(soft music) - [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

Support for Greater St. Petersburg is provided by Curtis Anderson.

- On the special episode of Greater St. Petersburg, the St. Pete Youth Farm harvests love in the community.

The storied history of the world's largest shuffleboard club, an untold story of bravery and kindness at the Florida Holocaust Museum, a one of a kind museum that celebrates motherhood, and a brewery that confronts the past.

(upbeat music) Hello, I'm Lissette Campos and this is Greater St. Petersburg.

The history of St. Pete is as vibrant as its residents and its exponential growth in recent years is a testament to the city's allure.

In this program, learn the stories of residents who embody the essence of St. Pete, a diverse city brimming with culture and individuals fostering positive change.

With the South St. Pete community facing nutrition insecurity, the concept for the St. Pete Youth Farm was born.

The farm provides access to locally grown produce and teaches kids how to grow their own food.

It's also a gathering place of love and support for the whole community.

(soft music) - What makes a Pete youth Farm special?

The fact that we're learning together.

The fact that we put so much focus around culture and community, so that people know, like, this is a gathering space.

And then guess what, the backdrop is food.

- The St. Pete Youth Farm is a community garden and there are some people that live in this neighborhood who has no means of transportation.

The way I chose to give back is to deliver what St. Pete Youth Farm has to offer.

- How lovely!

- Some fresh greens for you today.

- Oh!

- There you go.

- Thank you so much.

- That's the joy.

That's what I feel when you hear someone say thank you, and they clapping and that's the joy.

(pensive music) - In 2017, a large chain grocery store closed 10 blocks from where we're sitting right now today at St. Pete Youth Farm, and the community was left with a void of having access to nutritious food, fruits and vegetables.

- Especially our elderly community, they didn't have the means to eat healthy because it wasn't available in this area.

(soft music) - We come from an agrarian culture, like I like to talk the history about how it wasn't until the industrial revolution that we started to mechanize and mass produce.

We've really taken food and turned it into a commodity to be bought and sold.

When people are looking to feed themselves, they find it in grocery stores and supermarkets and places 'cause we don't grow our own food as individuals anymore.

And so we become very dependent upon this sort of industrial food complex.

But if it's not there, then what do you do?

You know, you have to now find food and maybe a restaurant, a fast food place.

These foods are generally overprocessed and can be really difficult for people's health.

- The outcome was this idea that young people could actually lead in the solution.

St. Pete Youth Farm was launched in summer of 2019, as a youth development program for teens.

We quickly realized that that's what we're here to do, is to develop the future for our city and areas beyond us.

- The youth began to come and pour into the community and the St. Pete Youth Farm opened up their doors and invited the community to come and get involved and say, "Hey, we have food here for you."

- They're learning how to cook, they're learning how to grow food.

They're learning everything from hydroponics, aquaponics.

They find value in being able to provide for the community.

It feels enriching for them along with the programming that we offer.

Job readiness and job-keeping skills is also something that we prioritize here at St. Pete Youth Farm for young leaders, but character development is what we believe must come before leadership.

- So look at that and smell, are you smelling that?

Over here we're making the additional seasoning for that.

- Every Monday there's pretty much something different.

- We'll harvest these.

- There's poetry, there's arts, there's crafts, there's painting.

- We don't really pay much attention to the youth anymore, you know, and so I think these new generations are feeling somewhat neglected and isolated.

And so, having a youth farm to me is one of those sort of recreational environments that we need to bring back.

- Hello everyone.

Welcome to the greenhouse.

- Not only have I learned how to grow and give back to the community.

It has helped me with my mental health.

On Mondays, we do mental health Mondays.

They not only help with my mental health, but they give me, like a voice in my community to speak out about things that I wouldn't speak with other people.

- If we talked about the high rate of mental illness with youth, specifically in our demographic, then we have to talk about the benefits of being outside, working with your hands, the fresh air, and everything that we do is conducive to that.

We have so much that's growing.

- We've given away over 500 mini gardens.

