TAMPA — The craftsman bungalows, granite curbs and Queen Anne style homes that give Hyde Park its distinctive character are also a fixture of the adjacent Courier City Oscawana neighborhood.
The homes, mostly built when the Hyde Park enclave was being settled between 1886 and 1933, helped put the neighborhood in the Hyde Park Historic District that was added in 1985 to the federal National Register of Historic Places. But Courier City Oscawana was left out when, three years later, city officials drew their own boundaries and created a local Hyde Park historic district that places tougher criteria on whether to approve requests to alter or demolish period homes.
The result has been that some 34 period homes from the neighborhood east of Howard Avenue and south of Kennedy Boulevard have been legally demolished since 1988. The most recent was a 1910 bungalow on South Melville Boulevard that met the wrecking ball late last year.
Less than half of the houses in the neighborhood are now historic, down from 69 percent in 1988, leading some council members and residents to fear that the neighborhood is losing its identity.