What happens in Tampa

What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas. What happens in Tampa may just end up in our museum’s permanent collection.

I moved here nine months ago to lead the Tampa Bay History Center. And I can attest to the fact that Tampa has been keeping receipts for millennia; in fact, we have 100,000 artifacts in our collection to prove it.

Tampa is decidedly not a city of amnesia. Rather, it is a city of bright, kaleidoscopic memory.

I’ve called a number of cities home–Paris, London, Chicago, Austin. Fashioning a home out of a city is a process. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes the work is never done. But always, it is a two-sided affair: a city welcomes (or rejects) and the newcomer nestles in and gets to know their new home.

We read about it. Walk its streets. Join organizations. We take its current pulse. But if a city is lucky enough to have a history museum, there is no better way to peel back a place’s layers, to get at the heart of the matter.

In Tampa’s case, the story is particularly layered and particularly complex. The Tocobaga and the Calusa were here millennia before the Spanish arrived, before the Cuban cigar makers built Ybor City with their hands and their culture, before the fortune-seekers and the settlers and the people, like me, who moved here for a job and created a home.

To get one’s imagination around the sheer breadth and depth of these stories, you need time and curiosity. And having a museum to visit that is dedicated to telling such stories certainly helps.

I can tell you that nine months in and countless museum strolls later, Tampa is one of the easiest places to call home, even as I’m still learning about its multilayered history and multifaceted character.

In my time here, I’ve met throngs of people whose families have been here for generations and many newcomers like myself. We all seem to struggle to articulate a defining “essence” of Tampa. When I try to describe it to people who have never been, I get tongue-tied. But, with the brazen innocence of the newly arrived, I keep trying: it appears to be somewhere in the raucous confluence of humility and scrappiness and pride; of playfulness and industry; of bright light and fortitude-requiring humidity; of stiffly flapping sails and lapping green waters; of neighborliness and palpable joy. It’s in the nooks and crannies of the long, collective memory here.

So, if Vegas is the city that forgets, conveniently, Tampa is the city that remembers, epically.

I’m happy to be in an ongoing quest to define its mysterious qualities, which beckon so many of us newcomers. To be in the neverending inquiry into its thousands of years of human history. And to call it home.