Whatever we're growing, we want you to have it at no cost, because we can't actually solve the issue of access without ensuring that the community has direct access to food when they need it, where they need it.

- Miss Julia.

Collard Greens.

- Oh, thank you.

- We've done our deliveries and it just feels good.

I know that I've helped families today and they've helped me.

This is something that my son would want me to do and something that I feel good.

I really do.

(sad music) - It makes me a little emotional to think about the fact that we lost one of our first young people.

- In 2022, my son, Bryce Lewis was a passenger in the back seat and he was killed in a tragic car accident.

I never forget my purpose of why I do what I do for the St. Pete Youth Farm because if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't know anything about the St. Pete Youth farm.

He told me what he wanted to do.

He was a very good kid and I just always want to tell his story.

He was one of the first generations for the St. Pete Youth Farm.

He worked from 2019 all the way to 2022.

My son's spirit lives right in the St. Pete youth farm, right over by the banana trees, right over by the greenhouse.

I don't even like to go out to the graveyard anymore.

I'd rather come to the St. Pete Youth Farm.

I find peace, I find healing.

I never would've thought that after losing my son, I would come and do the same thing that he has been doing years prior to his death.

The journey has been peaceful.

I'm healing and I know that my son's legacy is being carried out.

When Bryce met Carla in 2019, he immediately took to her and she became our village mom.

Carla is a person who is not only involved some of the time, but all the time.

I appreciate her being so involved in my son's life and she does that for all the kids and that's what this community needs.

They need a village mom.

(indistinct chatter) - That makes me really emotional to think that a young person who is not my biological child thinks of me as raising them.

For the parents saying, I see you as a second mom to my child.

This is what allows me the latitude to provide the level of love and support that's needed for our young people in this community.

- Love, I want your- - [Audience] Love, love, love.

- Gimme your- I think the youth farm benefits this city by love.

There's no strangers here.

Everybody's here for love.

It's no strangers or nothing.

It's like family for real.

- You know, oftentimes we talk about the impact of one person, but everywhere you look around the farm, you see the impact of many.

It's extremely meaningful as this is and will be a staple in this community.

I couldn't imagine spending my days, my time any other way than how we're spending it now improving the lives of others and making food accessible here in St. Petersburg, Florida.

(bright music) - In 1924, six shuffleboard players organized the first club in St. Pete.

It thrived for decades, but eventually became a symbol of retirement communities.

Today with some smart marketing and community support, the St. Petersburg Shuffleboard Club boasts over 2,600 members, a century after its founding and is the largest of its kind in the world.

(soft music) - Yes, shuffleboard is fun.

This club is important to the history of tourism and recreation in St. Pete.

There's no place like this anywhere else, and when it's something so special like this, it's really important to fight for it and make sure that the generations after you can experience it in the same way that you're fortunate to be able to do.

(bright music) Shuffleboard is a quintessential activity here in St. Petersburg.

We are the world's oldest and largest shuffleboard club.

We were founded here in St. Pete in 1924.

I like to say we're the Wimbledon of shuffleboard.

This is where all the important stuff happens.

In 1924, St. Petersburg was experiencing its boom.

More people were coming down here for the winter who wanted recreation and fun.

- [Reporter] Florida they claim is the next best thing to complete rejuvenation.

- Shuffleboard kept growing and growing, and by the 30s and 40s, there were about 5,000 to 6,000 members here in St. Petersburg.

(soft music) Anywhere around the world, they play shuffleboard, play shuffleboard with the rules that were developed here.

- All you really need to play this game is the court, (indistinct), a disc and a lot of desire.

- It is one of those games that is really easy to pick up and learn the rules of.

You can get playing in about five minutes.

If you get really serious about it, it'll take you years to master.

There's a lot of strategy to it.

It's definitely a mental game.

- These are pretty, yeah, this was the medals we used to get.

When I first started playing in Sebring, Florida, I was 19.

Everybody said, if anybody wants to be a good player, you have to go to St. Pete.

