Face-Lift and Frustration at Mirror Lake

If the setting is drab, the tenants are anything but. Bone-white paint chips flaking off the walls connote age, and tenacious weeds pushing up between the shuffleboard courts reflect disuse. But the sweaty ballet dancers, the crowded chess players and the surviving shuffleboard connoisseurs are waiting for a collective face-lift.

The Mirror Lake Recreation Center, on Fifth Street North and Third Avenue, is a historical landmark, and it’s slated for refurbishments.

“Right now, we’re just kind of in a holding pattern,” said Jay Morgan, manager of St. Petersburg's Office on Aging.

The complex’s tenants are frustrated by the glacial rate of upgrades, but change is afoot at Mirror Lake, where shuffleboard, lawn bowling and chess have been St. Petersburg institutions since the early 20th century. Aside from roof work last year, the center is slated for the most dramatic changes in its 79-year-long history. The city intends to modernize all of the pasty-white missionary revival-style buildings and find new uses to attract more -- and younger -- community members to the center.

But the upheaval will be slow.

The quaint reliquary of uncared-for edifices, which also house the Shuffleboard Hall of Fame, a ballet society and a cultural organization, is in serious need of repair. The renovations will include structural reinforcements, air conditioning, and electrical and plumbing improvements.

“First, we need to go in there and stabilize the structures so there’s no further deterioration,” said City Councilwoman Virginia Littrell, who considers Mirror Lake her pet project.

It won’t be cheap. The changes will come from a $1 million pot the city has designated for work at Mirror Lake. But that money -- from a $200,000 state historical grant, the city’s matching funds and dividends from the city’s sale of property at Weeki Wachee springs -- won’t be nearly enough in the long-term.

Because after the repairs, according to Littrell, comes the “master plan.”

“We have the potential to make that complex intergenerational,” she said. The center’s property is dominated by 65 mostly unused shuffleboard courts, which have become the domain of just a few retirees.

Mary Eldridge, president of the Shuffleboard Association since 1998, is reconciled to converting her vast space to Littrell’s “alternative uses,” which have not yet been determined.

“We have to be logical and reasonable,” said Eldridge, “so if we don’t need [the courts], we can commit them to better use. We can’t live in what was. We have to look at what is and what might be.”

What might be is anybody’s guess.

In the annals of municipal government, it will require a drawn-out process. Littrell said that after the initial repairs, the City Council intends to launch a blue-ribbon commission to solicit feedback on how St. Petersburg should use the site. Then an architect will draw up plans. Those plan must run the gantlet of committees, including the Historic Preservation Commission, whose members are appointed by the mayor, and the City Hall Department of Historic Design and Urban Preservation. Even if the politicians and bureaucrats reach consensus at every turn, it’s not a short process.

“It might be a while, you never know,” Eldridge said. And if it is, she continued, “they’ll have to continually do Band-Aid repairs just to keep it from being a total eyesore.”

Rick Smith, a planner with the City Hall preservation office, said that he did not anticipate a lot of holdups on his end. He said that approving the designs, once they are formulated, is less complicated than people think.

“One of the misconceptions about historic preservations is that you have to freeze everything in time,” he said, noting that his office was amenable to change. “We realize that we need to adapt to changes while maintaining the historical character of a site.”

That means the bulk of work will be in soliciting and drawing up ideas for the facility. Despite the hurdles, Littrell is optimistic. “Well, it’ll be at least six months for the master plan,” she conceded. The larger challenge will be finding money to overhaul the site, and planners won’t have a price for the transformation until they hear what community members want.

One possibility, she said, would be a onetime tax -- based on the property tax -- approved by referendum, like the one voters approved for the redevelopment of Sunken Gardens.

Complexity and duration can certainly explain the “holding pattern” frustration Scherman and others expressed. But the City Council members believe informed deliberation will justify their patience.

The original version of this story contained an error and was corrected on 7/8/2003. The error has been noted here.