GEORGE SHEPPARD "Dad" GANDY in 1922 1851-1946

A small group of men sat around a table on which was spread out a large map of Pinellas Peninsula and surrounding country. With a pair of calipers, they carefully measured the distance by all possible routes between St. Petersburg and Tampa. “Can’t you see the answer?” asked one of the men. “Can’t you see that a bridge across Old Tampa Bay is almost indispensable? Look how much distance it would cut off. Nearly fifty miles by land-by bridge it would only be nineteen or twenty miles. Think what that would mean to this section of the state!”

The others were frankly skeptical. “Sure, it would be a fine thing,” said one. “But it will never be built during our lifetime. Why it would cost millions and how could you hope to get your money back? It’s foolish to think of such a thing. Forget it.”

The advocate of the bridge listened to the arguments of his friends. He heard them say how hopelessly visionary such a project was and how it could never be put through. He paid attention to all that they had to say-and then promptly disregarded their advice.

He refused to “forget” the bridge idea. “Perhaps you gentlemen are right,” he said. “Perhaps the bridge is just a foolish dream. But I don’t believe it. And I never will be satisfied until the bridge is built.”


     

When George Gandy's colossus opened for traffic in 1924, it was the feat of its day.   One of the longest toll span bridges of the world in its time, it was a financial and engineering marvel that instantly accelerated the residential and commercial development of the entire Tampa Bay area.  But the major wonder of the feat was in its gestation and birth, because from the time that it was a gleam in the stern and flinty eyes of George Gandy, to the time when the first piling was hammered in to the bedrock of Tampa Bay, nearly a generation had passed. In the early 1900's, it wasn't Gandy's "colossus" but instead, his folly...a crazy notion that was greeted, at best, with patronizing guffaws from the more practical wags of the day.  Over the years, the project careened on the precipice of failure enough times to make the shrewdest stock market wizard hedge his bottom dollar for lunch money and a nice, sound, U.S. savings bond.  But the imposing Philadelphian simply said, "I am going to build that bridge."  And with the single-mindedness of a zealot precariously mixed with a razor will and unmitigated cheek, he did.

George Gandy was born in Tuckahoe, New Jersey, in 1851.  He was one of two sons of sea captain Louis Gandy and Jane Reeves Gandy. George, who had an older brother named Alfred, received only a grammar school education. He grew to be 5-feet-2 and came to be called the "runt." Gandy was always defensive about his size; on many occasions he fought those who ridiculed him. When he was 16, his father went bankrupt and young George went to Philadelphia, where he studied bookkeeping for three months. At that time he lived in Northern Liberties near the home of the Henry Disston family, becoming friends with Henry's sons and having Mary (Henry's only daughter) as a playmate. When he finished bookkeeping school, Gandy went to Disston's Keystone Saw Works as a clerk in the bookkeeping department at $4 a week.

Gandy's first run-in with Disston occurred in 1872. The year found Disston stressed over a growing business and a commitment to move it to Tacony. During a discussion, he cursed at Gandy in front of the men in the office. Disston swore at him again the next morning. At the end of the workday, an annoyed Gandy headed for Henry Disston's office. Disston never stopped writing as Gandy entered the room, instead abruptly demanding, "What do you want?" Gandy waited until Disston finally looked up and raised his glasses to the top of his head.  "I am only a boy and I don't think I am presuming," Gandy started, "but I have feelings of a man just the same. I don't like your treatment of me, and I want to quit."  A surprised Disston replied, "But George, I didn't mean anything." Actually, Gandy liked Disston and accepted his apology. He then offered his boss some advice: "Here is your trouble. You get your mind on something and go with three or four men to see something, and when you come back to the office, five or six people are waiting to see you. Suppose when you get busy you just ring for me." Henry Disston always liked men who spoke their minds and were loyal, hardworking employees. He had found that trait in longtime family friend George Gandy. In 1872, Disston placed Gandy in charge of the payroll department. On his first day on the job, Gandy informed Disston that he would reorganize the department using his own system.  

Read about the rest of George Gandy's interesting career with Disston, the improvements he made, and how things changed after his marriage to Disston's daughter and her death, as recorded by Gandy himself in his diary.

At age 35, Gandy began suffering from a heart condition which lasted the rest of his life and was occasionally aggravated by his business dealings.  In 1882, Gandy became involved in the transportation business. While working in transportation construction and operations, he achieved several prominent positions, such as secretary and treasurer of the Frankford and Southwark Railroad, vice-president of the Frankford and Southwark, president of the Omnibus Company, and president of the Fairmont Park Transportation Company. Gandy organized the construction of many trolley lines and electric railways, and was recognized in his field as an expert on traction problems. Eventually, he became vice-president of the Philadelphia Electric Traction Company. The tireless Gandy also served as president of the St. Petersburg and Gulf Railway, and this position brought him to west-central Florida in 1902.

