Ask Margaret
Dunedin happens to be where I have lived
since the mid-1970s. I can walk into town
on our neighborhood’s bumpy private road
between houses, some historic on the east
and St. Joseph Sound on the west.
Dunedin’s Victoria Drive back then was
a quiet little road, and its downtown was
even quieter. Most storefronts, except for the
popular Allen’s Florist block and the Bon
Appétit Restaurant and hotel area on the
water, were either empty, or only open when
the owners happened to be there. Many of the
store windows looked like storage units and
were void of displays.
Despite the advantages of having
Main Street angle parking, built-in
customers living nearby and charming
older buildings, downtown Dunedin
was pretty much a ghost town. It
is difficult to imagine Dunedin as
once being so empty, since today it
is filled with charming little places
to eat and shop, plus the throngs
of customers needed to make the
businesses successful. However, that
is how it was, a quiet little
town, just waiting to be
reborn. The merchants
and restaurateurs who
were there had to work
extra hard to stay in
business. Fortunately, a
great number of them not
only survived, but even
thrived, and have been
joined by others.
When my husband
Aaron Fodiman and
I started Tampa Bay
Magazine in the mid-
1980s, downtown
Dunedin was still in
a sad state. However,
fortunately in the mid-
1990s, a group of city
leaders took on the
project of rejuvenating
our small town. One of
them, our good friend
Bob Watson, then head
142 TAMPA BAY MAGAZINE | JULY/AUGUST 2021
by Margaret Word Burnside
of the Mease Hospital Foundation, asked
us to help.
Although Tampa Bay Magazine already
had some advertisers in Dunedin, I
started devoting more time to calling
on the businesses there to sell them ads.
This soon turned into one of my favorite
projects, since I enjoyed getting to know my
neighbors and loved helping them become
more successful, both individually and as
a
whole.
Probably since my background included
coordinating fashion shows and special
events for not only stores, but also for
shopping malls, I began to see
downtown Dunedin as one big
mall. This meant that the stores,
restaurants and other businesses
needed to consider themselves
as part of a whole and to work
together.
So why not group the Dunedin
ads together in the magazine for
more impact, while making it
possible for fledgling businesses
to have smaller, less
expensive ads, while
being part of the bigger
whole? Thus, Tampa Bay
Magazine’s Dunedin
pages were born.
To help implement
this, I worked with
Tony Chaplinsky Jr., who
was our magazine’s art
director at the time, to
group our Dunedin ads
together. He took a photo
of a red brick wall, which
he then positioned as a
background for the page
of Dunedin ads in our
September/October 1996
issue. Our special new
Dunedin page featured
“Delightful Dunedin,” a
portion of the city’s then
fairly new tagline, across
the top.
The Dunedin pages
of
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So many readers and business
owners have asked why the city
of Dunedin has its own section in
Tampa Bay Magazine, while other
Tampa Bay areas where they
are located do not. It’s a
legitimate question.
Downtown Dunedin’s Main Street, looking east from U.S. Highway
Alternate 19, appeared to be pretty desolate in the late 1960s, as pictured in
this vintage postcard printed by Sun News Co.