I was an amateur as soon as I walked into the club and then I became a pro at 22.

There she is again.

- Mary was taken under the wing of May Hall who was the reigning women's champion.

I don't think any woman has actually earned as many master's points as she has still to this day.

- I played her in a singles and I won.

About a couple days later she said, you wanna play in the national doubles?

And I said yes, and I was scared to death, but we won.

From then on, everything was, the first singles I won was the masters.

I played 10 years, then I took 15 years off.

When I came back in '91, I said, what's happened to the players?

When I left the club had close to 2000 members, but when I came back it had barely a hundred members, so whatever happened in the 80s.

- Our membership started to decline.

A lot more competition for things to do around St. Pete as the city grows.

Perhaps the perception that shuffleboard was for older people and there were a lot of factors.

- In '98, that was when I became president.

It was important to save the club because it was the original club.

I don't care what we have to do, this club is gonna stay.

- In 2005, the organization was in jeopardy and the continued use of the club was in jeopardy.

Then one day a group of artists and preservation people approached Mary Eldridge and said, we have an idea.

- And I said, well, please sit down.

Let's talk.

We developed this idea of Friday night.

- They said, (upbeat music) we wanna open up Friday nights to the community and just have free shuffleboard and it's a simple concept.

Just try to get people from the community in and discovering how great this place is.

The Friday nights started out as just combination of shuffleboard and music and art.

It started the ball rolling, it started getting the community interested.

- We opened the courts, we helped them learn how to play.

- There you go.

- We had our first night and we had 28 people.

It wasn't too long before we had 500.

- Before the Friday nights there were 35 members and then today we have 2,700 now.

Anybody from the community can come and play, and all walks of life just enjoying the place and enjoying each other's company.

That's ultimately what Friday nights does best.

- This is just a really special club.

There's a lot of history here and you can feel that.

And when you're here on a Friday, it's just got a really great vibe to it that I think just keeps bringing people back.

- People think, oh, you know, just push to this down there and bounce them around and whatever, but there's a lot of strategy and I like the people.

The people, everybody I meet down here is just super friendly.

- I think that more people need to know about shuffleboard.

My friends are visiting from Oregon right now and they thought we were going to table shuffleboard and then we show up to this beautiful outdoor location and they were shocked that there's so many courts and we've had a lot of fun.

(soft music) - This club helped people coming from far distant places to become a community.

The best end result is the club is going strong.

- I didn't think I'd ever say that it was our 100th birthday.

(audience claps) - The club turned a hundred this year and we buried a time capsule.

It was especially significant considering the history of the resurgence of the sport here in St. Pete.

It's makes it especially meaningful.

- I think that there's a new wave coming with shuffleboard.

I think it's starting to hit the hearts of people who do not live in retirement communities and we're really excited about that.

- My goal is to have a membership that's really truly reflective of the entire St Pete population.

It's such a fun sport.

This place should be for everybody.

I like to think that in a hundred years, the people opening up the time capsule or the people still running the club are gonna be able to look back at us in 2024 and see where we were and then see the progress that we've made too, and I hope we make them proud.

- Cheers to a hundred years and St. Petersburg shuffleboard Club.

- I just like to see people have a good time and I said what I wanna do if I should ever get to be a hundred is come in here, sit on that bench there by the courts and watch people playing.

They don't know me, I don't know them, but they're playing the game.

Then I will say, did a good job.

You won your turn, so that would make me happy.

- In 1943, Jewish people in Nazi occupied Denmark were desperate to evacuate to safety.

A courageous group of citizens helped rescue thousands of Jews via fishing boats.

Two local women share their family stories in what became known as the great Danish rescue.

(soft music) - The Danish people that helped their Jewish neighbors made an incredibly important choice.

Because of that, I'm alive and we have our family.

- I want my children, grandchildren to know that without people like that, none of us would be here.

(tense music) - My mom was born in Vienna, Austria, and she had, I think a fairly normal kind of a childhood until Austria was taken over.

