Columbia Restaurant

 

Columbia Restaurant in Tampa opened in 1905.  It is the oldest and biggest Spanish restaurant in the United States.  It was originally a cafe for the cigar makers in the Ybor City neighborhood of Tampa. 

It wouldn't be a trip to Tampa without visiting Columbia for a meal. 

The front of the restaurant has gorgeous tile panels.

I booked too late for a table in the room with flamenco dancers, but after the meal we stood along the back wall and watched for a bit.

Cesar Gonzmart was a classically trained violinist.  He married the daughter of Columbia's founder and was persuaded to give up his touring musical career and work at Columbia.  He eventually became general manager, then chairman, and expanded the restaurant group considerably.  While GM, Gonzmart strolled the restaurant and entertained guests with his violin.

Downtown Tampa

 The Plant museum and Tampa Art museum are both in Tampa's downtown Riverwalk area.  While I was there, I kept looking up at the interesting contemporary architecture of the nearby office buildings. 

 The cylindrical South State building is the star of the neighborhood.

Tampa Museum of Art

 The Tampa Museum of Art is in a riverfront park in downtown Tampa.  

It has a somewhat eclectic collection.  

An entry hall had big panels with colorful "X" patterns on each of four walls.  They are by an American artist, Vaughn Spann.  Frankly, I didn't understand a word of Spann's explanation.

The museum has several rooms with Greek, Roman and Etruscan antiquities.  This sculpture is from the first century A.D. and is thought to be based on an earlier work from the third century B.C.

A deceased Tampa photographer and collector, David Hall, has a room displaying 40 photographs from his collection.  This is a photograph Hall made.  The subjects are identical twins from the Midwest who lived in San Francisco.  Every day they dressed identically and went out to talk with passersby.

This superb 1948 image of Georgia O'Keefe is by Philippe Halsman, from a project for Life magazine.

This is a photograph of Nico, the lead singer of the Velvet Underground by the photographer Lisa Law.

Cuban artist Esterio Segura explains why he attached airplane wings to an old Chrysler better than I can.

A gallery showed walls of paintings by self-taught artist Purvis Young, who displayed them from the ground to the rooftops of abandoned storefronts in his impoverished Miami neighborhood. 

 

Doesn't the woman studying the Purvis Young works make you think of Waldo?

Henry B. Plant Museum

Henry B. Plant became a successful and wealthy railroad magnate in the second half of the 19th century.  He arrived in Tampa when it had 760 residents.  With a rail terminus and a deep port developed by Plant, Tampa grew to a bustling city of 15,000 people within ten years. 

Plant decided Tampa should have a hotel.  He had traveled extensively and acquired rail carloads of stylish furnishings in European auctions.  His architect persuaded Plant to build a Moorish-styled hotel with minarets.  The 511-room resort hotel called the Tampa Bay Hotel was opened in 1891.

The hotel was a hit with wealthy visitors.  At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, it was the U.S. military's base of operations.  Theodore Roosevelt had a suite at the hotel.

The financial strains of the Depression put an end to luxury tourism and the hotel closed.  A junior college was given the right to use one end of the building.  Today it is the University of Tampa.  College offices and classrooms still use one end, while a museum is at the other end. 

The Henry B. Plant Museum displays a pretty random assortment of Victorian items that had been in use in the hotel's heyday.  We were there at the start of the Christmas season.  All of the museum rooms were extensively decorated.

John Philip Souza often stayed at the hotel.  The stairwell to his suite is colorfully decorated with nutcrackers and garlands.

Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience -- II

 We enter a big hall with projection on all four walls.  I will show scenes without trying to explain each one.  There were irises, starry night scenes, sunflowers, virtual sliding panels introducing images, rolling waves, Japanese-influenced scenes, etc. etc.

Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience -- I

I stayed in Tampa after the game.  The next morning I visited a Tampa Van Gogh immersive exhibition.  I had never been to one of these before.  It was very cool.

It is in a very big, factory-sized building.

In the entry area, we see huge wall-sized painting in the style of Van Gogh's "Starry Night," accentuated with three dimensional sunflowers.

One of the first things we encounter after a 15-minute introductory video is an eight foot high bust of Van Gogh's head, lit by a series of lights that continuously change his look.

The first couple of rooms are educational.  They show images of many well known Van Gogh works, organized by theme.

Van Gogh painted many self-portraits.  This wall showed some of them on a loop. 

A room had three-dimensional sunflowers on all sides.

More tomorrow . . .