Two brothers opened a photography studio in Tampa around 1917 and spent the next four decades photographing everything. Street scenes, businesses, churches, houses, port work, Gasparilla, the Florida State Fair, Ybor City, Port Tampa, Temple Terrace, Ballast Point. People at the beach. People playing shuffleboard. A city turning into a city, one commercial commission at a time. In 1974 the library bought the entire collection. More than twenty thousand of those photographs now sit in a climate-controlled vault on the fourth floor of a building on North Ashley Drive, and you can go and look at them.
That last clause is the one that moves me. Twenty thousand pictures of a city that has mostly vanished, and anybody can walk in and ask to see them. Most people who live in this region have no idea the collection exists, and that’s a damn shame.
What is the John F. Germany Public Library?
The flagship of the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System, at 900 North Ashley Drive in downtown Tampa. The system phone is 813-273-3652. Seventy-nine Google reviews at four point four.
One hundred and forty thousand square feet across four floors, built in 1968 with an addition in 1976. It’s the central reference and resource center for the entire county as well as a local branch for downtown. One reviewer put the whole building in ten words: four floors of reference, resources, and Tampa history. Alongside the research floors there’s a creative space called The HIVE, a children’s play area, and a Realia Collection of more than four hundred and seventy models, tools and learning aids available to check out.
What is on the fourth floor of the John F. Germany Library?
This is the reason to make the trip and it deserves its own treatment.
The Florida History and Genealogy Library occupies the fourth floor, and its genealogy collection is one of the largest in the southeastern United States. The geographic emphasis runs to Florida, the wider southeast, the original thirteen colonies, and every state bordering the Mississippi.
Print, microform and electronic resources. Extensive federal census and Soundex holdings. Magazines and journals. Government documents going back to 1967.
Two indexes sit alongside it, and they’re a gift to anybody doing local research. The Tampa Bay History Publications Index covers articles on Florida and Tampa Bay history from 1925 to 1999. The Tampa Bay Obituary Index covers newspapers from 1855 to 1990. The library also takes obituary research requests.
And the detail that matters most: the genealogy collection is open to the general public during regular hours with no library card required. Materials are in-library use only. They don’t circulate and they can’t be borrowed through interlibrary loan, so plan to work there instead of taking anything home.
Staff are on the floor to help. For anybody who has stalled on a family history problem, that’s the free expertise nobody realizes they’re entitled to.
No card and no fee, with a trained person on the floor to help you. I find that close to moving. Companies that charge families every month to look up their own grandparents have turned genealogy into a subscription business, and this public floor does the same work for nothing.
The Burgert Brothers archive
Al and Jean Burgert founded their commercial studio in Tampa around 1917 and worked into the 1960s.
The collection the library bought in 1974 runs from roughly 1850 to 1963, more than twenty thousand black and white images, of which over fifteen thousand have been developed, digitized and indexed on the library’s own site. Thousands of negatives remain unprinted. There are also four hundred and thirty-nine Cirkut panoramic prints. Those are ten inches high and vary enormously in length, some reaching nearly five feet. A five-foot photograph of Tampa from the 1920s isn’t something you experience properly on a screen. A phone screen wastes it.
For anybody writing about this region in any period between the Civil War and the Kennedy administration, this is the complete visual record.
This is the part I most want every historical novelist in the region to hear. You don’t have to invent what a Tampa street looked like in the 1920s and hope nobody checks. The evidence exists and somebody has already catalogued it.
The University of South Florida holds a digital collection of Burgert images too, with several hundred available online. That’s the place to start before making the trip.
What a writer should do with it
Go on a weekday and go to the fourth floor.
Everything else in this series of forty-four buildings is about reading, browsing, borrowing or working. This one is about research, and it’s the only building within thirty miles of Clearwater where the deep regional material really lives. If you’re writing a family history, the genealogy collection is the best in the southeast and it costs nothing and requires no card. For anything you’re writing set in Tampa Bay, the Burgert photographs will tell you what a street looked like, what people wore, what the signage said and what the light did. I’ve written about Ybor City as the densest square mile of material in this region, and this is where a large part of the evidence for that sits.
The obituary index covers 1855 to 1990 for anyone writing about somebody who lived here, and the staff will take a research request.
The readers who catch writers faking period detail are exactly the ones those writers most want to please, the ones who grew up here or whose parents did. An afternoon on the fourth floor is a small price against handing those readers a reason to close the book.
Practical notes
Downtown Tampa parking is the real difficulty and reviewers say so. Plan for a garage and a walk instead of hoping for a space outside. Downtown parking is a nuisance, and I’d still tell anyone to put up with it. A garage and a short walk are nothing against a vault full of evidence no search engine will ever hand you.
The building is served well by bus, with stops at Tampa Street and Zack Street and at Tyler Street and Franklin Street on several routes. That’s a practical alternative given the parking.
It’s a big-city central library and it reads as one.
It’s institutional in scale and not cosy, it serves everybody who comes through the door including people in difficulty, and it’s security on site. If you want a warm neighborhood room, Gulfport or North Greenwood are the buildings for that. If you want the fourth floor, nothing else will do.
When is the John F. Germany Public Library open?
Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday from ten in the morning until nine at night. Thursday, Friday and Saturday ten until six. Closed Sunday.
Three late nights. North Ashley Drive is in downtown Tampa near the river.
From Clearwater, around thirty minutes across the causeway or over the Howard Frankland, traffic permitting. It pairs with Oxford Exchange a short distance away on Kennedy Boulevard, which opens at half past seven and closes at half past five, so library in the afternoon and bookshop earlier in the day.
Forty-four buildings
With this entry, a series covering every bookstore and every library within thirty miles of Clearwater ends, and the count came out at forty-four.
A warehouse in Largo with three miles of shelving, started in a driveway.
A booth in a flea market run alone for decades. A bookshop named after a James Baldwin essay, planned in a classroom. An 1891 stable that serves afternoon tea. A bungalow in Ybor that took four years and a trailer to open.
Then the libraries. A town that taxed itself into one instead of becoming a city. A 1915 Carnegie building on Mirror Lake. A branch that lends torque wrenches, another that lends metal detectors, another that lends seeds for native plants. A library with a museum in it.
A library with a fenced playground in the parking lot. A library open ten hours a week on an island with no parking, that sixteen people went out of their way to praise.
And this one, holding twenty thousand photographs of a city that no longer looks like that, in a vault on the fourth floor, free to anybody who walks in.
The received story is that books are in trouble. Forty-four buildings inside a thirty-mile radius, several of them opened in the last two years, says otherwise. (See also the two research libraries inside the Tampa Bay History Center)
Of the forty-four, this is the building I’d defend hardest. When people talk about trimming library budgets they picture shelves of paperbacks, and they never picture a climate-controlled vault holding the only surviving image of somebody’s grandfather’s shop. Anyone who wants to cut a library like this one ought to climb to the fourth floor and look first, and then try to justify it.