At about the age of 14 was when the Nazis took children and sent them to work camps.

So her parents decided that it would be safer for her if they could get her out of the country.

They arranged for her to stay with a family in Denmark.

- My father was born in Berlin and that's where he grew up.

But before he left Germany, he had a chance to say goodbye to his family.

I remember my father telling me this, the last thing my grandfather told my father when my father was getting on the train to Denmark, he says, "don't forget, there's a God."

How can you say that when you know things are that bad?

- [Reporter] The German army rolled across the neutral borders of little Denmark and in a matter of hours it occupied the entire country.

(soft music) - In 1943, the German occupying forces put in place a plan to deport the Jews.

They had planned it out to be the evening of Rosh Hashanah because they knew that most Jews would be at home celebrating with their families.

- The rabbi even told all Jews in synagogue when they went there for the high holidays.

He says, go home, call your family, call your friends.

Tell them to get to the harbor.

Any harbor, there'll be boats waiting for you.

You have to get out of Denmark, the Germans are coming.

- In October, 1943, Danish citizens rescued 7,200 Jewish men, women, and children by ferrying them to safety in neutral Sweden by fishing boat.

Danes considered Jews to be their friends, their fellow countrymen, their fellow citizens.

They didn't separate them into some other category.

They were simply Danes.

The rescue took about three weeks, so three weeks to save 7,200 people.

- My mom was about 19 when she escaped to Sweden.

She was told to go into Copenhagen and that a fishing boat would be ready for her.

When the evening came about, she was taken down to the water.

When she got there, there was a woman there carrying two big suitcases and was having difficulty taking them down to the boat.

So she asked the woman, can I help you?

And so she helped this woman drag the suitcases down to the water.

There were two boats that were actually gonna depart from that harbor at that time.

The woman got on the first boat.

My mom was supposed to go on the second boat, but the woman looked at my mom and looked at the captain and said, I want this girl to go with me.

What my mom found out afterwards was that the second boat was captured and never made it, so this woman saved my mom's life.

- My mother, she would talk about things.

She was telling me how she was put in the bottom of the boat.

My mother was very claustrophobic, but she had no choice and she was petrified the whole time.

My father, he left at 10 o'clock at night.

He didn't talk about that.

By the time he went on the boat, he's already lost his whole family.

- My mom, sometime during that time, she found out that her parents and her brother had been taken away to Auschwitz and had been killed there.

And so at that point she was completely alone and had nobody.

I know that it has to have been very, very hard for her.

It's really not anything that she talked about an awful lot, but it's something that I always was aware of, it being unsaid, but it's still there and I could feel it.

I could see it.

- The museum honors the memory of the millions of men, women, and children who suffered or died in the Holocaust and it is dedicated to teaching members of all races and cultures the inherent worth and dignity of all human life in order to prevent future genocides.

- I got involved with the museum over 25 years ago.

One of the reasons that I really wanted to get involved was that they were also going to tell the story of the Danish rescue.

And so one day I called my Danish friend.

- And she says to me, Margaret, I've always wanted a rescue boat to come to the Holocaust Museum.

Do you know anybody who can help us?

I said, I don't know.

I was told if there were any rescue boats left in Denmark there may just be one or two.

- She called an old family friend named Betty.

- I get a phone call from Betty and she says, "Margaret you can't believe what's going on.

I'm standing here with a broker.

He has a rescue boat."

- Thor, our fishing boat was owned by a Danish man named Eric Olson in a town called Coup.

We know the boat was used during the Nazi occupation of Denmark because we have a 1944 logbook from Eric Olson with Nazi stamps showing where he was going every time he left the harbor and came back.

Then we spoke with Klaus, his son, to discuss the story that he knew behind it, which was that Eric Olson was asked to move some bearings for a local mill.

On one of these trips, he was asked by a leader of the resistance to take four Jews with him to Sweden.

- His father hadn't really shared this story until he was quite a bit later in his life.

