![]() Petersburg’s Mahaffey family spearheaded a $24.5 million renovation of the Bayfront Theater, which had become seriously outdated. The little theater, on the other hand, had fans with deeper pockets. Competition for those big touring dollars meant newer, more state-of-the-art venues like the USF Sun Dome in Tampa and the Lakeland Civic Center began to tear away at the Bayfront arena’s business. The major rock artists began to make regular stops at the arena – mega-acts of the mid to late ‘70s including Jethro Tull, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, Jimmy Buffett, the Police, Rush, Cheap Trick and Journey. president had ever visited Pinellas County.) (Richard Nixon famously spoke to a packed arena in October, 1970, the first time a sitting U.S. Pete oldsters the Bayfront Theater was on his touring itinerary every year for decades.īecause the Bayfront Center was city-owned, the two venues were also booked for high school graduations, business conventions, political rallies and other civic events. The Bayfront Theater, as the Mahaffey was known, was reserved for smaller crowds (the original venue had slightly fewer than 2,000 seats) and more “sophisticated” entertainment like orchestras, operas and ballets.īy the mid 1970s, “soft” artists along the lines of Gordon Lightfoot, Melissa Manchester, George Benson and Chuck Mangione were infiltrating the lineup, interspersed between the bread and butter acts – the Fred Waring Orchestra, the Lettermen, Johnny Mathis, the Vienna Boys Choir – and septuagenarian Victor Borge, whose cornball comedy mixed with classical piano-playing was such a hit with the St. Petersburg landscape since 1965, although it’s changed considerably in appearance and stature.įor 22 years, it was a boxy little part of the city’s ambitious ($5 million, in early ’60s money) Bayfront Center complex, attached at the hip to a 7,000-seat arena where families gathered to see Holiday on Ice, the Lipizzaner Stallions and the Ringling Brothers/Barnum & Bailey Circus, where sports fans cheered on soccer’s Tampa Bay Rowdies, and the Suncoast Suns ice hockey team, and where – later on – the likes of Bruce Springsteen, Van Halen, Elton John and the Grateful Dead attracted massive amounts of enthusiastic fans.Īll the big “adult” spectacle acts – Elvis, Liberace, Lawrence Welk and TV-era Sonny & Cher – performed in the big hall, too, which everyone referred to as simply the Bayfront Center. The Duke Energy Center for the Arts Mahaffey Theater has been part of the downtown St. This one was originally published in October 2018. Many of these features have appeared in the Catalyst over the past two years, and new stories will be added as time goes on. KEITH RICHARDS PHOTO THEATER 1960S SERIESPETE is a series focused on our city’s illustrious (and occasionally notorious) past. ![]()
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