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Shuffleboard Club is significant for its association with the
development of the tourist and leisure industries in St.
Petersburg during the 1920s. The St. Petersburg Shuffleboard Club
was the first organized club of its kind. It had thousands of
members and served the recreational needs of St. Petersburg's
wintering tourists. Several tournaments were held on the grounds,
including the first state tournament in 1928. In addition, the
members organized a Festival of States Tournament and participated
in the Festival of States Parade. The club is located in the
Mirror Lake area which at the turn of the century was known as
Reservoir Lake and served as the source of the town’s drinking
water. In 1910, much of the area around the lake was dedicated to
"the public forever for the purposes of parks and roadways
(City Ordinance #242, 1910)." Around the lake remain some of
the most important relics of architecture in the city including
the Lawn Bowling Club, Coliseum, City Hall, Mirror Lake High
School, and the Carnegie Mirror Lake Library.
The Shuffleboard Club is an
assemblage of sixty-five masonry courts, four masonry buildings, a
steel and concrete grandstand, freestanding frame and metal
porches and hexagon block patios and walkways. The original
shuffleboard courts were built on this parkland property in 1923
with Clubhouse construction beginning four years later in 1927.
The structure, designed by Harry Cunningham of Goodhue and
Associates originally was a small rectangular building with a
steeply pitched roof. A second building was built in 1929 and has
similar architectural details of the original building. Over the
years the building complex was enlarged to include the bridge
club/dance hall in 1937 and the grandstands in 1939 as well as
major additions to the 1927 and 1929 buildings.
The game of shuffleboard,
originally known as "shovel board," can trace its
origins from the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. The modern day
game of shuffleboard became popular as a deck game on shipboard.
The first modern shuffleboard courts constructed on land were
built in Daytona, Florida in 1913. In 1922, W.N. Britton of
Rochester, New York, who had played in Daytona, recommended city
officials build courts to attract and entertain tourist. He
originally offered to finance and build a court in William’s
Park which was the sports center for St. Petersburg because lawn
bowling, cards, horseshoes and dominos were played there. However,
the heirs of J.C. Williams, believing that no one should be
excluded from enjoying the park, obtained a court injunction
restraining the City from allowing any club to have exclusive
rights over the park.
Plans for shuffleboard courts were
revisited when, P.T. Ives of Meridien, Connecticut came to St.
Petersburg in winter 1923. He urged the City of St. Petersburg to
build two courts in Mirror Lake Park which it did in mid-1923
making it, along with Daytona, the only other city in the United
States to play shuffleboard on land.
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