Davis Islands didn’t exist until D.P. Davis built it. In the early 1920s, the developer dredged mud from Tampa Bay onto two small natural islands — “Little Grassy Key” and “Big Grassy Key” — and manufactured a neighborhood out of bay bottom. He bought the dredged land for $350,000 and sold 306 original lots for $1,683,582, promising a resort community with hotels, a golf course, an airport, and a swimming pool. Most of it got built. Davis himself didn’t live to see how it turned out.
He went overboard on the world’s largest ship
Florida’s land boom collapsed before all 306 lots were paid off — of roughly $4 million owed, only about $30,000 ever came in. Davis sold off his stake to cover debt, then booked passage to Europe on the RMS Majestic, at the time the largest ship in the world and a sister ship to the Titanic. On October 12, 1926, somewhere in the Atlantic, he went overboard and drowned. The circumstances were never fully explained. The islands he’d built kept his name regardless.
What actually got finished
Peter O. Knight Airport sits on what was originally a third island — a connecting canal got filled in during construction to make room for the runway, dropping the archipelago from three islands to two. Marjorie Park Municipal Yacht Basin, named for Davis’s wife, is still there, along with the Davis Islands Yacht Club and its Mediterranean-style buildings from the original 1920s development, several with historic designations that protect them today. Tampa General Hospital anchors the northern tip.
Good to know
Davis Islands sits just south of downtown Tampa, connected by causeway, in Hillsborough County. It’s one of Tampa’s more affluent neighborhoods today, built entirely on land that didn’t exist before 1924.
For the rest of what’s on, there’s what’s happening across Tampa Bay this August, and for downtown just across the water, the 40-year story of the Tampa Riverwalk.
Photo: Eric Statzer, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.