The record
The first monument sold by a Florida foundation that shipped 350 slabs of the Wall to Tampa Bay and hoped to place a hundred of them across North America.
For the twentieth anniversary in 2009 the Florida-based Outdoor Art Foundation set out to build a hundred wall monuments across North America — the continent that already held the greatest concentration of the Berlin Wall outside Germany. Any community that could raise between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars was to have one. To supply them, about 350 concrete slabs from the Hinterlandmauer were delivered to Tampa Bay in July 2007.
The foundation also bought a collection of some 115 wall pieces painted in 1990 by the Russian artists Tamara Dubinovskaya, Andrei Aksenov and Vladimir Smachin, which had been sold to the American collector Cal Worthington and were long thought lost.
The plan failed. The foundation turned instead to exhibiting and selling the Russian-painted pieces, most of which have since travelled as the Berlin Wall Art Collection through museums and galleries in North America.
Saint Petersburg — named by a nineteenth-century Russian railway entrepreneur after his birthplace — was the first community in Florida to buy a monument. It was set up in the spring of 2008 on the site of the St. Petersburg Clay Company, where visitors can see it.
The three-hundred-and-fifty slabs are the part of this record that matters beyond the town. They are one of the largest single movements of the Wall recorded anywhere in this catalogue, and most of them were never placed.
Public radio reported in 2026 that the section had stood outside the Morean Center for Clay for nearly twenty years, and that the collection had been acquired by the Outdoor Arts Foundation under Jay Goulde.
How did it get here?
Bought from the Outdoor Art Foundation, which imported about 350 Hinterlandmauer slabs to Tampa Bay in July 2007; installed at the St. Petersburg Clay Company in spring 2008.
Sources
Listed by the Federal Foundation as #175 and by the Berlin Wall Archive as #362.
Federal Foundation — Berlin Wall worldwide, site entry ↗
The Outdoor Art Foundation's plan for a hundred North American wall monuments at fifty to a hundred thousand dollars each, the delivery of about 350 Hinterlandmauer slabs to Tampa Bay in July 2007, the purchase of some 115 pieces painted in 1990 by Dubinovskaya, Aksenov and Smachin and earlier sold to Cal Worthington, the failure of the plan and the touring Berlin Wall Art Collection, and Saint Petersburg as the first Florida community to buy a monument, installed at the St. Petersburg Clay Company in spring 2008.
Inventory listingSource accessed 2026-09-17
Why a Bradenton doctor donated 130 tons of the East Berlin Wall to New College ↗
A small section of the Wall has been on display for nearly twenty years outside the Morean Center for Clay in St. Petersburg; the Outdoor Arts Foundation, headed by Jay Goulde, had acquired the Berlin Wall collection about twenty years earlier.
Press reportSource accessed 2026-09-17
Federal Foundation — Berlin Wall worldwide ↗
The source lists this place as a Berlin Wall location. Coordinates, where supplied, are source-reported and may represent a general area. This is not independent verification of authenticity, current presence, or public access.
Inventory listingSource accessed 2026-09-17 · Source record 175
Berlin Wall Archive ↗
The source lists this place as a Berlin Wall location. Coordinates, where supplied, are source-reported and may represent a general area. This is not independent verification of authenticity, current presence, or public access.
Inventory listingSource accessed 2026-09-17 · Source record 362
Source-reported segments: 3. This is not a separately verified count.
No photograph of this one has been published. If you have taken one, or know when it arrived or who gave it, we would like to hear. Contribute to this record