Celebrating Community: Tarpon Springs, Reflections on 125 Years booklet
2012. Celebrating Community: Tarpon Springs, Reflections on 125 Years booklet. City of Tarpon Springs; Bureau of Historic Preservation, Division of Historical Resources, Florida Department of State. Tarpon Springs, Florida
From foreword: "Tarpon Springs’ residents and visitors alike should find this collection of articles celebrating the City’s 125 years of history a fascinating journey through time. Five noted authors share their expertise, illuminating diverse facets that make this community unique. Known widely as the sponge capital of the world and for the Greek culture supporting it, this volume sheds light on the area’s prehistory through archaeology, its broad maritime heritage, an arts legacy built upon two generations of the Inness family, the town’s extraordinary richness in both “high style” and vernacular architecture, and the dramatic changes brought to Tarpon Springs by World War II. Significant photographs from the archives of the Tarpon Springs Area Historical Society and important artwork from the area add visual dimension. Not mentioned by the authors, but in my mind of enormous consequence in the history of post-World War II Tarpon Springs, is the bypassing of the city by today’s US Highway 19. What may well have been deemed an adverse commercial effect 60 years ago has resulted in a historic built environment and cultural landscape thanks to the historic preservation movement this bypassing indirectly enabled. The success of historic preservation in Tarpon Springs demonstrates that preservation is not backward-looking or against progress. Instead, preservation has sought to manage the future so as not to spoil the very qualities of life that have made Tarpon Springs so attractive in the first place. Here one sees that historic preservation is not an end in itself, but a strategy to achieve neighborhood stabilization, economic development, community conservation, and tourism development. A bright future for Tarpon Springs lies, in part, in its past." Project funding was provided in part by a 2012 Historic Preservation Fund grant to the City of Tarpon Springs (project number FL-12-012) administered by the Florida State Historic Preservation Office (grant number 12-12-41916) and the State, Tribal, and Local Plans and Grants Division, National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior. Tarpon Springs, Florida is a Certified Local Government.
- Type
- Generic Document
- Date of Issue
- 2012
- Publisher
- City of Tarpon Springs; Bureau of Historic Preservation, Division of Historical Resources, Florida Department of State
- Units
- HPF
- Keywords
- Interpretive Materials