West Tampa Is Restoring Two Landmarks Right Now. Only One Of Them Is Staying Standing.

Drive down Howard Avenue this fall and you'll pass two City of Tampa construction projects that both get called "restorations" in the same press releases, on the same city webpage, sometimes in the same sentence. One of them is a careful excavation, with laser scans and hand-drawn 1950s blueprints guiding every decision. The other is a demolition, full stop, with a single mural getting a second life on glass while the building that held it for seventy years comes down.

If you live in West Tampa, you've probably already seen both sites. The George Guida Sr. House sits quietly behind fencing in the southwest corner of Macfarlane Park, looking mostly intact from the street. A few blocks over on North Howard, Rey Park is a flattened lot with equipment parked where a community center used to stand. Same neighborhood, same funding source, same word in every headline. Completely different fates.

"Restoration" Is Doing Two Jobs This Year

The George Guida Sr. House at 1516 N. Renfrew Street and the Rey Park Center at 2301 N. Howard Avenue are both getting worked on with money tied to the West Tampa Community Redevelopment Area, the district the city created in 2015 to steer investment back into a neighborhood built west of the Hillsborough River in the 1880s. Both projects carry the word "historic" in their city paperwork. Both are described as preserving something residents care about.

But look at what each project is actually doing to the structure itself, and the difference is stark enough that it's worth laying out side by side.

That last row is where the real surprise sits, and I'll come back to it. First, the two buildings deserve their own stories, because they earned very different kinds of affection from this neighborhood.

The House Built By Hand Is Being Rebuilt By Hand

George Guida Sr. came to be known as "Mr. West Tampa" the honest way: by showing up. He opened a home furnishings business, the American Venetian Blind Co., in 1938, the same year he married Palmira Priede. The business grew into George Guida & Sons, selling kitchen appliances, carpet and air conditioners as his five children joined the company. Along the way he helped build or fund landmarks across West Tampa and Interbay, including the Jesuit High School Field House, the original Rey Park Recreation Center and Boys & Girls Club facilities. The city later renamed a road through Macfarlane Park in his honor.

The house he designed himself in the early 1950s, drawing the plans by hand and building it through his own company, was never just a residence. It hosted Latin families' weddings and graduations, meetings of the Jesuit Academy Social Club, and fundraisers tied to St. Joseph School and Church. The driveway, poured in the shape of a heart as a tribute to Palmira, became the detail everyone remembered.

The city bought the property in 1984 with plans to fold it into the park's green space. Preservationists pushed back, and the house earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 2006. Even with that protection, it sat mostly empty for decades. Tampa's own historic preservation manager, Dennis Fernandez, described its status bluntly before work began:

"Currently, it's in a state where it's just moth-balled, in a holding pattern."

That changed in July 2026, when the city announced the $3.9 million restoration was underway. The project is currently in what officials call the selective demolition and exploratory restoration phase, meaning crews are opening up sections of the house to assess its actual condition before finalizing the scope of work, using Guida's original hand-drawn architectural renderings as the reference point throughout. The plan preserves the family room's fireplace, its tilework and built-in cabinetry, an indoor mural, and the outdoor chimney's tall ship mural. The heart-shaped driveway is being restored to its original shape.

City officials told WUSF they're hopeful the work can wrap within a year of the July announcement, which would put a realistic finish somewhere around mid-2027. That's a hope, not a lock. A city spokesperson also acknowledged there are still real uncertainties in the timeline given the building's age and condition, which tracks with the project's own history: an earlier phase of work, including reroofing, was expected to begin back in 2024, and the fuller restoration only got its public kickoff two years later. If you're watching this site, expect the visible progress to look slow and careful for a while yet.

The Park Center Everyone Grew Up In Is Coming Down Completely

Rey Park Center opened in 1955 and spent the next seven decades as the kind of building that shows up in a lot of West Tampa memories without ever making the postcards. Starting in 1959, it ran Teen Nights twice a week, with dances, novelty games and mixers. By the 1980s it was where seniors gathered for bridge while teenagers played pool after school. The 1990s brought cooking classes, homework help and weightlifting. The last major renovation happened in 1997, under then-Mayor Dick Greco.

None of that history saved the building itself. In June 2026, the city broke ground on a $5 million project, $4 million of it from the West Tampa CRA covering demolition, new park amenities and the building itself, with another $1 million earmarked for streetscape improvements around the park. The old center is coming down entirely and being replaced with a new 5,082-square-foot building plus 2,281 square feet of covered porch, along with a new playground, shade structures, a basketball court, a walking loop, an open play lawn, and an event stage and outdoor fitness area.

The one piece of the old building that survives is its mural, a piece painted directly onto the exterior facing Howard Avenue in 1984 by artist Carl Cowden III. Rather than trying to preserve the physical wall, the city arranged for Cowden to recreate his own work on glass, to be displayed inside the new center. It's a genuine continuity, since the same hand made both versions, but it's a different kind of preservation than what's happening a few blocks away at the Guida House. Nothing of the 1955 structure itself is staying.

The new Rey Park Center is targeted for completion by December 2027.

The Site With More Visible Progress Isn't The One Finishing First

Here's the part that catches people off guard if they're only watching one project or the other. Rey Park's demolition started in June 2026, a full month before the Guida House restoration was even publicly announced. If you drove past both sites in July, Rey Park looked like the neighborhood was moving faster: a cleared lot, heavy equipment, visible transformation. The Guida House, still in its quieter exploratory phase, looked like almost nothing was happening at all.

But run the two target dates side by side and the order flips. The Guida House has a hoped-for finish around mid-2027. Rey Park's target is December 2027, roughly five months later, despite having a half-year head start on visible construction. The building that looks further along on any given afternoon isn't necessarily the one that opens to the public first.

That's worth knowing if you're the kind of resident who tracks these things on a walk through Macfarlane Park or a drive up Howard Avenue. The dramatic teardown gets the attention. The quiet, careful one, sitting behind fencing with almost nothing visibly happening, might actually beat it to the finish line.

Both projects sit inside the same compact stretch of the West Tampa CRA, the district bounded roughly by Walnut Street to the north, Cypress Street to the south and Howard Avenue to the west, the same historic footprint where more than a hundred cigar factories once operated before the industry moved on and left behind brick buildings that West Tampa has spent decades finding new uses for. A full teardown and a full preservation happening at the same time, a few minutes apart, isn't really a contradiction. It's the same neighborhood doing what it's always done with the buildings it can't bring itself to lose, just choosing a different method depending on what's actually still there to save.

If you're the kind of neighbor who likes knowing what's changing on your own streets before it shows up anywhere else, that's the kind of thing Ryan Block Realty pays attention to for West Tampa year-round. Let's connect.