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Vast, mysterious, and inaccessible for centuries, the Everglades is famous worldwide. Much of this unique landscape is protected within Everglades National Park, as are exotically named places such as Flamingo, Ten Thousand Islands, Florida Bay, Anhinga Trail, Shark Valley, and Pahayokee. Dedicated in 1947, the park receives nearly a million visitors in most years who come to experience the Everglades and its alligators, crocodiles, Florida panthers, anhingas, roseate spoonbills, and egrets. It was egrets—or rather, their courtship plumes decorating ladies’ hats—that jump-started the movement to save the wetlands as a park. The Everglades was home to archaic people for thousands of years and also holds the stories of the indigenous Tequesta, Spanish and British colonialists, Mikasuki-speaking Native Americans (and the soldiers who sought to expel them), pioneer settlers, activists who created the park, residents of south Florida, and generations of visitors who have experienced the tropical wilderness of Everglades National Park.

Originally just a thoroughfare connecting St. Petersburg with Pass-a-Grille, the area on St. Petersburg Beach immediately south of the Corey Causeway would, in time, become a destination of its own. As Florida recovered from the Great Depression, real estate developers the Upham Company carefully turned a swampy and mosquito-infested property into a successful commercial district, eventually to be called St. Pete Beach's Downtown. Over the years, many businesses would come and go, but several of the earliest continue into the 21st century, and the offices of the largest municipality on Pinellas County's barrier islands are now located there.