WestShore Plaza: Tampa’s First Enclosed Mall
It was late September 1967, and Tampa had something it had never seen before. Walk through the doors of WestShore Plaza, and the Florida heat disappeared.
Inside was a fully air-conditioned mall – long corridors of shops under one roof, foot traffic filling the common areas on opening day and many days after that.
The mall had been taking shape since October 19, 1966, when Maas Brothers opened its three-level, 238,000-square-foot store as the first anchor…