The oyster reef balls at the north end of Lassing Park were installed in December 2021. If you have lived in Tropical Shores for more than a few years, you have walked past them a hundred times. What is worth walking past them for in 2026 is the cordgrass. It is doing something that seawalls do not do, and the City of St. Petersburg has spent the last twelve months designing a much larger project around what happened here.
That is the point of this piece. Not that Lassing is beautiful, which you already know, but that the small experiment at the north end of your park is now the template.
The living shoreline at the north end of Lassing Park, installed in 2021, consists of 100 tons of fossilized shell and 792 oyster reef balls.
That number stayed with me because it is the entire footprint of a five-year-old idea that St. Petersburg is about to multiply by roughly forty.
What the north end looked like in December 2021
Before the project, the northeastern shoreline at Beach Dr SE and 18th Ave SE was losing ground. Tampa Bay Watch and St. Petersburg Parks & Recreation described it as approximately 700 feet of severely eroding coastline, worn down by decades of wave and wake action from the bay. Lassing is the only downtown-adjacent waterfront park in the city with a natural shoreline, meaning no seawall, so the erosion was visible in a way it usually is not on the rest of the peninsula. The park was quietly shrinking.
The design response was a stacked installation:
- 792 oyster reef balls placed along the eroding stretch
- 100 tons of fossilized shell forming 8,384 square feet of new oyster communities
- A second 3,184 square foot layer of bagged fossilized shell placed on top for additional relief
- Coastal wetland plants and salt marsh grasses set behind the reefs to catch sediment
On Earth Day 2022, more than a hundred volunteers added 10 tons of oyster shell reef, 100 more reef balls, and 2,000 salt marsh grasses to what was already in the water. The work was staged over multiple weekends across 2021 and 2022, and the City's press release laid out the full sequence.
What five years of oysters and cordgrass actually produced
If you have not walked to the reef balls recently, the change is easier to see at low tide, roughly an hour before sunrise on the winter side of the year. The reef balls themselves are no longer bare concrete. They are colonized. Sand and vegetation have started backfilling behind them, which is the exact behavior the project was designed to produce and the exact behavior a seawall structurally cannot produce. The Old Southeast Neighborhood Association noted this in one of their updates, and it lines up with what a slow walk along the shore in 2026 shows on the ground.
A few numbers help frame what an established oyster reef is doing while you stand next to it:
- A single adult oyster filters up to 50 gallons of water a day.
- The Lassing installation covers about 8,384 square feet of oyster habitat, with a second bagged-shell layer of 3,184 square feet.
- Cordgrass planted in 2022 is now the visible edge of the shoreline in several spots where sand used to fall away.
The Northeast Journal, in a July 2025 piece on the strategy, called living shorelines a lean, green, estuarine machine. That is a useful frame for a resident who wants to explain to a visiting relative why the park's north end looks scruffier than the manicured lawn to the south. The scruff is the design.
Why Tropical Shores was the right place to try this
Tropical Shores is a small enclave. Roughly 200 homes sit on Tampa Bay and a set of protected canals, with about half the lots holding private docks and deep sailboat water and direct Gulf access via the bay. The neighborhood was built out primarily in the 1950s and 1960s as Old Florida ranch-style waterfront living, with dredged interior canals to give inland lots dock-accessible water. The streets are flat, cycle-friendly, and end at the water rather than passing through to somewhere else.
For a pilot project, that geometry matters more than it sounds. A shoreline restoration needs quiet water and consistent stewardship. The lack of through-traffic keeps wave action from car-related runoff low. The active voluntary neighborhood association keeps volunteer capacity high. And because Lassing is not a tourist park in any real sense, the people using it every day are the same people who noticed the reef balls arriving and the cordgrass filling in.
The San Pedro Gazette described the park in June 2025 as a place where the visitors mostly live nearby, which matches what you already experience on a weekday morning. That is not marketing copy. That is a project management advantage. When the people using a shoreline are also the people watching it, restoration work gets protected instead of trampled.
The Coffee Pot Bayou expansion is Lassing's second act
Here is the part most residents have not connected yet.
Starting in late 2025, the City of St. Petersburg began work on a 32-acre seagrass restoration near the entrance to Coffee Pot Bayou, about a fifteen-minute drive north of Lassing. The project uses 470,000 cubic yards of fill from a recent channel deepening at SeaPort Manatee to repair a dredge hole just offshore. Over the summers of 2026 and 2027, manatee grass, turtle grass, and shoal grass plugs harvested from a donor site to the north will be planted across the new bay bottom, with the goal of expanding seagrass coverage in that area to nearly 180 acres. New marine signage will alert boaters to the shallow habitat.
Coffee Pot Bayou is a different problem than Lassing. Seagrass rather than oyster reef. Bay bottom rather than shoreline edge. Different mechanics. But the underlying bet is the same one Tampa Bay Watch and the city made at Lassing in 2021: build habitat instead of building a wall, and let the ecosystem do the stabilizing work that concrete cannot.
Which means the reef balls at the north end of your park are no longer a one-off. They are the pilot that the city studied before committing to a project roughly four times the size in acreage terms. If you host relatives from out of town this fall and want to explain why St. Pete keeps ranking first in Florida for parks, this is a better answer than the usual list of museums.
A Saturday walk that shows the whole idea
If you have a spare hour, the walk that makes the argument visible is short. Park along Beach Dr SE near 20th Ave SE, then head north along the water.
- Start at the middle of the park, where the interior paved path meets the grass. The shoreline here is the version of Lassing your kids remember.
- Continue north to roughly 18th Ave SE. The reef balls sit just offshore. At low tide the tops are visible. Look for cordgrass behind them holding new sediment.
- Turn around and walk back south toward the unimproved stretch. Compare edges. The southern shoreline is what the northern one looked like before 2021.
- Loop back through the interior of the neighborhood along Tropical Shores Dr SE. Half the lots you pass have docks on deep sailboat water, which is the reason the park existed as parkland in the first place and was never sold off to developers.
That is the whole thesis of the park in about forty minutes on foot. Swimming is not permitted at the beach, so bring the dog or the paddleboard, not the kids' swimsuits. If you have never seen the fire ants that occasionally surface in the interior grass in warm months, you have been lucky, and it is worth stepping around obvious mounds.
Living in Tropical Shores means owning a small piece of a much larger conversation about how Tampa Bay's shoreline is going to hold up over the next thirty years. The reef balls at the north end of Lassing are your neighborhood's contribution to answering that question, and the answer is now being scaled up at Coffee Pot Bayou. That is a good thing to know about the place you already call home.
If you are thinking about a move within St. Petersburg or a change to your waterfront property, Plotkin Homes is happy to talk through what a Tropical Shores address actually offers a family in 2026. Contact us when you are ready.
