Davis Islands, Tampa — Dredged From the Bay in 1924, Still One of Tampa's Most Expensive ZIP Codes

What Actually Makes Davis Islands Different

Davis Islands is not a neighborhood that happened to end up near the water -- it is water that was turned into a neighborhood, on purpose, in under two years. Developer D.P. "Doc" Davis, a Tampa native who had already made money flipping land in St. Petersburg, began dredging two small natural islands -- Little Grassy Key and Big Grassy Key, sitting at the mouth of the Hillsborough River in Hillsborough Bay -- into buildable land starting in 1924, pumping sand and mud up from the bay floor in the same basic style Carl Fisher had used a few years earlier to build Miami Beach. Davis opened land sales on October 4, 1924, and sold all 300 available lots that single day for a combined $1,683,582 -- a genuinely frenzied opening even by the standards of Florida's 1920s land boom. Within about two years he had created roughly 875 acres of new land and built a private airport, a yacht basin, a community swimming pool, and a hotel, largely in the Mediterranean Revival architectural style that still defines much of the islands' older housing stock today.

Davis did not get to watch his islands mature. He sold his remaining Tampa interests in August 1926, near the end of the Florida land boom's collapse, reportedly in debt. That October he booked passage to Europe aboard the ocean liner Majestic. On the night of October 12, 1926, he went overboard and was never found. What's genuinely confirmed: the date, the ship, and that he was lost at sea, presumed drowned. What is not settled, despite being repeated for a century as though it were: whether it was an accident, a suicide, or something else. His marriage was reportedly failing and his wife had already left for France; he was traveling with a girlfriend, Lucille Zehring; and his young son, aboard the same voyage, said decades later that he believed his father had jumped. This page treats that as a real, sourced, and still-disputed piece of history -- not a settled fact and not a legend to repeat uncritically either way.

The land Davis built still carries two genuinely unusual, distinctive features for a residential island neighborhood. Peter O. Knight Airport sits directly on Davis Islands -- a working general-aviation airport built as a 1930s WPA project that served as Tampa's primary commercial airport from 1935 to 1946 before commercial traffic relocated to what's now Tampa International. Today it's general aviation only, but it means small-plane engine noise is a real, if apparently modest, part of daily life for nearby residents; published sound-test results cited average readings around 58 decibels at the closest homes during engine run-ups, described as a 3-decibel or smaller increase over ambient neighborhood noise. And Tampa General Hospital sits at the tip of the islands -- a major nonprofit academic medical center and the primary teaching hospital for USF's Morsani College of Medicine, serving the whole Tampa Bay region, on land Davis himself deeded to the city in the 1920s. A major regional hospital reachable by the same single bridge corridor as every home on the island is a genuine, worth-understanding fact of life here, one this site's Practical Living and Retirement pages cover in more depth.

Tampa Bay's hurricane history matters here in a way that's specific to this exact stretch of coast, not generic Florida risk. The bay's last confirmed direct major-hurricane landfall was an unnamed Category 3 storm on October 25, 1921 -- more than a century ago, and, notably, three years before Davis Islands existed as land at all. That is a real, unusually long quiet stretch that shaped decades of how the region priced and thought about storm risk. But "no direct hit" does not mean "no damage": Hurricane Idalia, making landfall far away in Florida's Big Bend in August 2023, still drove a storm-surge crest as high as 9 feet into parts of Tampa Bay and caused confirmed, reported flooding specifically on Davis Islands. Hurricane Helene, also a distant Big Bend landfall in September 2024, broke Tampa Bay storm-surge records at some locations. Hurricane Milton, three weeks after Helene, reached Category 5 strength in the Gulf and forecasters warned Tampa Bay could see a catastrophic, once-in-a-century direct surge -- but its track shifted south, it made landfall near Siesta Key well south of the bay, and a last-hour wind shift actually pushed water out of the north end of Tampa Bay rather than in. Davis Islands -- low-lying, entirely dredged and filled, surrounded by water -- sits squarely exposed to exactly the surge mechanism that hit it during Idalia, regardless of whether a storm's eye ever comes close.

Several things this research could not confirm with the specificity this page requires are worth naming rather than guessing at: a single authoritative, parcel-level combined property tax rate (Hillsborough County and City of Tampa millage figures are confirmed separately, but this page does not assert one blended number as official); a Davis Islands-specific homeowners or flood insurance premium, as opposed to Florida statewide averages; the settled cause of D.P. Davis's 1926 death; and the current, final status of any City of Tampa short-term-rental ordinance, which multiple sources describe as still under discussion rather than settled law as of this research pass. Anyone seriously evaluating a purchase or move here should confirm current numbers directly with the Hillsborough County Property Appraiser, the City of Tampa's zoning office, a Florida-licensed insurance broker, and a local buyer's agent rather than assuming a figure found online is current.