I often post about Real Estate topics on Mondays, but today is a holiday so I’ll skip the business talk.
Instead, I’m going to take the opportunity to dispel the myth of Little St. Mary’s.
Yesterday and the day before, I posted about two buildings either in or near downtown St. Petersburg – one is a public rest room, one is a Catholic church. It might not seem that such buildings could have very much in common, but, in fact, they do. They were both constructed in the 1920′s, during St. Petersburg’s great development boom time. They were both designed by the very highly respected architect Henry S. Taylor. And they were both designed using Romanesque Revival architectural styling. I’ve reposted pictures of each of them below. Please take a moment to click on the pictures to bring up a full-size version of the images, then compare them. When you do, you’ll see that there’s a lot more similarity than just the fact that they’re both Romanesque Revival. It almost looks like one is a pint-sized version of the other.
St. Mary's Church
- Comfort Station One
That strong similarity led to the birth of a myth, and it’s a myth that has been around for decades and one that continues to be reinforced, even today. The story is that architect Henry Taylor designed the church and oversaw the construction of it, but the church came into hard times financially, and so they did not fully pay Taylor for his work. Annoyed by the underpayment and newly hired by the City of St. Petersburg to design a beautiful public restroom for the growing waterfront area downtown, Taylor decided to ’get back’ at church officials by designing the public restroom to look like a miniature version of the church. And so, Comfort Station One came to be known by many as “Little St. Mary’s”. Even today, if you take one of the commercial tours available in the downtown area, they tell the Little St. Mary’s story as though it is the truth.
But the facts prove otherwise. Through a simple search of newspaper archives, I found an article in the May 7, 1927 issue of St. Petersburg’s Evening Independent that stated that the construction of Comfort Station One was 30% complete as of that date. And St. Petersburg’s own web site states that Comfort Station One opened to the public in 1927.
As for St. Mary’s Church, an article that I located in the December 25th, 1928 issue of the St. Petersburg Times has the following headline and subheadline: ”Catholics Buy Site For New Local Church — St. Mary’s Edifice Will Be Built on Fourth Street at Fifth Avenue South”. It’s pretty clear, then, that if Comfort Station One opened in 1927 and the land for the new St. Mary’s Church was just purchased at the end of 1928, the rest room design was not a retribution for some underpayment for the church design. The timing is just completely wrong. But it was a fun story, and with the two buildings looking so much alike, it was an easy one to convince people of…
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend” -Robert Wuhl
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6731102750245618218#
Two wonderful buildings that apart or together command admiration and affection. Thank you for featuring them.
Perhaps other conclusions than yours or the myth’s could be reached. The time line you cite could hold more options.
The architectural plans for the church may have been completed long before those for the comfort station, but it may have taken much longer to break ground for the church. By 1927 Florida was hurtling into a depression. Money to support the church construction may have been delayed. Mr. Taylor had designed buildings locally for the diocese prior to the comfort station. (“In 1924 he had designed a rectory for St. Mary Our Lady of Grace on Third Avenue South and later St. Paul’s School and Church.”, http://www.stmaryolg.org/history.html.) I would guess that to raise money to build the SMOLG church his plans would have been completed far in advance of groundbreaking. Completing the much larger church would have a longer building timeline (do we know when ground was broken?). Perhaps using that corner of the former Williams property for the new church had been long desired (General Williams having been a leader in the early St. Petersburg Catholic community) but required long negotiations with owners of that former Williams property. One way of interpreting the information is that the City beat the Church in enlisting Mr. Taylor’s services at a time when he was wanting to place the first brick, octagonal, Romanesque building in St. Petersburg — the “honor” went to his first client ready to break ground.
And then, the Diocese had built also in the 1920s in red brick: St Joseph’s and St. Paul’s. Perhaps they were not about to change building materials because Mr. Taylor had also built a comfort station in red brick.
Another teaser is on the church’s webpage: “After seeing San Stefano Rotundo in Rome, Father O’Riordan envisioned building a round church in which the altar would be the central spiritual and architectural focus. He studied this idea with architect Henry Taylor but it was decided to build St. Mary’s in an octagonal shape.”
Had Mr. Taylor placed in St. Petersburg a third brick, octagonal, Romanesque building (or tower), where would the myth and speculation be?