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Downtown Clearwater

Around 25 years ago, the city of Biddeford, Maine decided to try to bring some attention to its old downtown area.

Biddeford was an old mill town, and its brick mill buildings no longer housed the textile companies and other businesses that had depended on the water power that was provided by the adjacant river. In its heyday, enough money flowed through Biddeford to pay for a pretty nice downtown commercial area, with brick office and retail buildings as well as attractive municipal buildings.

Those buildings had once featured very nice architectural details, but many of them had been covered up or removed as the buildings had gone through a series of renovations.

The old Peninsular Telephone Co. building in Clearwater

But those renovations seldom extended up to the upper floors and the rooflines. If you looked up there, you could see some very fancy and attractive brick designs, windows and eaves. The city wanted to draw attention to those high-up fancy old touches and details rather than the decidely unattractive street-level renovations.

So they came up with this slogan: “Look Up, Biddeford!” They used that slogan on the cover of brochures and posters that featured details of Biddeford’s best top-story architectural work.

All of which is a long way of getting around to an old brick building in downtown Clearwater that houses a Dunkin’ Donuts shop. If you walk down Cleveland Street you may only notice the donut shop facade, but if you walk on the other side of the street and happen to look up, you will see a very beautiful three-story brick building with some nice architectural touches not unlike the ones 1,500 miles to the north in Biddeford.

I was in downtown Clearwater late Friday and I spent a little time admiring the building. In the middle of the brick facade above the second-story front windows is a granite square with a single carved word: “Telephone.” That got my curiousity stirred up, so I did some research when I got home.

This Cleveland Street building was built in the early 1920s for the Peninsular Telephone Co., Pinellas County’s first real telephone company which was granted a franchise to operate in Clearwater 1901. The company was actually formed in Bradenton by a couple of brothers who got into the telephone business when they installed a telephone in their grocery store so customers could phone in their food orders.

That idea worked so well that they opened other food stores, all with telephones. Soon, they found that the telephone business had more profit potential than the grocery business. before long, they were operating telephone companies in a number of Florida Counties.

In this particular building, Peninsular Telephone ran a commercial office in the rear of the first floor, while the switchboards and phone operators toiled away on the second floor. A Rexall drug store occupied the front of the first floor.

Later, Peninsular Telephone sold out to General Telephone, which became GTE, which became Verizon.

Later, the 9,000-square-foot building fell into disrepair, as did all of the downtown Clearwater area. At some point, the beautiful windows and brick work were covered with a slick slathering of stucco. For a number of years, the first floor was occupied by a commercial blood bank facility which paid for blood donations, mostly from local homeless people.

Around 2003, the stucco was stripped away and the building was restored. It now is a proud component of downtown Clearwater’s re-emergence.

Tags: Clearwater, downtown, telephone building