The building is still there. Two thousand and twenty-five Central Avenue, in the Grand Central District of St. Petersburg. What’s not there’s the sign, or the murals, both removed. Inside, as far as anybody outside the family knows, are thirty thousand square feet of nothing in particular.
That building is hard to write about in the past tense. The largest independent bookstore in Florida, open since the Depression, is now a blank wall on Central Avenue. The family owes nobody an explanation after eighty-seven years, and I don’t hold the silence against them, but I think this county lost something it hasn’t finished counting.
What was Haslam’s Book Store?
John and Mary Haslam started it in 1933. That’s the detail worth thinking about. The depths of the Great Depression, in a Florida that had already had its own land bust before the rest of the country caught up.
It began as a used book and magazine exchange, with Mary selling handcrafts alongside the magazines. That’s a pragmatic combination for a period when nobody had disposable income and everybody still wanted something to read.
That origin moves me. Two people opened a used magazine exchange in the worst economy of the century, betting that people with no money would still want something to read, and they were right for nearly ninety years.
Their son Charles and his wife Elizabeth joined after the Second World War. A third generation ran it after that. Over nine decades it grew to more than thirty thousand square feet of new and used books. That made it the largest independent bookstore in Florida. HuffPost once put it at number forty-one on a list of the country’s fifty best. It billed itself as Florida’s greatest rainy-day attraction, which in this state is a stronger claim than it sounds.
Visitors describe it the way people describe a library instead of a shop. Organised by subject, deep in every direction, Civil War through to Hollywood, and large enough that a person could arrive with a vague interest and leave four hours later with thirteen books.
Kerouac’s ghost
Jack Kerouac spent the last years of his life in St. Petersburg and died here, and he was a frequent visitor to Haslam’s.
The legend that grew out of that is the best bookstore ghost story in Florida. Staff and customers reported his titles turning up face-out on the shelf when nobody had moved them, and books occasionally leaving the shelves on their own. Whether anybody believed it’s beside the point. What the story records is a real thing: a working writer who lived a few minutes away and came in regularly, in a shop that stayed open long enough for that to pass into folklore. I’m fond of this legend and I don’t need it to be true. A town that turns its famous writer into a friendly ghost in a bookshop is telling you how much the shop meant to it, and that’s the part worth keeping. I’ve written about Kerouac’s last address, twenty minutes from my desk. That’s the other half of that story and considerably less charming. Tim Dorsey signed at Haslam’s in 2011, during the twenty-four years he spent touring Florida bookshops and libraries at about a hundred stops a year. That’s the sort of room it was: big enough for a national name, local enough that he kept coming back.
What ninety years in one family looks like
Three generations of one family ran this shop, and that’s rarer than the square footage.
John and Mary opened it in 1933. Charles and Elizabeth joined after the war.
That means they took over a business their parents had built through a Depression and carried it through the postwar boom and the arrival of the shopping mall. A third generation ran it after that, through the chains, then through the internet, then through the arrival of the e-reader.
Every one of those was supposed to be the thing that killed bookselling, and the shop was still there for all of them.
A family business surviving that long accumulates something that doesn’t appear on a balance sheet.
Staff who knew where everything was without a computer. Customers whose parents had shopped there. Stock that had been bought, sold, donated back and resold across decades. That’s how somebody’s grandmother’s Bible from California ends up on a shelf in Florida with her notes still in it.
That’s the thing that can’t be reconstituted. A new bookshop in the same building would be a new bookshop. Ninety years of accumulated coincidence isn’t inventory and can’t be restocked.
I feel that loss most. Somebody could open a new store in the same building with the same square footage and still never get back ninety years of books washing in and out through one family’s hands. That took three generations to build, and no amount of money puts it back.
Why did Haslam’s Book Store close?
It closed in March 2020 with everything else and didn’t reopen. There were notices at various points suggesting a reopening date. None of them happened. By August 2025 it had been closed for nearly two thousand days. The owners have stayed quiet about the future. That’s their right and which has left a five-year vacuum that speculation has filled. As of late 2025 the exterior murals had been painted over and the signage removed. The building itself remains standing and, in the assessment of people who follow commercial property in that district, would be attractive to a developer if it ever came up. Nobody outside the family knows what happens next, and it’s not reasonable to demand that they announce anything. A family business that ran for eighty-seven years doesn’t owe the public a press release about how it ended.
The man outside on Saturdays
Felipe Bergson, a St. Petersburg artist who goes by Fil, spends his Saturdays in front of the closed store.
He sells T-shirts and zines, and the money is meant to buy the building. By his own estimate he needs to sell around five hundred thousand of them.
He described the effort on a WUSF program in May 2026 and used the phrase hopelessly optimistic about it himself. That’s the correct assessment and doesn’t seem to have slowed him down.
The story he tells about why involves a Bible that ended up in the store from the other side of the country, with somebody’s name and notes in it. That’s the kind of thing that happens in a shop holding that many second-hand books for that long.
His point, which is a good one, is that a place accumulating that much history generates coincidences, and that the accumulation is what’s being lost. I’ve got a lot of affection for a man who calls his own plan hopelessly optimistic and then shows up every Saturday anyway. He’s keeping the place in people’s minds, and in a city changing as fast as St. Petersburg, that matters more to me than whether the shirts ever add up to a building. Whether the plan works isn’t the interesting part. What’s interesting is that five years after closing, somebody is still out there on the pavement every weekend.
What replaced it, and what did not
The Grand Central District didn’t lose its bookshop entirely. That’s worth saying because the neighborhood is now the most literary stretch in the city.
