The New "Lens" Pier: Foster's Folly

The Tampa Bay Times article on Sunday about "the Reef" portion of the new Pier got us thinking about how the whole pier design process. The article spells it out pretty clearly that the reef is not a viable option for the deep tidal current waters of the pier area, and that the designers(Michael Maltzan Architecture) didn't even bother to see what was under and around the current Pier, or figure out if it would be feasible to put this feature in the new pier. So in the end, we will have either some kind of strange in-water stagnant aquarium that loosely resembles the images in the Lens sales pitch, or we will have the normal murky tidal water with almost no view to the nearly $1 million wasted trying to construct a crystal-clear "rich marine habitat" where there was none before.

This along with the revelation earlier this year that all we would be getting out of the total Lens design would be the pier itself, and nothing else, or in the words of Mayor Bill Foster, "what we're building now is a standalone pier" and "For $50 million, people will get a Pier" then there's my favorite quote "Unless manna falls from heaven, we are unlikely to see any future phases in our lifetime". We wanted to illustrate exactly what this means using Maltzan's own images as a basis, showing you what we were sold, and what we will actually get(see below, click to magnify).

And now to the "Bill Foster specific" side of this, because it would be impossible for him not to mess this up in some way. Back in the St Petersburg Times archives we found this article that says Mayoral Candidate Bill Foster would "give voters final say on the Pier's future", yet after he won the election and only one year later it was revealed that "he doesn't support a referendum", and that the inverted pyramid will hardly be missed. Another campaign promise broken from stumbling Mayor Foster who has been pushing to secure his legacy by building a flashy new pier, whether it's a good idea or not.

WHAT'S MISSING: