From the recent Florida Humanities Council “A Tale of Two Cities” forum featuring Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio and St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker, here are the two mayors answering the question: Who is your favorite mayor from your city’s past?
Guess who is NOT going to get the St. Petersburg Times editorial recommendation in the mayoral race later this year?
Yeah, Jamie Bennett.
From today’s opinion page:
St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Jamie Bennett is pitifully ignorant or disappointingly complicit when it comes to a series of campaign mistakes and second-rate dirty tricks. He has fired the campaign manager he never should have hired, but if he stays in the race that will not end the questions or remove the stains.
Sorting out who knew what when between Bennett and his former campaign manager, Peter Schorsch, may be an exercise in futility. But some of their maneuvers cannot be dismissed as low-grade sleaziness. At least one neighborhood president was given campaign literature and requests for contributions along with free baseball tickets to the city’s Tropicana Field suite. Candidates cannot legally use public resources to benefit their campaigns. Bennett said Monday he did not know that happened and has apologized for “a blurring of lines and lack of oversight on the baseball tickets.” But he continued to distribute the baseball suite tickets he receives as a City Council member to neighborhood association presidents even after the issue was publicly raised.
The evolution of a mayor, 1974-present?
In Tampa these days, playing “Will Dick Greco run for mayor in 2011?” is getting to be nearly a full-time sport, the rumors are just that hot-and-heavy. So I picked up the telephone and gave him a call and asked him, “Are you getting ready to run for mayor – yet again?”
The answer?
They are an unlikely pair: She’s a lifelong Democrat, and he’s a conservative Republican. Their cities are known for decades of feuding and rivalries, a history that seems remote in these days of regionalism. But Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio and St. Petersburg Mayor Rick Baker both share a passion for history; Iorio was a 
history major at USF and earned her master’s in the subject, while Baker has written his own history of St. Petersburg.
In “A Tale of Two Cities,” a forum held last night at the historic Centro Asturiano building between downtown Tampa and Ybor City, Baker and Iorio showed off their historian chops in front of a crowd of a few hundred people. USF historians Gary Mormino and Ray Arsenault moderated.
I was asked to join La Gaceta publisher Patrick Manteiga and St. Petersburg Times columnist Ernest Hooper in questioning the two mayors on historical matters, and I asked both: What one historical building that no longer exists in your city would you like to have back, and why?
Their answers, and pictures of those two buildings, after the jump:
