A new Tampa Bay Rays ballpark may honor the Black neighborhood the team once displaced
A city council vote may pave the way for a new ballpark for the Tampa Bay Rays.
A key city council vote Thursday on a major redevelopment project in St. Petersburg, Florida, could pave the way to give baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays a new ballpark, which would guarantee the team stays for at least 30 years.
The $6.5 billion project, supporters say, would transform an 86-acre tract in the city’s downtown, with plans in the coming years for a Black history museum, affordable housing, a hotel, green space, entertainment venues and office and retail space. There’s the promise of thousands of jobs as well.
The site, where the Rays’ domed Tropicana Field and its expansive parking lots now sit, was once a thriving Black community driven out by construction of the ballpark and an interstate highway. A priority for St. Petersburg Mayor Ken Welch is to right some of those past wrongs in what is known as the Historic Gas Plant District.
“The city’s never done anything of this scope,” said Welch, the city’s first Black mayor with family ties to the old neighborhood. “It’s a momentous day for our city and county.”
The linchpin of the project is the planned $1.3 billion ballpark with 30,000 seats, scheduled to open for the 2028 season. That would cap years of uncertainty about the Rays’ future, including possible moves across the bay to Tampa, or to Nashville, Tennessee, or even to split home games between St. Petersburg and Montreal, an idea MLB rejected.
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