Destruction of Safety Harbor Memorial Pier ‘devastating’ to community
By Tampa Bay Newspapers,
4 days ago
Onlookers view the wreckage of the Safety Harbor fishing pier on Friday. [ TRACEY MCMANUS | Times ]
SAFETY HARBOR — The city’s Fire Marshal Dick Brock Memorial Pier didn’t survive Hurricane Helene.
“The Safety Harbor Pier is completely gone,” Marcus Afzali posted on the Safety Harbor Strong Facebook page on Friday. Within two days, his post received almost 2,000 likes and 400 comments.
Most posts expressed sadness, and many of the comments came with photos of the pier’s heydays.
“One of my favorite photos of me and my dad there in 2019,” Heather Rippert wrote with a photo of two silhouetted figures standing on the pier. “Our last visit of epic adventures together before he died.”
The pier dates to the early 1900s and was given its memorial tribute, after the late fire marshal, in 2021. It was closed due to damage from Hurricane Debby and was slated for replacement, but that didn’t seem to soften the blow for some.
“Thanks for the memories, the sunrises and everything in between!” Sally McKinney wrote on the Facebook thread. “Time for a new chapter for the Safety Harbor Pier!”
“The city wasn’t kidding,” Jarine Dotson commented. “It was ready to go.”
The remnants of the Safety Harbor pier are seen on Friday. Before it was decimated by Hurricane Helene, the downtown attraction was a popular stopping point for tourists and locals alike. [ TRACEY MCMANUS | Times ]
For others, a new pier won’t be the same as the one that was known for being beautiful in its simplicity.
“When I heard about what happened to the pier, I just started crying,” Janet Lee, a Safety Harbor artist and author, told Tampa Bay Newspapers. “That structure was so important to me. The pier is Safety Harbor.”
Despite the damaged pier being “in limbo” for several months, “it was still there,” said Lee, who has many pier-related art pieces and artifacts scattered around her downtown home. “We could still see it. So, when I saw the post, I cried, and my mom cried. And I felt kind of silly, because it was just a pile of wood, but it meant so much to us.”
Lee compared the loss of the pier to losing a loved one.
“It’s like when you see someone and they pass away the next day,” she said. “It makes you realize you have to appreciate everything and everyone around you every day.”
So, Lee went for a last peek.
“I went down there and got out and walked through the debris and over the tape and onto the boardwalk,” she said. “I found a beautiful piece of wood with a bolt in it that I carried back to my car and brought it to my house, and I plan to paint a picture of the pier on it.”
The new piece will join a mural her mother, Nancy Mitchell, recently finished on the side of her home and a painting Lee finished that morning, a watercolor tribute to pier.
“It’s really a piece of history that will be with me forever,” Lee said, adding she noticed another man doing the same thing as she left the scene.
Safety Harbor residents and artists Janet Lee, left, and her mother, Nancy Mitchell, are seen in front of a mural of the city’s pier that Mitchell recently completed on the side of her downtown home. [ JEFF ROSENFIELD | Tampa Bay Newspapers ]
According to Laura Kepner, the author of “A Brief History of Safety Harbor, Florida,” the intense reactions to the pier’s destruction are understandable.
“We attach our happy memories to it,” Kepner said. “It’s a place to see manatees and fish and hang out, and it reminds people of their happy memories in the Harbor. So even though it’s not as traumatic as a person’s death, when something devastating happens to something you love, it hits home.”
Kepner said the pier “had a lot of uses and many iterations” over the years, noting the structure was built by the Tucker family in the early 1900s and once featured a diving board, a snack bar and a bar before it was destroyed by the great hurricane of 1921.
“It was devastating for the community,” she said, “because it’s always been the community meeting place.”
While she said it was “symbolic” that the pier was already closed due to a hurricane and then destroyed by another one, Kepner said the structure, which once saw someone drive a car to the end and set it on fire, was and will continue to be a lasting image of Safety Harbor once it is rebuilt again.
“It will continue to be a symbol of the community, because every generation in Safety Harbor has enjoyed this pier,” Kepner said.
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