In a couple of weeks, former residents of St. Petersburg’s Laurel Park and Gas Plant communities will gather to reminisce about their lives in the now vanished African-American neighborhoods.
While their homes, churches and businesses were demolished and the land on which they stood forfeited for the city’s now disparaged baseball stadium, memories live on in the stories former residents will share in a Tropicana Field parking lot Dec. 12.
The African American Heritage Association of St. Petersburg has made it its mission to capture and memorialize the rich history of the city’s Black residents, with or without the structures in which they once lived, did business, worshipped or were entertained.
Just a few short years ago, in 2014, the association launched the African American Heritage Trail, which traces the history of St. Petersburg’s Black citizens over a 100-year period, beginning with the city’s first Black resident through the end of segregation.
