The Historic Gas Plant District was a predominantly Black neighborhood of homes, churches, and businesses in downtown St. Petersburg. Between 1979 and 1990 the City acquired and cleared the neighborhood for promised redevelopment; what was ultimately built became the stadium known as Tropicana Field. This map documents 188 recorded sales from the city's acquisition files.
Created by Brad Falbo.
How this was built
This map and table were built from roughly 30,000 pages of scanned acquisition files (deeds, appraisals, correspondence, and ledgers). Every page was run through optical character recognition (OCR) to turn the scans into machine-readable text, then read by AI vision and language models that extracted the facts that matter for each parcel: grantor, sale date, price, lot size, and property type. The cleaned text and extracted fields were embedded and stored in a vector database, so the records can be searched by meaning and cross-referenced across thousands of documents rather than by exact keywords alone.
Because these are decades-old documents, often handwritten or irregularly typed, every extracted value carries a confidence rating. Clean, plainly typed text and standard forms produce high-confidence results, while figures pulled from dense tables, stamped addenda, marginalia, and non-standard typed or handwritten passages are flagged as low confidence and, where necessary, estimated (for example, lot sizes derived from the 1980s plat drawings). Each field links back to the exact source file and page it came from, so anything uncertain can be checked against the original scan.
The map is under construction; some prices, boundaries, lot sizes, and value estimates are unverified or approximate and may change as records are reviewed. “Today” values are estimates for historical context, not appraisals or an official record.