His own wife didn't know the story and that we could actually get this boat was, it was like a dream.

It's lifted a lot off of me personally because the story will be told and it'll be told to children and adults and to anybody who wants to know because it's a story that needs to be told.

- Whoa.

(soft music) - This rescue is unique because no other occupied country took action the way that the Danish people did.

And not only that, it wasn't from the government down or the king down.

It was from the ground up.

These were ordinary people that took care of their Jewish neighbors.

- Because of that, I'm alive, and you know, we have our family.

- The Florida Holocaust Museum had a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Danish rescue where members of the public got to meet Thor for the first time.

We're having conservators work on Thor to prepare it for installation here at the Florida Holocaust Museum.

- Thor is going to be placed where you are gonna be able to see both the boxcar and Thor at the same time.

The boxcar was used to transport people to killing centers and to hurt people and to dehumanize people.

- The boxcar represents what can happen when hate goes unchecked.

The boat represents the power of making a choice and to answer the call when people are in trouble.

We're hoping that people understand the power that they have to do the right thing.

- Boats like that rescued my family, her family, and 7,200 other Jewish people from Denmark.

I want people to learn about the story, but I also want them to know if you are kind to people, if you're good to people, so much more can come out of this whole world.

- If we are silent about inhumanity, whether it be antisemitism or other forms of hate, I feel that we become complicit.

Having something like Thor here reinforces how important it is that we respect one another's humanity and one another's differences.

I felt it was a very important message that there is a choice.

There is always a choice.

- Everyone has a mom, but motherhood encompasses much more than a traditional maternal role.

Explore the complex topic of mothering in its myriad forms through the one of a kind museum of motherhood.

- Motherhood just blew my mind.

I went from being one person to being more than one person.

It was the most marvelous thing that had ever happened to me and also the most confusing.

It so rocked my world that I needed to dive into it deeper.

I needed to figure out what is this thing called Mother.

When I was growing up, June Cleaver was on TV, leave it to Beaver.

We had these images of the fifties housewife that really dominated.

- You know, say a woman's place is in the home and I suppose as long as she's in the home, she might as well be in the kitchen.

- Motherhood was prescribed by society, by social morays, by acceptable and unacceptable behavior, And that ideal of the white suburban housewife was not representative of most people's lives.

It was a more diverse, more complex job than what was presented.

My mother was a fifties homemaker, really a person of her times in certain ways, a little subservient to the powers that be and my father and doing the homemaking thing, but she found ways to express her own fierce individuality, really into environmentalism throughout the 60s and 70s, a bit of a woods woman, she canoed over a thousand miles of public rivers in the United States and she was a fire tower watch for seven summers for the National Park Service.

That was a great role model for me to be able to strike out and be my own person.

(upbeat music) I was so fortunate with the rise of women's empowerment.

(audience chanting) I was on the heels of the second wave of feminism.

- In a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court today legalized abortions.

The decision to end the pregnancy during the first three months belongs to the woman and her doctor, not the government.

- Women were feeling their power.

I knew I could go to work.

I was the first woman in my family on both sides to graduate college.

I was the first woman not to get married right away and move to New York City and find a life on my own.

(upbeat music) When I moved to New York, I went to make music.

(upbeat music) I started a punk rock band called Peter and the girlfriends.

I was Peter, the guys were the girls.

That was revolutionary at the time.

I was a total free spirit.

I thought, yeah, maybe I'll have one kid when I'm 40, but really it wasn't on my radar so much.

But something changed and every cell in my body wanted to have a child.

(soft music) A mother is one who divides and is paradoxically increased.

I use the m/other because we are constantly in relationship.

Whether that relationship is a positive one, whether it's a complex one, we're still in relationship.

We're always navigating that other person, and that's its fundamental defining factor.

I had four amazing pregnancies and birth.

I was able to give birth with a midwife on my own terms.

I was really fortunate.

Not that I didn't have difficulties, I did, but in general I felt like it was the most powerful thing I'd ever done in my life each time.