Tombolo Books is at 2153 1st Avenue South, a few streets from the Haslam’s building, and it’s now the literary anchor of that district. Fifteen hundred square feet holding roughly seven thousand chosen titles, more than a dozen book clubs, and an author calendar that brings in writers who tour nationally.
That’s a completely different proposition and the comparison is instructive. Haslam’s was thirty thousand square feet and you went to find something. Tombolo is fifteen hundred and you go to be handed something.
Neither model is the correct one. They’re answers to different questions, and the shift from one to the other is most of what happened to bookselling in the last thirty years.
I’m glad Tombolo is there, and it does what it sets out to do well. Still, something left this county when the big, messy general bookstore closed, and no tightly edited shop, however good, can give a reader the book they didn’t know to want.
For volume and price, the county still has The Book Rescuers in Largo, which is three miles of shelving at two dollars a paperback, and Wilson’s Book World a few minutes north with about fifty years behind it. Between them they hold a great deal of what a browser used to go to Haslam’s for.
What no longer exists anywhere in this region is one building where all of it is under the same roof.
What a thirty-thousand-square-foot bookshop was for
Serendipity, mostly, and it’s hard to replace.
A large general bookstore lets you walk into a subject you didn’t know you wanted. You come for one thing, take a wrong turn at the end of an aisle, and leave with a book about something you’d never considered. An algorithm can’t produce that because an algorithm only knows what you already liked.
A small chosen selection can’t produce it either, for the opposite reason. The selection is the value, and a selection is by definition the removal of the things somebody decided you didn’t need. For research the loss is sharper still. Reading into an unfamiliar subject requires buying wide and badly on purpose, and the only places that let you do that now are library sale shelves and the remaining used warehouses.
Across this series I keep making that argument about five-for-a-dollar shelves and two-dollar paperbacks. They’re doing, at small scale and by accident, the thing a thirty-thousand-square-foot general bookstore did deliberately.
The wider pattern, and why it is not simple
It would be easy to treat this as another bookshop closing and move on, and the data across this county doesn’t support that reading. This series counted forty-four bookstores and libraries within thirty miles of Clearwater. Several opened in the last two years. Bookends in Ybor City took four years and a trailer full of books to open. A new Barnes & Noble opened in Palm Harbor. Pages and Perks and The Story Garden are both recent.
So the picture is replacement by a different model.
The large general bookstore is what has gone, and it’s gone for reasons that have little to do with whether people read. Thirty thousand square feet of retail on a main avenue is an enormous fixed cost, and the thing it was uniquely good at, holding everything so that you could find anything, is the one function the internet does better on price and availability.
What angers me about the fate of stores like this is how little it had to do with readers. Thirty thousand square feet on a main avenue carries a brutal fixed cost, and the internet undercut the one thing a giant store did best on price alone.
What survived is everything the internet can’t do. A person who hands you a book. A room with an event in it. A shop with a premise. A children’s section with a librarian in it. A shelf of books at a quarter each that you can buy badly on purpose.
Haslam’s was the last of the old model in this county at that scale, and its closing is the clearest marker of where the line fell.
Why write about a shop that is shut
Because the count is wrong without it. This series covered every bookstore and library within thirty miles of Clearwater and came out at forty-four buildings, several of them opened in the last two years. The received story about books being finished doesn’t survive that count. But an honest account has to include what was lost, and what was lost here was the largest independent bookstore in the state, ninety per cent of the way to its hundredth year.
The other reason is that a closed bookshop is still part of a literary map. Kerouac’s house is still a house. The Haslam’s building is still a building. People still stand outside both.
And the family who opened it in 1933 were selling used magazines and handcrafts because that was what a Depression allowed. That’s not a bad origin story for anybody currently deciding whether the conditions are right to start something.
What to do with a closed landmark
Every region has one, and the useful question is what a writer does with it.
Record what people remember while they remember it. Anybody who worked there, shopped there regularly, or found something improbable on a shelf has a story, and those stories are currently held in individual heads with no repository. That’s the same argument I make about recording a parent or grandparent, applied to a building.
Photograph the exterior now. The murals have already gone. Signage removal is usually the step before something more permanent, and a photograph taken this year will be the record in ten.
Check what the archives already hold. The Burgert Brothers collection covers this region from roughly 1850 to 1963, which overlaps the shop’s first three decades, and the library that holds it also carries newspaper indexes covering the same span.
And resist the elegy. A building that ran for eighty-seven years and then stopped is a business story with a family in it, not a tragedy, and writing it as a lament produces something sentimental and inaccurate. The interesting version is the specific one: what it sold, who ran it, what it felt like inside, and what the numbers were.
If you go
There’s nothing to go in to. The store is permanently closed, the signage is gone, and the exterior is visible from the public sidewalk and nothing more.
What’s worth doing is walking the Grand Central District properly. The Haslam’s building at 2025 Central Avenue, then Tombolo a few streets over with Black Crow Coffee next door sharing its back patio, and the Warehouse Arts District beyond that.
It’s about twenty-five minutes from Clearwater down 1st Avenue South from I-275, and the district is walkable once you’re parked. For the rest of the city, where to write in St. Petersburg covers the working rooms, and the bookshops are in the wider series.
If you’re in St. Petersburg, walk past the building and then go spend money at the bookshops that are still open. Haslam’s lasted as long as it did because people kept coming through the door, and the district’s newer shops need that same stubborn habit from this generation of readers.
