What makes St. Petersburg special? St. Pete is a Gulf Coast city of roughly 263,000 on a peninsula between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of America. Downtown is compact and walkable, anchored by a waterfront park system (North Shore, Vinoy, Straub, and the new St. Pete Pier) that stretches almost uninterrupted for seven miles. What surprises most transplants is how the density has grown: new condo towers went up along Central Avenue without swallowing the bungalow neighborhoods around them, so the city still reads as a collection of distinct places rather than one block of new construction....