The fourth pregnancy, some weird signs showed up.

I was in some pain.

10 days after my daughter was born, I had failed to thrive.

I was really sick.

I couldn't get outta bed.

I was diagnosed with lupus that attacked my kidneys and my internal organs and I was on my way out.

The hardest thing that ever happened to me was when my husband took my 10 day old daughter through the elevator doors of the hospital and I had to stay for a month.

That broke me.

I lost my former life and became someone new out of that experience.

After I got sick, the struggles with the kids became exponentially much more difficult.

I was literally bedridden with four small kids around me.

I wasn't able to participate in a lot of their lives, which was heartbreaking and difficult and challenging.

And they had needs.

They still got sick.

They still brought home head lice.

They still had sports to go to and it was my job to do the best I could every day and sometimes my best wasn't very good.

I was started on chemotherapy.

That prepared me for the next seven year journey, which resulted in a kidney transplant seven years later.

That journey informed what you see now and who I am now because I had to have a lot more compassion for all the mothers and all the things that mothers go through.

I had to reinvent myself to thrive.

(upbeat music) I wanted to really take this motherhood thing into my art.

I went back to making music after I was sick.

I started a band called Housewives on Prozac.

(upbeat music) - We've got housewives on Prozac with US.

- Housewives on Prozac, six women singing about mom's life through songs like "The Housewives Lament."

- We weren't subscribing to the expected mother role, so we were mom rockers.

Out of mom Rock came the Mama Palooza Festival.

- Mama Palooza supports, empowers and advertises and amplifies all these great women who are in the arts and business.

- That festival was in 25 cities, four countries over the span of 10 years.

(upbeat music) Hi, welcome.

Come on in.

Come into the Museum of Motherhood.

Welcome.

I realized that mothers, myself, other mothers needed more of a place of connection and reference.

We have car museums, marble museums, and mustard museums.

Why don't we have any museums of motherhood except this?

We are the first and only museum of motherhood in the world.

We need to make visible this labor and these lives and the art, science, and history around this incredible deep subject.

The museum has been through multiple incarnations.

Our first exhibit was in Seneca Falls, New York, which is the home of the suffragette movement.

And now we've moved to the factory here in St. Pete.

The great thing about the audiences who come to the museum now are they span the gamut.

We have families, we have women, we have men, we have mothers, those who need healing.

We have so many feelings about our mothers.

They did it wrong.

They did it badly.

I hate my mother, I love my mother.

How can we even give value to something that our whole infrastructure doesn't even really give value to?

(soft music) Is it true you're only working if you're being paid for it?

How much do our mothers make for their care work?

There's no economic equivalent, and this artist is asking the question, should there be an economic equivalent?

In our culture, we have no affordable childcare.

We have no federally mandated paid parental leave.

We have no social security for those who are staying home and care working, whether that's for the generation before or for their children.

This is a real issue.

Why don't we care about that?

Somebody's doing that work.

And in America it's a very isolated position.

You are expected to do it on your own time and your own dime.

That seems like an untenable burden to me.

Feminism and motherhood, where they go hand in hand is this idea that basic human rights of expression, of access to reproductive health, of access to healthcare, of access to food, to housing, to wellbeing, to not radical racism.

All of these things are significant and important for our women, mothers, and families, and so how we create policies around that are all part of this mother feminist movement.

It's up to all of us to care about each other.

It's up to all of us to care about the woman behind the job or the human behind the job, and it's up to all of us to care about those kids too.

I hear from people all the time who say, where do I fit in?

I'm not a mother, either by choice or not choice, and I wanna say you're human and you came from someone, you came from a mother.

We're interested in your journey here.

The ways that you thought, oh, I never wanna have a kid, or the ways that you thought I wanted to and I couldn't, or the ways that you did it and then you regretted it.

I'm privileged to witness so many deep stories from people when they walk through this space.

Sometimes people cry.

They say, I feel seen, and that's what we're about.

We're about starting great conversations and creating thought provoking exhibits and sharing information and education.

