The History of Tampa Bay Center: Memories of the Landmark Tampa Mall

Old malls never die, they just shut their doors. While Tampa, Florida, has seen a number of malls rise and fall over the decades, Tampa Bay Center seems to have maintained quite a following, years after its closure, among nostalgic folks.

Tampa Bay Center was a two-story indoor shopping mall that opened in 1976, right across the street from Tampa Stadium. Tampa Stadium was the old home of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers professional football franchise. The connection of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Tampa Bay Center is significant, both in symbolic and physical respects. Read on to find out more about the mall and its important Buccaneers connections.

About the Mall

When the 877,000-square-foot Tampa Bay Center opened in 1976, it became Tampa's fourth major indoor mall, following South Tampa's Westshore Mall in 1967, North Tampa's Floriland Mall in 1972, and University Mall in 1974 --- located only blocks from the University of South Florida in North Tampa. Tampa Bay Center was located at the southeast corner of North Himes Avenue and West Buffalo Avenue (in 1989, Buffalo Avenue was renamed Martin Luther King, Jr., Boulevard).

Tampa Bay Center stood out from the other Tampa malls in a number of ways. It was one of the few two-story malls in the Tampa area, and unlike the other malls at the time, its main corridor was splashed in sunlight. A large portion of the roof was actually constructed with skylights; a bright and sunny day outdoors meant a bright and sunny day indoors---an inviting feature at a time when many malls were being built with dropped ceilings and finished with darker colors.

The mall featured exposed, light-colored truss ceilings over the main corridor, tan-brown floor tiles, floor-based water fountains, and trees (ficus?) intermittently planted on the bottom floor of the main corridor, growing upwards toward the skylights. The open-and-airy interior was further augmented by what was one of the mall's most important trademarks: a "glass" elevator located in the center of the mall.