Historic Pensacola comes alive with downtown murals showcasing city's rich past

Genius idea: Hide that trash with some classy blasts from the past.

That's exactly what the Downtown Improvement Board has done, partnering with the University of West Florida Historic Trust to place large photographic murals of historic downtown Pensacola so as to obscure a large trash compactor at the corner of Garden and Jefferson streets. Because which would you rather look at? Trash or faces and places from yesteryear?

The new murals show a vibrant Pensacola from years gone past and are part of the UWF Historic Trust's POP: Murals project.

The murals are undated, but the photos range from a scene showing the "East Hill via Jackson St." trolley on a crowded downtown street to a bustling car fair in downtown Pensacola.

The photos depicted range from the 1910s through the 1960s, said Ross Pristera, Historic Preservationist with the UWF Historic Trust.

"People like to look at old photos, and this is a way of making blank walls or boring walls more interesting,'' Pristera said. "They can help bring life to a city."

But if you look closely, you can see depictions of Pensacola's past throughout the city.

The UWF Historic Trust received a grant in 2017 from the National Park Service for the creation of two maritime themed murals in downtown Pensacola, and the murals were installed at the Museum of Commerce and Voice of Pensacola and were on display during the 2018 Visit Pensacola Tall Shops Festival.

The reaction to the murals were so positive that the UWF Historic Trust launched its POP: Murals project soon after to continue spicing up Pensacola present with glimpses of Pensacola past.

The murals around the trash compactor aren't the only new murals. Recently, a huge mural showing a spirited Fiesta of Five Flags celebration sometime in the 1950s was installed, replacing a previous maritime mural.

Some personal favorites are on the eastern wall outside of the Regions Bank, 70 N. Baylen St., where 14 large murals depict life at the once-grand San Carlos Hotel at the intersection of Palafox and Garden streets, where the U.S. Courthouse is located today. The murals depict the towering exterior of the hotel in two photographs from circa 1910 and 1945, a lively parade passing the San Carlos in 1911 and numerous other images of the hotel showing smiling faces of guests and employees who have long since passed, along with a long-gone era.

At other locations, the murals are painting depictions, including a watercolor painting of a Pensacola port scene from the late 1800s that is prominent on Seville Tower, 226 S. Palafox St.

Speaking of the Port of Pensacola and history, just last week I took my 5-year-old grandson Beckett ("Rumpus") down to the waterfront to check out the imposing USNS Sgt. William R. Button, a 657-foot long cargo ship that lords over the smaller tugboats and other vessels on the waterfront.

"Is this the port?" he asked, and I was excited the little kindergartener could recognize it as such. We walked around the water and moseyed on over to the statue of Tristan de Luna in Plaza De Luna honoring the Spanish conquistador and explorer who, along with 1,500 passengers, established the first European settlement in the New World in an area just off Pensacola Bay in 1559. (Of course, that's ignoring accounts of Norse explorers to the Americas that so many of us never learned about in school.)

So I tried to teach Beckett a little bit about Pensacola's history and told him about de Luna's doomed settlement.

"So there was no one else in America when they got here?" Rumpus asked, as he posed for a photo under the statue's gaze.

Honestly, a million things went through my mind? How do I explain the European colonization of the Americas to a kindergarten student? How do I distinguish "first European settlement" from the indigenous settlements of the land? Will he even understand "colonization"? How do I even approach the impact of that colonialization?

Luckily, Beckett saw a tugboat he though was cool, so we ventured on to that. I'll teach him about de Luna and the messy rest later, promise. Because history is important and, sadly, so much of it is forever lost to, well, history.

Think of the millions of names lost to time's march, born before names were written or faces and voices were photographed or recorded. There is no record of them. (Recently watched a short documentary about the first known name in recorded history. It's supposedly of an accountant named "Kushim" and it was recorded sometime between 3,000 and 3,400 B.C. on tablets used to document barley transactions in Southern Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq).

We're lucky that we can preserve our history, and that we do. These awesome murals bring us back to another time yet take place in vistas we're all familiar with. We walk the same streets the people forever immortalized in these murals walked. Though it would be awesome if we still had street trolleys going through town.

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Historic Pensacola comes alive with downtown murals showcasing city's rich past