite-Powell described it to FOX 13, was a bridge across the lower end of Tampa Bay connecting St. Petersburg and Tampa's Interbay peninsula. Gandy began construction in September 1922 using his own money. The project took $3 million and 1,500 workers to finish the 2.5-mile span. FOX 13, citing the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, puts that cost at about $56 million in modern dollars.

A Marshall University entry on Clio traces the plan back to 1910, when H. Walter Fuller began planning a bridge and later partnered with Gandy. According to that entry, the War Industries Board refused permission for the project during World War I, and Gandy then raised money through stock sales to build the Tampa Bay crossing himself.

The Gandy Bridge opened as a private toll bridge. The Clio entry records the opening date as November 20, 1924, with a toll of $.75 per car and $.10 for each extra passenger. Kite-Powell told FOX 13 that every crossing left George Gandy 10 or 25 cents richer. Bay News 9 reports that the 2.5-mile bridge between the Interbay peninsula and St. Petersburg was considered the longest toll bridge in the world when it was built.

Private ownership did not last. Bay News 9 reports that the original Gandy Bridge was eventually taken over by the United States government. The Clio entry gives April 27, 1944 as the date toll collection ended and reports a federal payment of $3,383,642 to Gandy. Kite-Powell described the opening to FOX 13 as a game changer for the Tampa Bay area, arriving just as the automobile was becoming available to the average middle class family.

The 1924 structure was not the last Gandy Bridge. FOX 13 summarizes the sequence: the bridge was replaced in 1956, expanded in 1976 and expanded again in 1996. Bay News 9 states that the original 1924 bridge was dismantled in 1975. The Clio entry dates the opening of a later span to October 20, 1975, and describes a 1996 bridge that replaced the failing sections of the crossing.

The 1956 span outlived its role as a highway. According to the Clio entry, it reopened on December 11, 1999 as the Friendship Trail Bridge, and about 600,000 residents and visitors used it each year for cycling, running and fishing. The trail closed for good on November 6, 2008.

Its removal was a joint Tampa Bay decision. 83 Degrees Media reported in January 2011 that the Friendship Trail, a former biking and walking trail along the Gandy Bridge connecting St. Petersburg with Tampa, had been closed since 2008 and was scheduled for demolition. Hillsborough and Pinellas county commissioners were weighing how best to demolish the 1956 bridge, citing structural hazards. The same report described more than $3 million in Florida Department of Transportation pedestrian work on the Pinellas side of Gandy Boulevard.

On the Tampa side, the bridge lands on Gandy Boulevard, a commercial corridor across the Interbay peninsula of South Tampa. Since 2021 drivers heading east from the Gandy Bridge have had a second choice. The Tampa Hillsborough Expressway Authority describes the Selmon West Extension as a 1.9-mile toll bridge connecting the south end of the Gandy Bridge to Brandon with no stoplight in between, by linking the bridge to the Lee Roy Selmon Expressway ramp at Dale Mabry Highway.

The authority reports that construction began in December 2017 and that the $230 million elevated toll lane was fully funded by toll revenue and bonds. It was designed so that drivers could stay on Gandy Boulevard for local destinations or take the extension for regional pass-through trips. THEA states that removing that pass-through traffic created 40% greater capacity on Gandy Boulevard for neighborhood traffic and corridor businesses, and reduced signal waits at Westshore Boulevard, Manhattan Boulevard, Lois Avenue and Dale Mabry Highway.

The extension was built 30 feet above the ground, roughly twice the usual height, after Gandy Boulevard business owners raised concerns about sightlines. At the April 19, 2021 ribbon-cutting, THEA presented the City of Tampa a $2 million check to rebuild city parks on the north and south side of Gandy Boulevard that had served as construction staging areas.

The Gandy Bridge also shaped later crossings. Hillsborough County records that Howard Frankland was long an advocate of a new span between the Gandy Bridge and the Courtney Campbell Causeway, a crossing that opened in January 1960, more than three decades after the Gandy Bridge.

The original bridge's paper trail is held in Tampa. Bay News 9 reports that the USF Library keeps a Gandy Bridge collection with documents, photos, an opening day program and sheet music written for the 1924 opening, including a foxtrot about the bridge. The collection is open to the public at the USF Special Collections Library, and Huse told Bay News 9 that the opening marked the beginning of Tampa Bay as a single market.