Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa, Florida

The Straz Center is Tampa's 335,000 square foot performing arts complex on a nine-acre site beside the Riverwalk, opened in July 1987 as the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and operated by a nonprofit in a city-owned facility.

The center's About Us page calls the David A. Straz, Jr. Center for the Performing Arts one of the largest performing arts complexes in the country and says it has welcomed nearly 16 million guests since opening its doors in July of 1987. In a typical season, it says, more than 600,000 patrons attend over 1,500 events. The complex consists of five theaters, a performing arts conservatory, a rehearsal hall, three on-site restaurants, a coffee shop and banquet facilities, plus the outdoor Riverwalk Stage.

The Straz is also a civic building. The nonprofit's audited financial statements for the year ended September 30, 2021 state that it leases its operating facility from the City of Tampa for $100 per year for a period of 99 years unless sooner terminated, with automatic renewals for successive 10-year terms, and report that, according to the City of Tampa, the insured value of the operating and education facility, excluding contents, was approximately $150,000,000.

The Straz lists five indoor theaters, from the 2,610-seat Morsani Hall to the 130-seat Shimberg Playhouse, along with an outdoor stage on the Tampa Riverwalk.

The center's 2021 history quiz counts the Riverwalk Stage as its sixth stage and names the donors behind one hall: Robert and Lorena Jaeb, the namesakes of the Jaeb Theater, were former owners of the Stop and Go convenience store chain, which had 450 locations before they sold it in 1985. The same post says Disney's The Lion King had 120 seats removed from Morsani Hall to create aisles for the opening walk-in of animals, and that CATS was the first Broadway show on the main stage.

The Tampa center began with a 1965 idea from Mayor Nick Nuccio that stalled, and it was built under Mayor Bob Martinez, whose administration the City of Tampa credits with constructing the Performing Arts Center.

The Straz's own history says the idea of a performance hall downtown was first floated in 1965 by Mayor Nick Nuccio but failed to move forward, and that Mayor Bob Martinez played an integral part in the center's creation, forming a blue ribbon committee to raise funds and consider two viable sites. The City Clerk's Mayors of Tampa book (10th edition, March 2025) says Martinez served as mayor from 1979 to 1986 and that his administration is credited with the construction of the Performing Arts Center, the Tampa Convention Center, Tampa's Lowry Park Zoo and the restoration of historic City Hall. His City Clerk biography gives his term as October 1, 1979 to July 16, 1986, when he resigned.

Martinez explained the structure in a 2017 Straz profile: if people were going to give, he said, it should be to a nonprofit organization rather than the local government, so the city does not run the center and the nonprofit does. The same profile notes that the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center was renamed the David A. Straz, Jr. Center for the Performing Arts in 2009.

Opera Tampa is the center's resident opera company, founded with a 1995 production of La Boheme, and the Patel Conservatory is its school for theater, dance, music and vocal arts, added in 2004.

According to the Straz About Us page, the 2004 addition of the Patel Conservatory added 45,000 square feet for arts education, including 20 studios, three dance studios with sprung floors, a sound and lighting laboratory, a technical theater workshop, a rehearsal hall, a costume shop and a black box theater. The center's history post names it the Pallavi Patel Conservatory for the Performing Arts.

The same Straz post says Opera Tampa's first production in 1995 was La Boheme, that Maestro Anton Coppola was its founding artistic director, and that his opera Sacco and Vanzetti premiered at the then Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center on March 16, 2001. Peter Stark was the founding artistic director of Next Generation Ballet, and the musical Wonderland, which workshopped in Tampa and Houston, opened on Broadway in April 2011.

The City of Tampa's Downtown Community Redevelopment Area invests tax increment money in Straz renovations, and Hillsborough County lists the Straz as eligible for its cultural facilities matching grants.

The Downtown CRA page says the downtown CRA is currently investing TIF funds on renovations and improvements on several cultural assets like the Straz, the Tampa Theatre and the Tampa Museum of Art. The City of Tampa's Annual Comprehensive Financial Report for fiscal year 2025 lists a CRA project titled DT Straz Center Renovations with a budgeted amount of $2,054,909 and actual expenditures of $2,054,909 as of September 30, 2025, in its schedule of construction projects of at least $65,000.

Hillsborough County's Cultural Facilities Matching Grant policy names Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, Inc. (dba David A. Straz Center for the Performing Arts) among its participating agencies. Awards are made on a minimum 1:1 matching basis for capital improvement projects, and no recipient may receive more than $500,000 in any county budget year under the program, subject to annual appropriation by the Board of County Commissioners.

The Straz describes a $100 million campus project designed to open the Tampa center toward the Riverwalk and the public, not only ticket holders.

In a January 2023 Straz blog post, the center said the $100 million project would remove the patch of land that slopes down to the river so that people on the Riverwalk face an outdoor area and an adjoining stage, give Morsani and Ferguson halls a large shared lobby open to the public, and add a shaded open-air rooftop terrace on the balcony level, described as a nearly 5,000 square foot rooftop bar, with a veil wrapping the building from south to north.

Construction dates, the final budget and the public funding share have been reported in Tampa news coverage, but no City of Tampa or Straz page fetched for this check states them, so they are not repeated here. The city's 2025 financial report and Downtown CRA page above are the official record of public spending on Straz renovations as of October 2026.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, for the Straz against its own About Us page, history posts and 2021 audit, the City Clerk's mayors book and Martinez biography, the Downtown CRA page, the city's fiscal 2025 financial report and Hillsborough County's cultural facilities grant policy.