Notable Tampa Residents and the Landmarks Named for Them

Official Tampa and Hillsborough County records single out residents such as educator Blanche Armwood, Judge George Edgecomb, legislator Helen Gordon Davis, commissioner Jan Platt, judge John Germany, banker Howard Frankland, football star Lee Roy Selmon and golfer Babe Zaharias.

Each of those eight has a Tampa area public building, road, bridge or course named for them, and Hillsborough County explains why in its Faces Behind the Places series, which profiles the namesakes of the county's well known buildings, parks and roads (Hillsborough County). This guide sticks to people those official pages, a county historical marker, the National Park Service and the City of Tampa describe; it does not rank residents or include private individuals.

For Lee Roy Selmon the Hillsborough County page gives a death date, Sept. 4, 2011, at age 56, rather than a birth year (Hillsborough County), so the table lists only that date for him.

Blanche Armwood, born in Tampa in 1890, and George Edgecomb, raised in Tampa, are the education and court pioneers Hillsborough County honors with a high school and the downtown courthouse.

Born in Tampa, Armwood graduated from St. Peter Claver Catholic School and Spelman Seminary in Atlanta, passed the Florida State Uniform Teachers Exam in 1902 at age 12, helped found Tampa's Urban League, supervised Hillsborough County's segregated schools for Black students beginning in 1922, and earned a law degree from Howard University in 1937 (Hillsborough County). The Hillsborough County School Board named a high school for her; Armwood High School opened in August 1984 on U.S. Highway 92 in Seffner, near where the Armwood family homesteaded in the 1870s.

A Middleton High School student body president who went on to a Howard University law degree, Edgecomb was working as the county's first African American prosecutor in 1973, when Governor Askew appointed him the first African American county court judge in Hillsborough County (Hillsborough County). He also led the Greater Tampa Urban League board. No downtown Tampa building had carried an African American's name before the $42.9 million George E. Edgecomb Courthouse, dedicated in January 2004.

Helen Gordon Davis, Jan Platt and John Germany are the Tampa officials whose names sit on a women's center, a South Tampa library and the downtown main library.

Mayor Jane Castor, a lifelong Tampa resident by the city's own account, is the one living officeholder included.

Davis became the first Hillsborough County woman elected to the Florida House in 1974 and spent 18 years as a state representative and senator, working on equal pay and child care; she and her husband helped found the Women's Survival Center, now the Helen Gordon Davis Centre for Women on Hyde Park Avenue (Hillsborough County).

Platt served 24 years as a Hillsborough County commissioner and one term on the Tampa City Council, and the county's Jan K. Platt Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection Program also bears her name (Hillsborough County). Germany, a circuit judge and a founding partner of the Holland and Knight law firm, helped conceive the University of South Florida in the mid 1950s and led the drive that opened the Ashley Street library in 1968 after Tampa outgrew its 1917 Carnegie library; the city named that library for him in 1999 (Hillsborough County).

The living officeholder on this list is the mayor. The City of Tampa's official biography calls Jane Castor the 59th Mayor of the City of Tampa and a lifelong Tampa resident who graduated from Chamberlain High School and the University of Tampa, became Tampa's first female Chief of Police in 2009 and was elected mayor in 2019 (City of Tampa).

Banker Howard Frankland, Buccaneers great Lee Roy Selmon and golfer Babe Zaharias are the Tampa business and sports figures behind the Howard Frankland Bridge, the Selmon Expressway and the Babe Zaharias Golf Course.

Frankland ran Pioneer Tire Company in Tampa, inventing ways to recap tires, was president of the First National Bank of Tampa and the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce, and worked to attract MacDill Air Force Base; the chamber proposed naming the new cross bay bridge for him, and it opened in 1960 (Hillsborough County).

Selmon was the first player the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers drafted, first overall in 1976, and became Tampa Bay's first inductee into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1995; he stayed in Hillsborough County as a bank executive and then USF's athletic director from 2001 (Hillsborough County). The Crosstown Expressway, whose first segment opened in 1976 between Gandy Boulevard and downtown Tampa, was renamed for him in 1999.

Zaharias, born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1911, won Olympic gold in the javelin and 80 meter hurdles in 1932 and co founded the LPGA in 1949, the year she and her husband moved to Hillsborough County and bought a golf course in North Tampa (Hillsborough County marker). Twenty five years later the City of Tampa took over the course and reopened it as the Babe Zaharias Golf Course, where the county marker now stands. She also set a 72 hole record at the 1951 Tampa Open.

The National Park Service credits Henry Plant with the railroad and the Tampa Bay Hotel and Vicente Martinez Ybor with Ybor City, but neither federal page describes either man as a Tampa resident.

Ybor, born in Valencia, Spain, a manufacturer who backed Cuban independence, moved his factories to Key West and New York in the late 1860s, and in 1885 he and Ignacio Haya formed a partnership to build a cigar manufacturing town near Tampa, which then had about 700 people (National Park Service). The first 176 worker houses went up in Ybor City in 1886, and Tampa annexed the district in 1887. The same NPS page notes that the Cuban leader Jose Marti visited Ybor City before the 1895 Cuban War for Independence, a visit rather than a residence.

Plant, founder of the Plant System of railroads and steamboats, brought the railroad to Tampa in 1884 and built the Tampa Bay Hotel between 1888 and 1891; he died in 1899, and his heirs sold the hotel and 50 acres to the City of Tampa in 1905 (National Park Service). Part of the old hotel now serves the University of Tampa and its south wing holds the Henry B. Plant Museum, and the Tampa history section has separate guides on Ybor City and on the hotel's role in 1898.

Most of these Tampa names are on working public buildings: the Edgecomb Courthouse on Twiggs Street, the John Germany Library on Ashley Drive, the Platt library on Manhattan Avenue and the Babe Zaharias course in North Tampa.

The Edgecomb Courthouse at 800 E Twiggs St. is the main building of Florida's 13th Judicial Circuit, 332,000 square feet, with a bronze bust of Edgecomb in its lobby (Hillsborough County). The 140,000 square foot John F. Germany Public Library at 900 N. Ashley Drive is the flagship of the Tampa Hillsborough County Public Library system and holds history collections (Hillsborough County).

The Jan Kaminis Platt Regional Library is a 25,000 square foot branch at 3910 S. Manhattan Ave. in South Tampa (Hillsborough County). The Howard Frankland Bridge became the northbound span when a parallel southbound bridge opened in 1990, and the county page says the Florida Department of Transportation was vetting further improvements, a status that dates from the page's January 2024 revision (Hillsborough County). The county's Babe Zaharias marker, erected in 2023, stands on the course at 11412 N. Forest Hills Drive, and its text says the city reopened the course in 1974 (Hillsborough County). Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the Hillsborough County Faces Behind the Places pages, the National Park Service and the City of Tampa mayor's page.