Palma Ceia is in the heart of South Tampa. So, what does the name really mean?
Well, no one really knows for sure.
Some think it's a play on one of the leading developers of this community Thomas Palmer.
The streets here are just about all Spanish names, too. And almost all have a counterpart in Old Havana.
"The kind of one of the centerpieces of the Palma Ceia neighborhood the original neighborhood and plat, just after the turn of the 20th century, was the spring and it was called pomocy," Rodney Kite-Powell, a historian at the Tampa Bay History Center. "And it was a freshwater spring that had a creek that led out from it into Hillsborough Bay. And so now that creek actually still exists, but it goes underneath Bayshore."
Back in the early 1900s, this part of Tampa was considered the country.
Once development started, the streetcar ran down Bayshore so getting to downtown was easily accessible.
