I’ve been asked about it a thousand times. “What’s the story of that building on the southwest corner of Central Avenue and Third Street?” Well, it didn’t reveal its secrets easily but after some digging, I’ve learned its history.

Despite an appearance that might lead you to believe it was built in the 1960s, the building was constructed in 1925 by a man named J. Bruce Smith, who’d owned a clothing store in that location for several years prior. As St. Pete boomed in the 1920s, Smith hired architect M. Leo Elliott to design a large building that could hold his clothing store on the ground floor and offices above.  Elliott was a prominent architect in the region, later designing the Union Trust Bank at 830 Central Avenue, as well as the Snell Arcade with his partner Richard Kiehnel, and many significant buildings in Tampa and Sarasota. 

From the busy corner to St. Pete’s “White Elephant”

The building looked radically different back then, made up of brick and steel, with a Neoclassical style. It was only seven stories tall, with a large open first floor meant for a store, a mezzanine level, and five floors of offices; 75 units of office space in total.  

J. Bruce Smith optimistically dubbed the corner of Central Avenue and Third Street “the busy corner.” But the Great Depression hit hard, and the building struggled to keep tenants. The St. Petersburg Times even referred to it as downtown’s “White Elephant”. In 1933, the building’s name was changed to the Empire Building, probably as an aspirational nod to the Empire State Building in NYC, which had opened two years earlier. 

World War II breathed new life into the Empire Building, with the Army Air Forces Training Center using it for administrative offices. It was there that representatives from every hotel and boarding house in the city registered their establishment’s name and number of beds available for soldiers coming to St. Pete to train. (Ultimately every hotel in the city except the Suwannee ended up being used by military trainees, a complicated shell game that was managed at the Empire Building.) 

An adaptive building for more than 100 years

Following the war, the building changed hands several times and then, in the mid-1960s, was converted into an apartment building called the Coronet 300. The exterior of the building was radically altered. Long horizontal “bands of aluminum grill” went in between “new window installations,” significantly reducing the number of windows in the building. Three additional floors were added, topped off by a rooftop garden.

The new apartment building was thoroughly modern, with club facilities, laundry room, and rents ranging from $154 to $189 in 1967. Each unit boasted air-conditioning, carpeting, and telephone outlets in the living room and bedroom. Security was paramount; only tenants had keys to operate the secured elevator, with one exception: a bonded milkman. The building operated as apartments for several decades, rarely making news (except for the time in 1996 when an 81-foot blimp broke its tether at Albert Whitted Airport, made its way through town and crashed into the side of the ten-story building!)

The building was purchased in 2017 by investor Steve Gianfilippo who planned to turn the apartments into a live-work concept, but progress on that project has stalled.  The future of the building at 300 Central Avenue may be uncertain, but it has adapted many times over the past 100 years. I wouldn’t count it out just yet!