Say “St. Petersburg” and your thoughts might jump to onion-domed churches on another continent. And, yes, there is a connection to that Russian city a few thousand miles distant. Orange Belt Railroad entrepreneur Pyotr Dementyev (also known by his anglicized name, Peter Demens) extended railroad tracks from the middle of Florida to this fledgling city on Tampa Bay in 1889. Railroad construction came at the urging of land developer John Williams, who saw dollar signs in his eyes when doctors at the American Medical Convention touted the Pinellas peninsula as “the healthiest spot in the United States.” According to legend, Demens and Williams flipped a coin for the right to name the up-and-coming resort, and when Demens’ quarter prevailed he dubbed the place in honor of his hometown: St. Petersburg, Russia.

Same names are about the extent of the two cities’ similarities, which is a long way of saying this ain’t Russia, baby. St. Petersburg is Florida through and through, with miles of white-sand beach and the tempting warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico to prove it. Orange juice makes its mark here, in the form of downtown’s Tropicana Field, where the Tampa Bay Devil Rays bring a full season of baseball to the land that once made do as the stomping grounds of spring training. St. Pete also accommodates its fair share of vacationing college students. And gaggles of white-haired grandmothers make regular rounds about town, but would you expect anything less from the home of the National Shuffleboard Hall of Fame?

Downtown St. Petersburg boasts six major museums, with collections ranging from Salvador Dalí’s surrealist masterpieces to poignant reminders of the Holocaust. Blockbuster traveling exhibits also have a place to hang their famous canvasses and even children are treated to a museum that pays homage to curious minds and itchy fingers.

First on the list of St. Petersburg museum musts is the Salvador Dalí Museum, where time flies, or maybe it just melts before your eyes. The largest collection of the renowned Spanish surrealist’s works outside of Spain came to St. Petersburg via Cleveland, hometown of A. Reynolds and Eleanor Morse, who caught their first glimpse of the artist’s work at a Cleveland Museum of Art traveling retrospective in 1942. The Morses purchased their first painting shortly thereafter, and soon struck up a friendship with the artist that lasted for more than 40 years. A collection bloomed, outgrowing first the Morses’ Cleveland home and later a dedicated museum in Beachwood, Ohio, before a national search for a permanent home ended on the St. Petersburg waterfront in 1982.

The collection spans four major periods in the artist’s career and includes 95 oil paintings, over 100 watercolors and drawings, and 1,300 graphics, photographs, sculptures, and other objects. Melting watches populate a bleak landscape in one of the best known works of the surrealist movement, Dalí’s “The Persistence of Memory” (1931), currently on loan from the New York Museum of Modern Art. This famous painting is juxtaposed with its 1954 “revision” and one of the highlights of the permanent collection, the “Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.” Other current exhibits include “Selections from the Permanent Collection,” chronicling Dalí's development as a painter, and “Dalí’s Graphic Art,” which examines his printmaking career in depth. Periodic rotations of the permanent collection and quarterly exhibits featuring the work of other artists ensure a fresh perspective for both first-time and regular visitors.

Speaking of fresh perspectives, parents in search of a warm museum welcome should head straight to Great Explorations, The Hands On Museum, located on the third floor of the St. Petersburg Pier. As the name suggests, touching things is permitted, encouraged, and sometimes required here. Young visitors experience rather than view exhibits that focus on arts, science, technology, and health. Youngsters can test their sensory perceptions in the “Touch Tunnel,” a darkened maze featuring different tactile surfaces, sounds, and air directions, or line up for a fitness challenge in “The Body Shop.” Slippery, slithery, scary creatures star in the “Snakes, Spiders, & Scorpions” exhibit while budding Beethovens can explore the science of sound on a giant keyboard, laser harp, or multimedia music computer in the “Music! Music! Music!” exhibit. The museum’s mission is to make learning fun and stretch the mental muscles of kids of all ages.

Almost 300,000 square feet of retail space gave way to galleries when a former downtown department store was transformed into the Florida International Museum. The museum opened its doors to the public in 1995, and soon became the premier Florida venue for presenting blockbuster exhibits from notable museums around the world. Two permanent exhibits: “The Kennedy Collection,” a collection of artifacts from the private and political life of JFK, and “The Cuban Missile Crisis,” which recreates the tension of October 1962 in an experiential exhibit, keep the doors open year-round, but the real lure is the museum’s visiting exhibitions. Past hits included “Titanic: The Exhibition,” “Splendors of Ancient Egypt,” and “Treasures of the Czars” and current visiting exhibitions include “Norman Rockwell’s 322 Saturday Evening Post Covers” and “On Miniature Wings: Model Aircraft from the National Air & Space Museum.”

Twenty galleries grace the Mediterranean-style waterfront villa that houses the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg’s first art museum, and the most comprehensive art collection on Florida’s West Coast. The permanent collection, which has enjoyed constant growth since its inception in 1965, includes more than 4,000 works by European and American artists, spanning the 17th through the 20th centuries. Notable works include paintings by Fragonard, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Gauguin, and O’Keeffe, a Rodin sculpture, and photography by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Robert Frank. Additional gallery space is devoted to Greek and Roman antiquities, pre-Columbian and Asian Art, and an outdoor sculpture garden.

The history of St. Petersburg, the Pinellas Peninsula, and the State of Florida comes to life at yet another downtown museum with yet another lovely waterfront location--the St. Petersburg Museum of History. Permanent artifacts on view include a canoe once used by the Tocobaga Indian tribe, a 3,500-year-old mummy, and a replica of the world’s first commercial airliner. Time travel takes center stage in the permanent “Walk Through Time” gallery, featuring a recreation of an 1870 general store, a 1913 trolley car, and the “Try History on for Size” exhibit, where specially-equipped mirrors project optical illusions of visitors dressed in period costume.

St. Petersburg is also home to the Florida Holocaust Museum, which was founded by Walter P. Loebenberg, who escaped Nazi Germany in 1939. Permanent and visiting exhibits explore the causes of the Holocaust and promote tolerance and an appreciation for human life. On permanent display is a railroad boxcar from Gdania, Poland that was used by the Nazis to transport Jews and other prisoners to Auschwitz, Dachau, and Treblinka.

If the dynamic museum scene isn’t enough to shed St. Petersburg’s fusty image, add an active performing arts calendar to the mix, over two dozen galleries, a monthly Gallery Walk, and the Looper, the city-sponsored, bright-pink trolley that zips visitors from one facility to another with ease.•