Pinellas Park, FL

An agricultural land promotion shaped Pinellas Park’s beginnings: publisher F. Davis bought 12,800 acres around 1911, and the Florida Association offered a city lot with each ten-acre farm purchase while establishing model farms. The central Pinellas County city incorporated in 1914 and counted 53,093 residents in 2020. Its Vietnamese, Laotian, Indian, and other Southeast Asian communities support a major concentration of restaurants, businesses, and specialty vendors. The City Auditorium hosts concerts on a Mighty Wurlitzer restored by a local theatre-organ group. At the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum, the collection includes a working full-scale replica of Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s early self-propelled vehicle. Pinellas Park’s flat, low-lying terrain historically flooded, but a network of drainage canals and other water-management projects has reduced that problem.