Plumbing the depths and remembering the history of St. Petersburg’s Round Lake

Working with the City, the Historic Uptown Neighborhood Association, Keep Pinellas Beautiful, and a local nonprofit called Stewards of our Urban Lakes (SoUL), Arabitg and his neighbors staged dozens of clean-up days and ended the spraying. They installed a native aquatic plant plot, designed to provide habitat while naturally filtering nutrients from the lake’s water, which has since doubled in size...

I wonder if I could swim there?

It’s a simmering August morning in St. Petersburg. The sun’s still-slanted light plays through the jigsaw branches of the ancient banyan onto the grassy bank leading down to Round Lake. This tiny oasis, a hidden gem just west of the busy Fourth Street North corridor, shines like a polished tiger eye under the brilliant summer sky. The steady splash of the aeration fountain cools my soul exactly two degrees as perspiration pools along my hairline and creeps down my back. Watching a tricolored heron thread its way through the spikeweed and pickerel along the water’s edge, I feel I’m about ready to give up on my mission—learning more about a decade-long effort to restore the lake’s habitat—and just dive in. Those refreshing depths are calling my name.

But how deep is Round Lake, really? As it turns out, it depends on the year.

Days earlier, in the mercifully cool rooms of the St. Petersburg Museum of History’s archives, I’d seen an 1888 plat of the neighborhood that identified the pool as Deep Water Lake. Just how deep remained unclear. But the presence of two other bodies nearby—“Long Pond” and “Grass Pond”—seemed to suggest it was a deep spot in a chain of marshy lakes that once stretched just north of town. Possibly a sinkhole fed by groundwater. And while this watery triad stuck around for at least another 18 years, appearing again on city plats in 1902 and 1906, by the time St. Pete celebrated its sweet 16 in 1908, there was just one lake with a whole new name: Park Lake.