The legacy of Southside St. Petersburg lives and dies by segregation.
Jim Crow discrimination forced black residents into the area in the late 1800s and early 1900s. But, by the 1920s, the neighborhood that hate and separation had spawned near Central Florida’s Gulf Coast had flourished into a thriving oasis of art, music, food, and culture.
In its prime, the Manhattan Casino, perched in the heart of the 22nd Street South business district and better known simply as “The Deuces” to locals, was a hotspot for celebrity sightings.
“Until 1968, when it closed, you had the Manhattan Casino,” says Raymond Arsenault, a local historian and John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida–St. Petersburg.
“Count Basie, Duke Ellington, everybody. Billie Holiday, Cab Calloway, every single musician you ever heard of would play there,” he says.
While white residents and visitors were known to sneak across Central Avenue to catch a show at the Manhattan Casino, Jim Crow laws kept black residents from spending time in white neighborhoods in the same way for decades. So Geech’s Barbeque, Mr. Silva’s Shoe Repair, the Royal Theater, Clark’s Funeral Home, and more than 100 other black-owned businesses joined the Manhattan Casino.
[For more of this story, written by Desiree Stennett, go to https://psmag.com/can-southsid...e7e987b72#.kkfevnuty]
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