The three sections of the Berlin Wall in St. Pete, Florida, stand unmarked and unexplained in a parking lot.<\/p>\n
Wake and Wander Media<\/p>\n
St. Petersburg, Florida, is best known for beaches, sunshine, arts, and baseball<\/a>. But tucked into the city’s Warehouse Arts District is a surprising piece of history that seems to come out of left field\u2014sections of the Berlin Wall.<\/p>\n Three sections of the wall stand outside the Morean Center for Clay at 420 22nd Street South, a working ceramics facility housed inside a historic 1926 freight depot. That\u2019s about the best way to say it\u2014they stand there, in the middle of the parking lot. No sign. No fanfare. No description. You could park in front of it, as many do, and never know its significance. <\/p>\n So, what gives? Today, several locations in Florida preserve pieces of the wall, but the St. Pete installation is particularly puzzling given its unheralded location in an otherwise normal parking lot.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take a look at how this piece of history ended up in St. Pete:<\/p>\n How the Berlin Wall Ended Up In St. Pete, Florida<\/p>\n The story centers on the Outdoor Arts Foundation, a St. Petersburg nonprofit that developed public-art projects around the city. In 2007, it acquired what was described at the time as one of the world\u2019s largest private collections of material from the Berlin Wall, which included more than 100 painted sections as well as about 350 plain concrete slabs identified as sections of the Hinterlandmauer, or “hinterland wall,” part of the barrier system on the East Berlin side. <\/p>\n The Outdoor Arts Foundation had much bigger plans for the collection than keeping it in Florida. The organization intended to use the concrete to establish 100 Berlin Wall monuments across North America, with the project leading into the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009. Communities could acquire sections for public memorials, while other pieces would be given to artists to turn into works of art.<\/p>\n But the project never developed on the scale its organizers envisioned. The foundation eventually turned its attention to exhibiting and selling the painted pieces, while much of the plain concrete wall pieces remained in Florida.<\/p>\n When The Wall Was Installed<\/p>\n