MAY/JUNE 2021 | TAMPA BAY MAGAZINE 135
The St. Petersburg Public Library, also known as the
Mirror Lake Community Library, was St. Petersburg’s first
library and the Tampa Bay area’s second Carnegie Library.
The Free Library, Tampa Free Library, or Old Tampa Free
Public Library in the Tampa Heights neighborhood of
Tampa now houses the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public
Library system and other library-related offices.
HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY COOPERATIVE
GRAM
In addition to the libraries in Tampa and
St. Petersburg, our Tampa Bay area actually
had a fourth Carnegie Library on Osceola
Avenue in downtown Clearwater on a bluff
overlooking a park and Clearwater Bay. The
Clearwater Public Library was made possible
through a $10,000 grant from the Carnegie
Foundation with the provision that the city
would provide its location and maintenance.
The library opened in 1916. Its later necessary
renovations and expansions were dedicated
in 1961, and again in 1980. Clearwater’s
historic Carnegie library was torn down in
2000 to be replaced by a new state-of-the-art,
90,000-square-foot library designed by Yale
University’s School of Architecture Dean
Robert A.M. Stern. The new facility opened in
2004, was built on the same site and serves as
Clearwater’s main library.
Although bronze busts of Robert Burns
were required by Andrew Carnegie to be in
the libraries he helped underwrite, there don’t
seem to be any records of them having actually
been in any of our area’s Carnegie libraries, or
of what happened to them if they ever were
there.
However, Ian Greig of the St. Andrew’s
Society of Tampa Bay researched and helped
raise funds to commission Linda Ackley-Eaker
to sculpt an 18-inch, life-size bust of the poet
Burns. It was unveiled in January 2009 during
the society’s annual Burns Supper Night in
Tampa, then later donated to the Tampa-
Hillsborough County Library system for
display in the Germany Public Library with
the provision that the society could borrow
the bust for 48 hours each year to display it at
its dinners. 9