Joe Marzo

By Joe Marzo Tucked along the eastern shore of Lake Tarpon in northern Pinellas County, the community known today as East Lake was — for most of its existence — a stretch of open Florida frontier, where cattle outnumbered people and the loudest sound was the bellow of a Brahman bull. Its transformation from one of the largest cattle ranches in Pinellas County into a network of golf-course subdivisions is one of the more dramatic land-use shifts in the modern history of Tampa Bay, and one that...

A 23-Minute Hop Across Tampa Bay That Changed the World By Joe Marzo On the bright, cool morning of January 1, 1914, a crowd estimated at somewhere between two and three thousand people pressed against the railings of the wooden municipal pier in downtown St. Petersburg, Florida. They had come for a New Year's Day spectacle — a band concert, an auction, and, just after ten o'clock, the takeoff of a strange wooden contraption that one local newspaper had described as "a motor boat with wings...

By TBLP Staff For half a century, a small Gulf Coast city in Florida has been the unlikely setting for one of the strangest stories in modern American religion, real estate, and local politics. Clearwater, population roughly 117,000, known for its sugar white beaches and aging downtown, is the de facto spiritual capital of the Church of Scientology. The church calls it the "Flag Land Base." Internal documents seized by the FBI called the campaign to capture it "Project Normandy." Locals, for...