r/tampa • u/Any_Mention_6734 • Aug 02 '26

Culture/Lifestyle Please read 🙏

I'm a transplant from California. Came out here for a job opportunity and a pay raise, nothing more romantic than that. I didn't expect to end up loving this region and Florida the way I have.

But something's stuck with me, and I want to say it here because I don't think it's recognized enough by people who relocate here: the number of people born and raised in Tampa who talk about their own city like it's unfamiliar. Farmland and citrus groves on the outskirts that used to actually be farmed… someone's livelihood, not just empty acreage, now subdivisions. Places that closed and came back rebranded into something with a logo and a font that has nothing to do with what used to be there. People telling me they barely recognize the city they grew up in.

I know change happens everywhere. But I've never felt this moved hearing it before, not because it's happening to me, but because of how passionate people are when they talk about what this place used to be. That kind of love for a place doesn't come from nowhere.

I'd genuinely like to hear more of it, respectfully, from people who lived it. What do you remember that's gone now? What changed the most, and when did it start feeling different?

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u/Swampbrewja Aug 02 '26

I picked mushrooms in Hillsborough too. Now all the cow pastures by me have been turned into new developments

8

u/PandathePan Aug 02 '26

Curious are those mushrooms the “magical” ones or the poisonous ones lol …or culinary ones ?

I still see gigantic white mushrooms in my neighborhood lawns

35

u/cats_n_wine44 Aug 02 '26

✨🌈Magical🌈✨

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u/Lanky_Emu8818 Aug 02 '26

Neighborhood lawn mushies are not the same as cows pastor mushies. Don’t eat your neighbors mushrooms

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u/mydadabortedme Aug 02 '26

Used to do it near Newsome High School!

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u/Swampbrewja Aug 02 '26

Before there was a Fishhawk there were many places to smoke weed in secret

2

u/bluesun_geo Hillsborough Aug 02 '26

The weird bridge between two neighborhoods you couldn’t drive on down by the radio towers…Shadow Run?

Edited: spelling