For four hundred years of recorded history, the defining fact about the islands at the mouth of Tampa Bay was that you needed a boat to reach them. The Spanish came by ship. The quarantine patients arrived by ship. The soldiers, the fishermen, the Seminole prisoners, the tourists on the little train, all of them crossed water to get to Mullet Key, because there was no other way. That ended on a single day: December 21, 1962, when the Pinellas Bayway opened and, by no coincidence at all, Fort De Soto Park was dedicated the same day.
The two events were really one event. A park that could only be reached by boat would always be a park for the determined few, the people with their own vessel or the patience for a ferry. To become the regional destination Pinellas County envisioned, drawing the millions of visitors it draws today, Fort De Soto needed a road, and the Bayway was that road. The causeway and its bridges reached across Boca Ciega Bay, connecting the mainland at St. Petersburg through a chain of islands out to the barrier beaches, and finally down to Mullet Key itself. The day the asphalt connected was the day the island stopped being remote.
The Bayway was, quite literally, built out of the bay. It opened as a modest two-lane facility, its causeway sections dredged up from bay fill, the same kind of dredge-and-fill construction that was reshaping shorelines all over mid-century Florida, piling up new land where there had been open water. The system was a toll road from the start, and it still is: drivers heading out to Fort De Soto today pay a toll on the bridge just before the park, a charge so often mistaken for a park admission fee that the toll authority has had to explain, repeatedly, that it isn't one. The old configuration even had a bridge nicknamed the “ten cent bridge,” after the trivial toll it once charged on the final approach to the park.
What the Bayway connected, it also created. The islands it crossed had been little more than a handful of undeveloped keys before the road came through. Tierra Verde, the cluster of islands just north of Mullet Key, was bought up in 1959 by developers with dreams of a resort community, but almost nothing happened until the Bayway opened in 1962 and gave the place a road to the mainland. Even then it took an infusion of outside money to slowly turn the dredged islands into the condominiums, golf courses, and waterfront homes that define Tierra Verde now. The same bridge that made Fort De Soto a public park made its neighboring islands valuable real estate, and the two transformations happened side by side.
It's worth appreciating what was lost along with what was gained. The little tourist train that had carried visitors from the boat dock to the fort became obsolete almost immediately; once cars could drive the whole way, nobody needed a train to cross the island, and within about a decade it was gone. The particular character of Mullet Key as a place you had to make an effort to reach, a place at the literal end of the road and then some, softened into something more accessible and more ordinary. That's the trade every beautiful remote place eventually faces: a road brings the crowds that love it and, in bringing them, changes the thing they came to love.
The Bayway has kept evolving in the decades since. Traffic and the relentless development it enabled forced the addition of second spans in the 1980s, turning much of the route into four lanes. The old low-level drawbridges, charming but slow, were gradually replaced with high fixed spans, partly to keep traffic moving and partly to improve hurricane evacuation for the thousands of people who now live on islands that, within living memory, had almost no one on them at all. The original 1962 western drawbridge wasn't replaced until 2014; the southern drawbridge on the road to the park held on even longer.
Stand at the toll booth before Fort De Soto today and it's easy to take the whole arrangement for granted, just another Florida causeway, another toll, another bridge over another stretch of bright water. But that road is the single most consequential piece of infrastructure in the modern history of these islands. It ended an isolation that had lasted since the Tocobaga, it made a county park out of a fortified sandbar, and it did both on the same December day in 1962. Everything about how people experience Mullet Key now, by car, on a whim, in their millions, begins with the day the bridge opened.