- There's new fallout across the nation after the Supreme Court's ruling on abortion.

- Where do privacy and personal freedom begin and where do they end?

- Never before has the court granted and then taken away a widely recognized constitutional right.

- What I say to mothers who are at the absolute end of their rope is hang on baby.

Because no day lasts forever.

No week lasts forever.

If you're really struggling, I mean, there are mental health resources available, there is scholarship available, there are communities that are available.

You can call us.

We're here for you.

(soft music) What I hope my children will say about me, I think the best superpower anybody can have is to just be loving.

So if I've given my children love, which I think I have, then I've done the best job in the world because it's all love.

That's what it is.

It's all love.

So I hope they feel loved.

(soft music) - Chris Johnson, co-owner and brewmaster of Green Bench Brewing Company is confronting St. Pete's troubled Past.

Learn how the Green Bench became an iconic image of St. Petersburg, but also a symbol of segregation.

(soft music) - You can't ignore the experiences that people had in our history here in St. Petersburg.

You can't ignore the fact that it was great for some people, it wasn't great for everybody.

If we ignore what people have been through, then how can we help keep those things from happening again?

We had to tell this story.

So I was born in Memphis, Tennessee.

I'm biracial.

My mother's black and my father's white.

My brother and my sisters, they were all, you know, a hundred percent black and I was the lightest skin kid on the streets.

Yeah, it was a little different.

But you know, I grew up a black boy in Memphis, Tennessee.

So I would visit St. Petersburg pretty regularly.

My father was living here, didn't really have a father figure in my life on a day-to-day basis.

So they decided that it would be best if I moved to Florida, specifically here in St. Petersburg where he was living.

I ended up gonna high school here in St. Petersburg as well.

And then I started gonna USF St. Petersburg for college.

And in that time period, I realized I had a lot of time on my hands and so I needed a hobby just to kind of keep busy.

And you know, when I first moved to St. Petersburg when I was in middle school, my father picked up home brewing as a hobby.

I didn't know what he was doing, I was too young really to understand it or even care about it.

But I knew that he did this thing that he enjoyed and it inspired me to be like, oh, that's the thing that maybe I'll enjoy.

If he liked it, I'll probably like it, or at least I'll see.

I started going to home brew club meetings, ended up working at Southern Brewing and Wine making.

I was able to help open a brewery for them.

And it was at this point right after we opened it that I realized I think I can do it.

You know, I think I can open a brewery.

I think I can put my fingerprint on it.

I think I can help this area build a foundation in this industry.

And then luckily for me, I end up meeting my current business partners, Nate and Steve.

And they specifically wanted to open a brewery in St. Petersburg.

And so we spent about nine months just getting to know each other, home brewing, hanging out.

Eventually we decided to open Green Bench Brewing Company.

(bright music) - The idea of the green benches belongs to a gentleman by the name of Noel Mitchell.

He was an entrepreneur, a businessman who moved to St. Petersburg in about 1904.

He was the king of the original Atlantic City Salt Water Taffy.

So when he came to St. Pete, he tried his hand at real estate and development.

In 1908, he decided to put some benches outside 'cause when people did come to his real estate office, they basically would go in his office and just like sit down to get out of the heat.

And so anytime someone sat there, straight away, he'd get them to sign a contract to buy some land.

Other merchants took notice.

They started putting their own benches out.

So all throughout downtown, you found red benches and blue benches and yellow benches and orange benches.

And in 1916, Mayor Al Lang basically told City council that we looked like a circus tent.

We looked like this podunk little town and we needed uniformity.

So he pushed through the green bench ordinance.

All the benches had to be the same size and the same color.

Green bench green.

(bright music) - Literally the city would take out ads and newspapers and you know, in snowbird towns and say, come to the city of the Green benches and label us the city of the Green benches, right?

That's how powerful a symbol it was.

They became a symbol for coming together.

- Like a lot of history, especially in the South, including here in St. Petersburg, there's always two sides to history.

