The History of Downtown Tampa
Inhabited and utilized for thousands of years, Tampa’s downtown has been home to countless people, businesses and commercial ventures. The development of Tampa as a city, which dates back to the establishment of Fort Brooke in 1824, has had a profound effect on the region. Growth began in earnest in 1847, when the village of Tampa — what we now consider downtown — was first platted into blocks by John Jackson. Six years later, he completed a plat of Tampa that is still used today as the legal description for downtown land transactions.
Fort Brooke remained a fixture of Tampa throughout the mid-19th...
