Best Eco-Friendly Store of the Bay?!!

And the winner is... for Best Eco-Friendly Store in the Best of the Bay Reader's Poll... Tampa Street Market!?! You know that little shop on the corner of Florida and Osborne that you keep thinking about checking out and then the light changes and you quickly go back to your dinner planning...? Well obviously not everybody keeps driving and hopefully winning an award will get a few more people to stop. I am so amazed and floored that people voted for us. The contest is a funny mix of Editor's Pics that give out eclectic awards of their choosing and Reader's Poll Awards that involve write-ins that sometimes hit the mark and sometimes go awry. Well we are happy, stoked, pumped, and thrilled that enough people wrote in our name to get us an award!

Congrats to Ernie from Nervous Turkey on winning Best Frontman and Rebekah Pulley (my personal favorite female local singer/songwriter). Also, the oh-so-deserving Cafe Hey (chocolate zucchini bread anyone?) and Cafe Nola (beignets take me back to N'awlins) both won awards and are frequently frequented by the TSM crew.

Some very in tune readers chose Tweeprints as the best recycled product and I am so sorry to say it was the first we had heard of these beautifully designed modern cards from local designer and architect Thuy Ma. Check them out at http://www.tweeprints.com/

Last, shout outs to It's Our Nature and Why Not Boutique, the runners-up in our category. They both are definitely worth checking out with Linda at ION making awesome eco-tees at the Saturday Morning Market and Jennifer at WNB rocking great green fashions in South Tampa.

Park(ing) Day Photos of other Parks

Very cool, and all very different. Way to go Tampa!

Photos from TSM at Park(ing) Day

After

Before

Thanks for all the hard work from the folks at Supertest and the Tampa Downtown Partnership!

We got plenty of questions and funny looks from our park visitors, but

as long as we can get people talking and interacting we feel it is a good thing for the city!

Park(ing) Day Activism This Friday!

Photo courtesy of Park(ing) Day / Rebar














This week I got an email from Creative Loafing informing me that I was nominated for Best Green Activist in the Best of the Bay competition. After spitting out my morning latte uncontrollably in a fit of surprise, I decided that one of two things had happened. I had been chosen based on our people's confused definitions of activism (which would have been a sad commentary on the understanding of activism) OR there was a horrible mistake! Luckily after a few confirmation emails, I was slightly reassured by the reply of "Sorry that was a typo." I think we were nominated for Green Retail Shop but I'm not sure at this point if the voting process has the surety of a modern day democracy like say... Afghanistan. Anyhow, all joking aside, I guess we are in the running for something. We'll see.

The best irony is that this week we are actually doing something that is sort of activist like. No, we won't be carrying any obnoxious Obama = Dracula signs at a rally, but we will be having a sit in of sorts. We are participating in a mass demonstration / installation called Park(ing) Day. Our part of this involves taking over a parking spot in downtown Tampa for a Friday, paying the meter, and converting it into a miniature park. Ours should be a restful spot with native greenery and benches made in TSM fashion from scrap wood and steel. The idea is to promote a non-commercial agenda of reclaiming our underutilized space from cars and giving it back to the people. If all of these parked car people could get to downtown easily on mass transit then maybe our little 9X20 could be a greenspace in the future! Anyway, there will be about a dozen micro-parks on the Franklin corridor so grab a bike or your walking shoes and help us take back our public areas, one metered space at a time.

P.S. We get plenty of confused looks when we talk about this project to folks, but basically we are optimists and when it comes to activism, we prefer funny, positive, visual, and experimental over screaming fits of rage any day.

-Charles