The house where Lorenzo Brown was born met a bulldozer and is now a patch of blacktop behind St. Petersburg’s Tropicana Field.
Brown grew up in the historically black Midtown area along one of America’s original black main streets known as the Deuces. Along 22nd Street South was a bustling corridor of doctor’s offices, nightclubs, a hospital, restaurants, pharmacies and a movie theatre, mostly black owned and catering to the black community. Brown’s life has often followed the fortune of the Deuces.
Seated on a gray, plastic pail beside Cadillac Dry Cleaners, viewing a beaten section of the strip that anchored Midtown, Brown plans his move to Tangerine Plaza, a new development four blocks south.
The $5.4 million Plaza, anchored by a Sweetbay grocery store, is at the heart of St. Petersburg’s effort to redevelop Midtown and the Deuces.
“It was a working and thriving community. You really didn’t have to come out of your own neighborhood for anything,” Brown said. “From 18th, what we called Tangerine, to about 5th you had everything.”
Brown, now 59, watched the Deuces’ vibrant life fade like colored paper left in the sun. The end of segregation closed the black hospital. Stores closed. A new interstate brought wrecking balls in the 1970s and then came a bloated, domed arena in 1990.
Known to his friends as Lo, Brown exercised his fists when he had to; he struggled in school because of hunger; fathered a child at age 17; owned and operated a clothing store; and after his first marriage dissolved by age 28, he reared his two sons as a single father, all along the Deuces.
Playing football at Gibbs High School he said he lined up at outside linebacker and was offered three college scholarships. The only one that mattered was the letter from Florida A&M University – the historically black, college powerhouse of the time.
“I can’t help but remember Florida A&M because that is where I wanted to go. I wanted to go, ‘On the hill,’ as people called it,” Brown said. “But I didn’t, and life went on.”
“Drugs stopped a lot of my friends. Going to prison stopped a lot of my friends. Being a young father stopped my dream,” Brown said. “But if someone asked me if I would do it all over again. … I’d still do it the same way.”
With a family at 17, Brown went to work. It was the early 1960s and the shine of the Deuces waned. But Brown and his wife, Flo – the mother of both of his sons – opened an alterations and clothing store in Midtown known as the Mad World of Flo and Lo.
According to Brown they did alterations for neighbors, dry cleaners, department stores and made clothes for musicians such as the Manhattans (“Kiss and Say Goodbye”) and Archie Bell and the Drells (“Do the Choo Choo”). The shop lasted for 10 years, but with the slow demise of the Deuces after desegregation, Flo and Lo packed for New York to find their fortune.
Brown didn’t take to New York. He wanted to come back to St. Petersburg, to the the Deuces where he left his two boys with family. Flo wanted to stay. They divorced and Brown returned to Midtown to raise his boys.
By the mid ’70s the Deuces was in pieces. Gone were Geech’s Bar-B-Q stand and the electric nightlife at the Manhattan Casino that inspired Ray Charles, one of scores of legendary acts to grace the stage there, to compose “St. Pete Florida Blues.”
Brown can’t explain the change. He knows some folks blame I-275, others blame Tropicana Field, and still others talk about drugs and alcohol. Brown said all he knows is that what was no longer exists.
When he returned to Midtown after his detour to New York, he opened a clothing store, Lorenzo’s. When it closed he found himself working at a dry cleaner, pressing pants. He still presses pants today, but in his own store.
On a recent afternoon at Cadillac Dry Cleaners, Lo Brown wears a smile and a white T-shirt. He gestures with quick swoops of his hands and laughs with an easy chuckle behind the counter in a small building that lacks air-conditioning, has cracked windows and a rickety roof. The shop wears a bright shade of teal with white and orange horizontal stripes encircling its middle – the paint is a tribute to the Miami Dolphins.
Brown shares the close space with Linda, his second wife. The two met in 1988, introduced by Linda’s daughter. Brown was still pressing clothes at the time.
They married on Valentine’s Day in 1994 and Linda went back to school. The two weathered their long hours, night classes and juggled the use of one car. Eventually, Linda graduated with an MBA from Florida Metropolitan University. They opened Linda’s, an alteration shop, in 1994 and their own dry cleaner in 1998.
Cadillac Dry Cleaners opened in 2003 in the Deuces. By then the old strip was a collection of forgotten businesses, boarded up buildings, sagging store fronts, rusted over signs and empty, faded lots. The Browns are convinced that the location scares off customers.
“People don’t have respect for you here,” Brown said. “People will come up to you and ask you for a quarter. If you say, ‘No,’ they’ll give you a lot of foul language and attitude. We need to escape this foolishness.”
Lo and Linda believe their new location in Tangerine Plaza provides the exposure and atmosphere needed for quicker, sustained growth. A new branch of SunTrust Bank anchors Phase 2, while Phase 3 is in an early planning stage, according to the city of St. Petersburg.
For the Deuces and Lo Brown, Tangerine Plaza might be the light at the end of a long tunnel.
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