How Abandoned Tomato Warehouses Became an Arts District

Before it had murals, glassblowers, or a name, the land south of Central Avenue in St. Petersburg's Midtown neighborhood was just industrial — tomato and seafood packing plants, a commercial laundry, a sewer equipment manufacturer, and a deserted railway station. Artists started moving in because the rent was low and the buildings were big.

A dream of a creative corridor

In early 2012, a group met at the Morean Center for Clay with a specific worry in mind: the well-known pattern where artists move into a cheap, unglamorous neighborhood, make it "cool," and then get priced out once everyone else notices. To try to get ahead of that, they formed the Warehouse Arts District Association (WADA) as a nonprofit dedicated to preserving affordable studio space for artists.

Make the neighborhood cool without pricing out the people who made it cool.

The turning point for the district's clay scene actually predates WADA: the Morean Center for Clay moved into the old Seaboard Air Line Railway station on 22nd Street, a red-brick building from 1926, and it's now a working ceramics hub with kilns, classes, and gallery space donated to the nonprofit by Beth Morean.

Glass, land, and the ArtsXchange

Glass artist Duncan McClellan is another name that keeps coming up in the district's origin story. Around 2010, he bought an abandoned Tasti-Lee tomato-packing plant at 24th Street and Emerson Avenue after years of trying (and failing) to secure space in Tampa's Ybor City, and turned it into a live/work glassblowing studio and gallery.

In late 2014, WADA itself bought 2.7 acres along the Deuces Corridor on 22nd Street and the Pinellas Trail with the help of public and private donors. That property became the ArtsXchange, now home to multiple warehouse buildings with studios, galleries, and local businesses, and the site of the neighborhood's monthly Second Saturday ArtWalk.

By 2018, the ArtsXchange's main building — a renovated, two-story, 9,200-square-foot space — had nearly 30 professional artists working inside it and a waiting list 400 names long to get a studio there.

Twenty years on

A 2026 documentary, "District Lines: The Rise of the Warehouse Arts District," traced the neighborhood's evolution from derelict industrial blocks into what current WADA board president and sculptor Mark Aeling calls "a magic place." The film also captured a harder note: Aeling warned that the city's creative community is "in crisis" as rising costs push some artists out — the exact tension the association was founded to prevent.