Anyone who has had the great honor to grow up or live in the Interbay Peninsula of Tampa (not "Sun Bay South") has probably heard of or visited Picnic Island Park. Situated on the very southwest end of the Interbay Peninsula, adjacent to Port Tampa, this City of Tampa Park has gone through incredible changes over the years, particularly since the Christmas Day Freeze of 1983. This story is an up-close and personal chronicle on the modern history that this favorite haunt of mine has seen over the years.

Old History
Adjacent to railroad magnate Henry B. Plant's Port Tampa Hotel, Picnic Island was a favorite spot for Sunday picnics and beach going well over a century ago. From this location, picnickers could see the Navy battleships leave from the Port Tampa Hotel as Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders launched the Spanish-American War.

By the 1940's an Army Air Base was carved out of the rattlesnake infested pines and palmettos located just east of the picnic and beach site. Soon, bombers would fly overhead belying the Second World War. Still active today, and now called Mac Dill Air Force Base, this Base now houses a tanker wing of KC-135-R's and is the nerve center of the Department of Defense's Central Command ("Cent Com") for that sun and fun capital of the world, the Middle East.

By the 1950's and 1960's heavy industry moved in as gasoline storage complexes (or "gas farms"), boating industries, reinforced concrete manufacturers and a gypsum board plant surrounded what would be modern day Picnic Island Park. Throughout much of this era, the park as we know it today was unintentionally being built as soil entails from the gypsum board plant, known as Quartzipsaments, were being deposited in former shallow flats and mangrove marshes, creating the land mass that would become the city park. Once Port Tampa City was annexed into the City of Tampa (a horror story on its own merit), the City decided to use the land for recreational purposes as very little of the original Picnic Island was left due to post War industrialization.

Once the adjacent gypsum board plant finally configured the man-made landmass of Quartzipsaments, non-native Australian Pines began to populate the majority of site, forming an almost impenetrable forest. This forest would become an exclamation point in the south Tampa landscape, particularly as viewed from the Gandy Bridge.

The 1970's
Regrettably, as recreational drugs became more popular with the youth culture of the 1970's, Picnic Island Park with its thick forest of Australian Pines garnered the reputation of being a dopers paradise. This was truly Party Beach at its worst. Many a drunken revelry and crazed orgy occurred in the shelter of the towering Australian Pines. Beer cans, litter and unmentionables cluttered up the Park's grounds. There were no paved roads or parking, just dusty roads carved through the forests-forests painted chalky white due to the high limestone content of the Quartzipsaments. Parking was where you found it, or created it. On occasion you would see amphibious craft using the Park for training operations from the Marine Corps auxiliary out on Gandy Boulevard.

Time For Action
By the mid 1970's, faced with being awarded an NFL football franchise, and also facing the prospect of being a big league city with an image to worry about, City officials pushed to get Picnic Island Park cleaned up. By 1978 and 1979 a paved entry road was finally added. A fishing pier with a paved parking lot was built at the park's northwest corner and dedicated by former City of Tampa Mayor in 1979. But the most major change to this Park would not be due to a set of construction plans and an accompanying bulldozer-no, the most major change to this Park would come through a left handed Christmas Day gift for City officials in the form of a catastrophic freeze.

The Christmas Day Freeze of 1983
December 24, 1983 started out as a sunny, pleasant day with a high of around 83 degrees predicted. The fall of 1983 had been unseasonable warm, so nothing could have prepared the plants or even the people for what was about to happen later that day. As Christmas Eve lingered on, strong winds out of the north were building momentum during the mid afternoon. By evening the winds were almost hurricane force, and by nighttime, the mercury started to plummet. The severity of this event was not even foreseen by many weather forecasters. This would become a non-stop blast of hyper cold Canadian air nicknamed "the Arctic Express".

	The first major reforesting effort at Picnic Island Park after the devastating effects of the Christmas Day freeze of 1983 was through the planting of these Slash Pines by volunteers from Plant High school's S.T.R.I.V.E. organization in December 1984.

By Christmas morning the temperature had nose-dived to anywhere from 18 degrees to 24 degrees Fahrenheit. The high would not push above 34 degrees in most of Tampa for the next day and a half. Birdbaths and kiddy pools in the Tampa area were frozen for close to two days. This was a cataclysmic freeze, the type of which had not been seen in close to a century. This would become one of the most significant and damaging freezes in Florida history. It would push the citrus belt from Daytona Beach and Tampa southward to Lake Okeechobee and Homestead. Millions of acres of citrus trees dead, and almost all of the tropical plants in Tampa were either killed outright or irreparably damaged. For close to two years the Bay area looked like someone had set many of its plants on fire due to the extensive freeze damage. Much of the City of Tampa's efforts to beautify its first Super Bowl (XVIII) turned to mush in a matter of hours that fateful day. Picnic Island Park would end up in many ways being Ground Target Zero in this climatic cataclysm.

The Aftermath
100% of the Australian Pines that covered 90% of the landmass that comprises Picnic Island Park were determined to be as dead as post. In a sense this was a vegetative catastrophe. The death at the Park was so pervasive and all-inclusive, that the City was overwhelmed by the gravity of it all. By April 1984, as spring drought began to grab hold, a sense of urgency in removing the dead trees became a top priority as the hazard for a major fire, particularly so close to the gas farms, became a major concern. Action had to be taken, and quickly.

By the summer of 1984, an incredible machine capable of ripping the massive trees out by their roots and then grinding them into mulch was used to remove the dead trees. Suddenly the Park that for so many years was identified by the sheltering of its massive Australian Pines was reduced to a barren ground plane that literally resembled the Moon's surface. All that was left of the Australian Pine forest were massive mulch piles each 20 to 30 tall. The piles were then spread over the barren terrain to be used as mulch for a new generation of cold hardy native trees that would become the starting point of the Park's rebirth.

	After the addition of cold hardy Slash Pines, Live Oaks and Southern Red Cedars, the City's next step in rehabilitating the devastated Park was through the addition of formal clusters of Cabbage Palms along the western shoreline in August 1985. In less then a month after their installation, Hurricane Elena took several of the plantings out to sea.

The Healing Begins
To move along the healing process of a scarred and barren land, the reforesting of Picnic Island Park started out with the planting of 3-gallon Slash Pines donated by the Tampa Reforestation and Environmental Effort, Inc (T.R.E.E.). The pines, which now average 15 to 20 feet in height and flank the western side of the entrance road in the Park's central area, were planted by Plant High School's S.T.R.I.V.E. organization in December 1984 under the leadership of former City of Tampa Parks Department Landscape Architect J. Michael Callahan.

Other Slash Pines donated to the City of Tampa by T.R.E.E., as well as field grown Southern Red Cedars and containerized Live Oaks were planted along the northern 2/3rds of the Park's western half by Boy Scouts under the guidance of City of Tampa Parks Department urban Forestry Coordinator Steve Graham from April to August 1985. Over the years many of the Slash Pines have declined due to the excessively high pH of the site, while the Red Cedars have demonstrated vigorous growth and high survival.

It's A Matter of Formality
By the summer of 1985, with a totally blank palette to work with, former City of Tampa Parks Department Landscape Architect J. Michael Callahan designed formal clusters of Cabbage Palms running the entire length of Park's western shoreline. In addition he specified that balled and burlapped Live Oaks be used to shade the two newly constructed parking lots that complimented newly constructed picnic shelters to the west and to the south.

The Cabbage Palms were installed in August 1985. Just as the Park was beginning to recover from the devastating freeze of just a year and a half earlier, Hurricane Elena came along around Labor Day and washed several of the newly installed palms out into Old Tampa Bay-those palms were never seen again. By September 1986, T.R.E.E. Founding Member and Vice President Bob Scheible had landed the Horticulturist position with the City of Tampa Parks Department and oversaw the planting of the Live Oaks flanking the parking lots. This would culminate the last major planting initiative at the Park during the 1980's.

Next week we will explore yet more changes to Picnic island Park throughout the 1990's to the present. Right here in Nolan Canova's Pop Culture Review!