(soft music) - If you ask about the green benches to say the African American community that remember it, it's a completely different story.

Because while the green benches were used to market St. Pete as this beautiful communal town, the African American weren't allowed to sit on it because this is a time of segregation and we're in the South.

- The only time the black population of St. Petersburg were permitted to sit on the green benches is if they were caring for white children.

You never learn about Florida in US history when it comes to civil rights and segregation, probably because the state did an amazing job marketing itself, as you know, America's playground and vacation land.

But when you look at everything that happened here, I mean, we had lunch counter sit-ins, we had marches, we had the Freedom Riders arrive in St. Petersburg.

Of all the things that happened here and all the conversations that we've had about civil rights, the one thing that's steal the flashpoint are the green benches.

As the 1950s rolled into the 1960s, there was a huge movement in St. Petersburg to make us a younger city.

So one of the first things they did was begin to remove the green benches.

The removal of the green benches had nothing to do with what was right or wrong, or integration.

The removal of the green benches is because the city wanted to get rid of the elderly image that we had.

They probably could have used it as a teaching moment to try and pull us together because you can't hide it.

I mean, you know, it's something that needs to be brought out in the open and talked about, but I think it was just easier for the city to just destroy the benches.

- When I was growing up, my family didn't shy away from our history.

Matter of fact, we were constantly reminded of our history.

We were constantly reminded that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in our town.

I have a great uncle who in Mississippi was lynched.

Apparently he looked at and spoke to a white woman and he was dragged out into the fields and he was lynched.

And my family would tell this story a lot when I was growing up.

Because of the way that I was taught to deal with these traumas, which was to look it in the face, constantly be reminded that this is who we are, this is how we got here, right, it was almost impossible to not call this place green bench.

We couldn't ignore people's lives.

We couldn't ignore the experiences that they had.

We had to tell this story.

So I source those through like a fruit co-op, like a fruit and veg co-op for restaurants.

I never want anybody to hide how they feel about us calling this Green Bench.

I have friends who don't come here who actually feel like by calling it Green Bench, we're celebrating it just for the same reasons it'd always been celebrated.

Instead, we're celebrating it because of what everyone had to go through and what it means to our community.

A few things were vital for us.

The first one was making sure that we tell the whole story as often as we could 'cause the goal was to always to represent St. Petersburg.

And we wanted the green benches to be exactly what they were supposed to be, a communal gathering place where everybody can come together and enjoy the beautiful weather and each other and everything that this amazing city has to offer.

The second really important thing for us was, it may been slightly more personal, right?

A black man owns Green Bench.

You know this, this powerful symbol in our city that once wasn't for my people, I own it now.

And turns out we ended up opening the first black owned brewery in Florida.

(upbeat music) At the moment, there's far less than 1% of all the breweries that are open in the United States are black owned.

In the brewing community, there's some organizations that have been built to help diversify the industry as a whole.

There's a few that I'm personally a part of.

I'm the vice President of Beer Culture.

The goal with beer culture is to prove and show that the culture of beer is only built by the people that are involved in it.

That you don't walk into the space of beer and see its culture and conform to it.

You contribute to it.

And by doing so, you alter its culture.

We provide scholarships and job placements in an attempt to not let that gap grow.

We're trying to provide the industry with quality candidates of color.

(soft music) I'm an extremely prideful person.

I'm proud of where I came from, and I'm proud of my family, I'm proud of St. Petersburg.

I'm proud of the people that I work with in order to diversify this industry.

I'm proud that people care and I take pride in not just the products that I make, but the people that I share them with.

I don't know if there's a better way to honor what my family has done to put us in a position where we can do things now that we never could.

And If I get to drink a beer to celebrate them, I don't know, you know, everybody's having fun.

- St. Petersburg is a city of transformation and enduring charm, propelled by the passion of those who call it home.

We certainly hope you've enjoyed all of these stories.

I'm Lissette Campos.

Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Support for Greater St. Petersburg is provided by Curtis Anderson.