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Florida's 10th Congressional District:
from National Journal's Almanac of American Politics

St. Petersburg was first settled in the 1870s, reached by railroad in 1888 and named for the then-Russian capital. For decades, it was known as the American city with the largest percentage of elderly residents, no doubt due to its 361 days of sunshine per year. In the early 1900s, St. Petersburg Times editor W. L. Straub sought to reverse the industrialization of the waterfront, establishing the parks and benches that continue to define the city's character. By the 1950s, St. Petersburg had become a national clich?, bringing to mind old folks trying to drum up a game of shuffleboard. Starting out on the grid streets facing Tampa Bay, St. Petersburg later spread toward the Gulf Coast as the migration of retirees accelerated. Mostly from the North and modestly affluent, the newcomers adapted easily to a city whose civic tone was set by the St. Petersburg Times and its longtime owners Nelson and Henrietta Poynter: Sober, good-humored, supportive of clean government and civil rights. More recently, retirees have come to prefer homes in less urbanized settings, and St. Petersburg has become a more conventional central city, with a larger working population, more families and minorities, and more office buildings and civic attractions--the Salvador Dali Museum, the Florida International Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts.

The 10th Congressional District is the only Florida district entirely within one county. It includes all of Pinellas County south of Clearwater except for south St. Petersburg, which is part of the Tampa-based 11th District. It also includes all the Pinellas County beach communities on the barrier islands facing the Gulf from Belleair Beach to Mullet Key and, north of Clearwater, includes Dunedin and Palm Harbor in the north to the new subdivisions of Largo in the center of the peninsula.