St. Petersburg, city, Pinellas county, west-central Florida, U.S. It is situated at the southern tip of the Pinellas Peninsula on Tampa Bay, about 15 miles (25 km) southeast of Clearwater and 20 miles (30 km) southwest of Tampa. Those three cities form one of the state’s largest metropolitan areas. It is part of Florida’s “Sun Coast” region.
Calusa peoples were early inhabitants of the area. The Spanish explorers Pánfilo de Narváez (1528) and Hernando de Soto (1539) were the first Europeans to visit the region. Settlement began as early as the 1840s, but the community actually dates from 1875, when John C. Williams of Detroit, Michigan, purchased land in the area. He and Peter Demens, who built a railroad that reached the site in 1888, founded the city, and it was named for Demens’s birthplace in Russia. It quickly developed as a resort area, and seafood shipping on the Orange Belt Railroad was a major part of the city’s economy. In 1914 the world’s first scheduled passenger airline service linked St. Petersburg and Tampa, and the two cities were linked 10 years later by the Gandy Bridge, the first of two bridges and a causeway across Old Tampa Bay. In the late 1940s St. Petersburg became one of the first Florida cities to promote “residentism,” encouraging former tourists to spend their retirement years there.