George S. Gandy, Jr. with Tony Jannus in the Benoist Flying Boat, Feb. 1914

At the beginning of the twentieth century, travel between the Pinellas peninsula and the mainland of Hillsborough County was limited to difficult land routes. Despite the arrival of the railroad to the lower Pinellas in the late 1800s, journeys between Pinellas and Hillsborough remained difficult and time-consuming because no direct rail link existed until 1914. The arrival of the automobile cut the travel time, but it took approximately six hours for a model-T to make the trek around the bay on primitive Florida roads, if you didn't break down. A steamship cruise between the two cities across the bay took about two hours. In 1914, during the pioneering period of aviation, Percival Fansler's St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line, with Tony Jannus in the pilot's seat, cut travel time between St. Petersburg and Tampa a mere twenty-two minutes, but this novelty quickly went out of business within 4 months.

On George S. Gandy's first visit to St. Petersburg in 1902, he decided that a bridge linking St. Petersburg with Tampa could be built across Tampa Bay at the narrowest point. Gandy was firmly committed to completing such an ambitious project once the population of the area had increased to a sufficient amount so he could make large profits from tolls. In 1915 Gandy employed a large crew of surveyors to determine the narrowest and shallowest part of the bay. The surveys took two years to finish. Upon completion of the surveys in 1917, Gandy secured the rights-of-way from Pinellas and Hillsborough counties, the state, and the federal government. The volume of permits needed today to perform such a monumental task were not required in Gandy’s day; basically, all one had to possess were the finances and land rights. In the 1920s, ecological concerns were not even considered, except in very rare cases.
 

1920s survey ship on Tampa Bay

In the beginning of 1918, the Gandy Bridge Company finally advanced to the construction phase of the project. However, as a result of the United States’ entry into World War I the previous year, it was impossible to obtain the volume of construction materials needed for such a huge project. The War Emergency Board informed Gandy and his partner H. Walter Fuller that they had to postpone the bridge project until the end of the war.  The postwar recession further delayed Gandy's dream, but he did not give up hope.
 

The initial plan for financing the project was to enlist the aid of northern capitalists. Many propositions were considered with this in view and at one time it appeared as though the negotiations were closed. It was soon discovered, however, that when the time came to confirm tentative plans in writing, that Wall Street money was a more costly article than preliminary arrangements indicated and that a high contract price for construction replaced a lower tentative bid.

Worse of all, Gandy learned that to get Wall Street’s help he would have to relinquish control of the project. Gandy balked, broke off all negotiations, and decided to finance the bridge through the sale of securities to residents and winter visitors of Florida.

See Feb. 23, 1921 Evening Independent article on Gandy bridge investment opportunity

In 1922, Gandy bought out his partner H. Walter Fuller and persisted with the project to build the bridge. Despite his determination, Gandy refused to put one penny of his money into the project, so he faced difficulties in financing the bridge, which continued to encounter doubts about its profitability.  During the summer of 1922, another Philadelphia businessman, Eugene M. Elliott, became aware of the project after meeting Walter Jones, a part-time resident of St. Petersburg and an unofficial representative of the city’s chamber of commerce. 

When Elliott and Gandy first met, they talked almost continuously for nine days, and Elliott became convinced he could finance Gandy’s plan. According to Elliott, he did not need to earn money because he was already financially secure, but he became captivated with Gandy’s bridge because the seeming impossibility of it challenged the self-acclaimed financier. From that point on, Elliott became a key player in making the Gandy Bridge a reality.

In 1909, H. Walter Fuller, president of the St. Petersburg Transportation Co. and manager of the Florida West Coast Co. city electric company, St. Petersburg and Gulf railway and Johns Pass Realty Co., gave an interview to the Independent.  He expected a wave of prosperity to sweep the country in the following year. Fuller, "one of the live wires," was a driving force in developing the city. He made, and lost, fortunes. Among his careers, he was a road builder and developer (Jungle and Pasadena subdivisions, Treasure Island). He built an electric plant at 16th Street N and First Avenue, and helped extend Central Avenue from Ninth Street to Boca Ciega Bay. Fuller envisaged a bridge to Tampa, which George S. Gandy later built. He died in North Carolina in 1942, at 74

Eugene M. Elliott
"Colorful Promoter"
Mrs. Elliott Dies From Fractured Skull
Eugene Elliot, a troubled man

Eugene Elliott's obituary 

"It didn't need to be real, it didn't need to be needed, Elliott could sell anything to anybody.  If the product had merit--fine, if it didn't have merit, well, Gene Elliot could sell it anyhow, and perhaps even faster....He didn't sell them the bridge, he sold George Gandy to the public."   --Historian Karl H. Grismer

Former St. Pete Times editor Edward Naugle called Elliott a Leonardo Da Vinci, a master of virtually any field who could attract people and keep them on the edge of their chairs when he spoke.

In 1922, Gandy decided to "go public." According to historian Raymond Arsenault, Elliott was not what he professed to be during his interviews with the press at the time. Arsenault asserts that Elliott, as a real estate promoter, was completely unrestrained in his sales approach. As Arsenault remarked, “As clever as he was unprincipled, the slick-talking Elliott took the town by storm – and boom-era ethics to a new low.” Elliott, who was less enthusiastic about the bridge than he was about selling securities for it, assured prospective sales prospects that the bridge was already "underwritten." 

By September 1922, after 110 days of Elliott’s hard selling, Gandy was astonished that the salesman and his associates had raised $2 million from the sale of stocks. In their pitches, Elliott and his legion had falsely claimed that Elliott was a well-to-do tycoon who had already financed most of Gandy’s venture. Furthermore, according to historian K. H. Grismer, Elliott thought that Gandy actually would never build.   The day Elliott hit the million dollar mark in sales, Gandy nodded and told Elliott that construction would soon begin.  Elliott's jaw dropped and he gasped, "What?  You're not really going to build, are you?" 
 

Elliott's Riviera headquarters office on Central Ave. between 5th & 6th St.

Construction Begins

Despite the questionable claims, construction began in earnest on September 26, 1922, when dredging started for the causeways that would approach the bridge from both sides of the bay. Gandy moved quickly. With equipment coming from as far away as St. Paul, Minnesota, and expertise from men who had worked on the Panama Canal, the construction project itself was like nothing that Floridians had ever witnessed. Dredging began on the Pinellas side and was carried out during the entire project by three dredges. For a year and a half, dredging was constant, and it eventually removed roughly 2.5 million cubic yards of sand from the bottom of Old Tampa Bay. The piling and packing of this sand transformed a 400-foot-wide strip of bay into a causeway ten feet above the mean low-water level. This was about a foot above the maximum height of the bay's storm surge during the great  hurricane of October, 1921.  The causeway from the Tampa side is three-quarters of a mile long, and the one from the St. Petersburg side is approximately two and a half miles long. According to one estimate, causeway construction is about five times less expensive than bridge construction. 

George Gandy standing on a dredge pipe, 1923

A New Bay Area Town--Ganbridge

Near the end of 1922, a temporary town was organized on the eastern side of the bay as a base of operations for the project. Dubbed “Ganbridge,” the base camp had dormitories and showers for the workers, a warehouse, offices, a machine shop, a blacksmith’s shop, and a wood shop. In addition, Ganbridge had a concrete plant, a water plant, a sewage system, and telephone lines. Existing roads were repaired and upgraded and temporary roads were established to provide a route for materials between Tampa and the bridge site. To accommodate delivery of materials by boat from the Gulf the Mexico, a pier 1,100 feet in length was built.

Wide angle views of Ganbridge and dredging in 1923

Pile Driving

In July 1923, pile driving commenced for the bridge span that covered two-and-a-half miles. Some piles were driven as much as forty-five feet through the sand into the bedrock. The sixteen-inch-square, reinforced-concrete piles were manufactured at the Ganbridge plant, and they ranged in length from twenty to sixty feet. By utilizing water jets and steam hammers, the pile drivers drove in four piles at a time. This was convenient since the piles were placed in groups of four, which were five feet apart across the width of the bridge. Each group of piles or “bents” was spaced twenty-four feet from an adjacent bent. The pile driving concluded within a year.

  Workers using wooden forms to build the concrete road bed in 1923

The facts and figures associated with the bridge are remarkable. At Ganbridge, the materials arrived by truck, barge, and more than 1,600 railroad cars. A total work crew of 1,500 men labored for two years on the highway over the bay, using 170,000 bags of cement, 30,000 tons of gravel, and 15,000 tons of sand. In addition, they used 1,500,000 boardfeet of timber, 1,250,000 bricks, 7,000 tons of rock, 75,000 feet of electrical cable, and 50,000 feet of water pipe. Heavy equipment required 40,000 gallons of gasoline, 30,000 gallons of fuel oil, 2,500 tons of coal, and 9,000 gallons of lubricant.

   1924 construction at the drawbridge