Current Time in St. Petersburg, United States

St. Petersburg occupies the Pinellas peninsula on the west coast of Florida, with Tampa Bay on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other. Around two hundred and sixty thousand people live in the city, part of the Tampa Bay metropolitan area, and its situation between water on three sides gives it a mild, breezy climate and an unusually long waterfront of parks, marinas and piers.

The city was founded in 1888 when a railway reached the peninsula. One of its developers, Peter Demens, was a Russian immigrant who named the settlement after his home city of Saint Petersburg, reportedly winning the right to do so on a coin toss with his partner, who consoled himself by naming the first hotel after Detroit. Both buildings and both names survive in the local story.

Sunshine became the city's business. St. Petersburg promoted itself relentlessly as a winter resort, and it holds a record for consecutive sunny days that gave it the nickname the Sunshine City. Aviation history was made here too: on New Year's Day in 1914 the world's first scheduled commercial airline flight carried a paying passenger across the bay to Tampa in a small flying boat, an event commemorated on the waterfront.

Culture has since become the city's calling card. The Dali Museum holds the largest collection of Salvador Dali's work outside Europe, housed in a concrete building pierced by a bulging free-form glass structure, and it is complemented by the Chihuly Collection of blown glass, the Museum of Fine Arts and the James Museum of western and wildlife art. Downtown streets are covered with hundreds of large murals, celebrated each autumn at a mural festival, and the Central Avenue corridor is lined with galleries, independent shops, coffee roasters and one of the densest concentrations of craft breweries in the United States.

The waterfront is the city's greatest asset. A new pier, opened in 2020, extends into the bay with a marketplace, playgrounds, a fishing deck and an art installation, and a chain of parks runs along the shore. Sunken Gardens preserves a century-old tropical garden in the middle of the city, Fort De Soto Park offers some of the finest beaches in Florida, and the resort communities of St. Pete Beach and Pass-a-Grille lie a short drive west across the intracoastal waterway.

The Tampa Bay Rays play Major League Baseball at Tropicana Field, and an IndyCar street race runs through downtown each spring. Marine science is a serious local industry, with university, federal and independent laboratories clustered near the port.

Interstate highways, the soaring Sunshine Skyway Bridge across the mouth of Tampa Bay, two airports and a rapid transit bus line connect the city. Campuses of the University of South Florida, Eckerd College and a large community college serve students.

Sunny, artistic and thoroughly coastal, St. Petersburg is one of Florida's most appealing cities.