Davis Islands in Tampa, Florida

Davis Islands is a neighborhood just outside downtown Tampa that developer David Paul Davis created in the 1920s from Little Grassy Key and Big Grassy Key at the mouth of the Hillsborough River, according to the City of Tampa neighborhood page.

The City page calls Davis a Tampa native, while the National Register documentation records his birth in Green Cove Springs and his move to Tampa as a boy. The City page says the land was built up from mud dredged from the bottom of Tampa Bay, and lists Peter O. Knight Airport, the Davis Islands Yacht Club, Tampa General Hospital, the Sandra Freedman Tennis Complex and the Roy Jenkins aquatic center on the islands, along with Marjorie Park and the Marjorie Park Municipal Yacht Basin. Marjorie Park was donated to the City and named by Davis after his wife, Marjorie Merritt Davis.

The plural name has a physical basis, but official sources count the islands differently. The City page says a canal fully separates a portion of the land, making Davis Islands technically an archipelago, and that the original three islands became two when the end of one canal was filled for an airport runway. The National Register documentation for the neighborhood's Mediterranean Revival buildings instead describes the fusion of the two large islands into one irregularly shaped island when the southeast entrance of Currituck Channel was closed for Peter O. Knight Airport in the 1930s.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, against the City of Tampa Davis Islands neighborhood page, the National Park Service's Davis Islands Multiple Property Documentation Form, three City news releases and the Mobility Department's Davis Boulevard page, the Davis Islands Civic Association's community plan page and a 2020 Tampa Magazine history.

Davis bought the small islands from their private owners for $150,000 and the City's submerged lands for $200,000, after agreeing to keep the new islands at least 700 feet from Bayshore Boulevard, according to the National Register documentation.

The nomination records that David Paul Davis was born on November 29, 1885, in Green Cove Springs, came to Tampa in 1894 with his father and attended the public schools in Tampa, and later sold real estate in Jacksonville and Miami before returning to Tampa in 1924. The City hesitated over the project because residents along Bayshore Boulevard complained that it would spoil their view of the bay. Davis also agreed to finance the bridge connecting Davis Islands with the city and to devote fifty five acres of the subdivision to parkland owned by the City.

In May 1924 Davis set up D.P. Davis Properties, Inc., capitalized at $3,500,000, and contracted with the Northern Dredge and Dock Company of Minnesota to build the islands. The nomination says he proposed to bulkhead and fill an area about 8,000 feet long by 5,700 feet wide at the base, dredging 8,000,000 cubic feet of sand from Hillsborough Bay. The G.F. Young Engineering Company of St. Petersburg drew the subdivision plans, with twenty six miles of streets and about 3,500 lots, plus yacht basins, tennis courts and a country club with a nine hole golf course.

Davis Islands lots sold before dredging had even begun, and by October 24, 1925 every lot held by the Davis company had been sold for a total of $18,138,000, according to the National Register documentation.

A two lot per person limit and heavy advertising brought buyers to line up at the office the day before the first sale, and the nomination calls the $1,683,000 day a record figure in Florida at that time. Writing in Tampa Magazine in 2020, a Tampa Bay History Center historian gives the same three hour, 300 lot, $1,683,000 opening and dates it October 4, 1924. The nomination adds that the $18,138,000 total did not top Carl Fisher's 1925 sales at Miami Beach but surpassed everything on the west coast of Florida.

The first Davis Islands buildings were designed by Miami architect Martin Hampton in what Davis called the Venetian style, with Tampa architect Franklin Adams overseeing the work, according to the National Register documentation.

Hampton came to Tampa in November 1924 to sign a contract with Davis and produced designs for the first six buildings in his Miami studio. The nomination says Hampton's office prepared designs for twenty structures on Davis Islands, seventeen of which still survived when it was written, and that Adams personally designed twenty nine of the more than 100 buildings and structures surviving from the 1925 to 1935 period, including the Marjorie Park Yacht Basin gatehouse and an above ground municipal swimming pool.

Early projects named in the nomination include the Mission style Davis Islands Coliseum, the country club, the Bay Isle Business Building and the Palace of Florence, Venetian and Spanish apartment buildings. The seven story Davis Arms Hotel, later renamed the Mirasol, was planned at ten stories and $2,000,000 but opened in 1926 at a cost of $750,000, and the first houses in the subdivision were ready for occupation by June 1926. During the same building period, Davis and the Tampa City Commission chose a site at the north end of Marjorie Park for the Tampa Municipal Hospital. Tampa Magazine adds that the Bay Isle Building at 238 East Davis Blvd., designed by Adams and completed in 1925, is still the anchor of the islands' business community.

After the Florida boom collapsed in 1926, Stone and Webster, a large construction and utilities company, took over Davis Islands, according to the National Register documentation.

The nomination says the August 1926 deal gave Davis forty nine percent of the stock of a new company plus $250,000 in cash and credits, which he put into his Davis Shores development at St. Augustine; Stone and Webster then took sole control and formed Davis Islands Inc. Only fourteen building permits were issued on the islands in all of 1926, although sixty houses were ready for occupancy by the end of that year. On the morning of October 13, 1926, news reached Tampa that Davis had been lost overboard two days out of New York on a voyage to Europe. Tampa Magazine gives October 13, 1926 as the date of his death, while the nomination dates the news to that morning.

Public works continued. A City of Tampa release states that the Davis Island Swimming Pool was constructed in 1929 at a cost of $75,000 and was renamed in 1965 for Roy E. Jenkins. The nomination records that Peter O. Knight Airport was built in the 1930s with additional dredge and fill, that the subdivision lost its golf course to house lots, that a large section of Marjorie Park was claimed by expansions of Tampa Municipal Hospital, and that intensive development beginning in the 1950s filled nearly every available building lot.

Current public work on Davis Islands is guided by a 2007 community plan and a list of City capital projects in Council District 4, according to the City of Tampa neighborhood page and the Davis Islands Civic Association.

The Davis Islands Civic Association says the community approved the Davis Islands Community Plan on June 6, 2007, that Tampa City Council approved it on November 15, 2007, and that the plan's Stewardship Team, formed in January 2008, completed its strategic actions on June 25, 2008. The City Mobility Department says its Davis Boulevard Complete Streets project, which resurfaces the road from the roundabout off Severn Ave to the Davis Islands Bridge in three segments, was initiated in response to that plan.

On April 4, 2022, the City of Tampa reported that Phase I had added 5,150 linear feet of bike lanes and Phase II another 2,800 linear feet. Phase III was then expected to bring four way stops at Chesapeake, Biscayne and Barbados avenues, 22 golf cart parking spaces and a 15 mile per hour limit in the Davis Islands Village; neither City page checked for this guide reports its completion, and the Mobility page was last updated 10/01/2023.

Storms remain the islands' biggest recurring cost. In July 2025 the City announced that Roy Jenkins Pool on Davis Islands had reopened nine months after Hurricane Helene inundated it, with everything in the two story pool building replaced and repairs totaling more than $600,000.