It’s Friday and today I’ll wrap up my Back To School theme, where I’ve been showing you some of our great St. Petersburg schools and their buildings. Yesterday, I wrote about St. Petersburg High School and showed you a quick glimpse of its beauty. I encourage you to take a look in person, up close. The details are amazing and the structure is truly unique. In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that, although St. Petersburg High School was founded in 1898, the current building did not open to students until December of 1926. But where was St. Pete High prior to 1926?
Well, one of its early homes was in a building at 5th Street and 2nd Avenue North. But by 1916, St. Petersburg had experienced a 46% increase in school enrollment, and the existing school could not accommodate the growing student body. Plans were drawn up to construct a new high school on the western side of Mirror Lake and construction was begun, with the building being completed in November of 1919. The school opened to students in February of 1920.
That structure served as St. Petersburg High School from 1920 until the end of 1926, when the new St. Pete High opened. But after the Mirror Lake building stopped being a high school, it became the St. Petersburg Girl’s Junior High School for five years, then Mirror Lake Junior High School for 33 years. It shut down in 1964 but reopened in 1967 as the Mirror Lake Adult Education Center, operating until 1985.
After shutting down in 1985, the building was sold by the public school system and, in 1991, it was transformed into condominiums. It’s great that this happened, because it might otherwise have just become another obsolete, unused building that would eventually have faced destruction. But it’s a beautiful building that sits in front of very picturesque Mirror Lake, and it had so many great features that made it a natural for transformation to private condominium homes.
The building is four stories, designed in Mission Revival style. Architectural historians describe the Mission Revival style as exhibiting subtle stylistic elements that served as a precursor to the extremely popular Mediterranean Revival style that took St. Petersburg by storm in the 1920′s. The basis of the Mission Revival style was a simplicity of form with a minimalist approach to surface decoration. This St. Petersburg High building has a square style with the front facade set back enough to form an atrium. The sides are perpendicular sections with flat roofs and they have gable ends that emulate parapets. The outside walls are covered with a stucco that is embedded with very small, multi-colored Chattahoochee stones which give the building a unique hue.
In the photograph below, you can see the beautiful detail of the front entryway. In addition to the arched skylight, the columns, and the rays that extend past the skylight onto the surface of the wall, you can see that the St. Petersburg High School name was carved into the wall, and this photo, which I took just a few weeks ago, shows that the name still stands proud today.
The building is now known as 701 Mirror Lake Drive, and you can click the link for a map and directions. With such a wonderful exterior structure plus beautiful interior detail and the high ceilings inherent in this sort of building, the renovation of the interior back in 1991 resulted in some extraordinary condominiums. Next time you’re in the downtown area, take a few minutes, turn towards Mirror Lake Drive, and look at this amazing building! And if you think you might be interested in living in a very cool, very historic school building, less than one minute from downtown St. Petersburg, give me a call – there are currently two condominiums in the building for sale. One of them is a one bedroom, one bath, the other is a two bedroom, two bath. Both are small units, and both are priced at today’s crazy low market kind of prices – less than $80,000! If you’d like details, let me know and I’ll be happy to email them to you and/or set up an appointment to see them. Remember the first-time homebuyer $8,000 credit only applies if you buy a home and close on it by November 30th.
St. Petersburg High School at Mirror Lake
