The building is still there. Two thousand and twenty-five Central Avenue, in the Grand Central District of St. Petersburg.
What is not there is 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.
It closed in March 2020, when everything closed. Everything else opened again.
What it was
John and Mary Haslam started it in 1933, which is the detail worth sitting with. 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, which is a pragmatic combination for a period when nobody had disposable income and everybody still wanted something to read.
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, which 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 is 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 have written about Kerouac’s last address, twenty minutes from my desk, which is 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 is 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 ran this shop, and that is the part of the story most worth understanding, because it is rarer than the square footage.
John and Mary opened it in 1933. Charles and Elizabeth joined after the war, which 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 does not 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, which is how somebody’s grandmother’s Bible from California ends up on a shelf in Florida with her notes still in it.
That is the thing that cannot be reconstituted. A new bookshop in the same building would be a new bookshop. Ninety years of accumulated coincidence is not inventory and cannot be restocked.
What happened
It closed in March 2020 with everything else and did not 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, which is 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.
The honest position is that nobody outside the family knows what happens next, and it is not reasonable to demand that they announce anything. A family business that ran for eighty-seven years does not 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 programme in May 2026 and used the phrase hopelessly optimistic about it himself, which is the correct assessment and does not 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, which is 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 the thing being lost, not the inventory.
Whether the plan works is not the interesting part. What is 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 did not lose its bookshop entirely, which is worth saying because the neighbourhood 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 is 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 is 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 are answers to different questions, and the shift from one to the other is most of what happened to bookselling in the last thirty years.
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 is genuinely hard to replace.
A large general bookstore lets you walk into a subject you did not 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 had never considered. An algorithm cannot produce that because an algorithm only knows what you already liked.
A small chosen selection cannot 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 did not 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.
That is the argument I keep making across this series about five-for-a-dollar shelves and two-dollar paperbacks. They are 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 file this under bookshops closing and move on, and the data across this county does not 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 not decline. It is replacement by a different model.
The large general bookstore is what has gone, and it has 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 genuinely does better on price and availability.
What survived is everything the internet cannot 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 does not 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 is 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 is 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 is 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 is 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 is about twenty-five minutes from Clearwater down 1st Avenue South from I-275, and the district is walkable once you are 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.
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