A Horse Town, Ten Minutes From the Gulf

The third answer

Ask anyone where you ride in Florida and you get two answers. Ocala, for the thoroughbred farms. Wellington, for the winter show circuit. Both are real, and both are two hours from a beach.

There is a third answer, and almost nobody outside this county knows it. In the middle of Pinellas County, ringed by a city of fifty thousand people, there is a working equestrian district with city-maintained horse trails, a public equestrian center with two arenas, boarding barns a rider can reach on horseback, and a zoning code written to protect all of it. It sits between downtown St. Petersburg and the Gulf beaches. You can ride at sunrise and have sand under your feet by lunch.

How a horse district survived inside a city

This part of Pinellas Park was citrus groves through the 1930s and 40s, and riders here still remember taking backyard ponies down sandy, unpaved streets between the trees. Then the post-war boom paved most of the county, and in nearly every comparable Florida community the horses left.

Here they did not, and the reason is unglamorous and decisive. Because the area was historically equestrian, the zoning ordinance still reflects those pre-existing uses and rights of way. Barns that predate the subdivisions kept their standing, and so did the paths between them. What looks like an accident of geography is a legal protection.

The result is something Florida has almost nowhere else. Not a horse county an hour from the nearest city, and not a gated show community priced for a professional circuit. A working horse neighborhood inside city limits, with a feed store, a tack shop, marked horse crosswalks, and neighbors who know one another's animals by name.

The Equestrian Center at Helen Howarth Park

The public heart of it is Helen Howarth Community Park at 6301 94th Ave N, a city park with an equestrian trail running its rim. The city operates the Pinellas Park Equestrian Center inside it, and the facilities are more serious than most people expect from a municipal park.

Two practical notes before you haul in. The venue closes occasionally for events and arena setup, so check the city's page first. And free public use covers recreational riding rather than business use, so paid classes and private instruction require permitting and insurance.

The park is named for Helen Howarth, who ran Park Oil Company for three decades, drove the trucks herself, and filled residents' furnaces in winter whether or not they could pay. Children in town called her Granny Good. It is a fitting name for land a city chose to keep as pasture instead of selling.

• —Two square arenas, with jumps and obstacle course items kept in the secondary arena
• —Two holding pens
• —Trailer parking on a large grassy field, 8:00 am to 4:30 pm
• —Free for recreational riding during regular park hours
• —Available to rent for private events and shows

The trails, and the barns along them

An arena is a place to work. A trail is a place to ride, and this is where Pinellas Park earns the description. The Pinellas Park Equestrian Trail is city-maintained and connects the barns to the park and to each other, running through the horse community, past other horse properties, and through stands of Florida woods. It is not a loop around a parking lot. It is a network you can get somewhere on.

Southern Star Stables sits within two city blocks of the Helen Howarth trails, open sunrise to sundown. Cypress Breeze Farm connects to the trail directly from its stables and runs guided rides through the local horse community and the park.

Cypress Breeze describes the reaction they get better than any brochure could. Their out-of-state guests are struck by having horses this close to the beaches, and by the fact that you do not have to drive an hour or more to go riding. That is the whole story in one sentence, from people who make their living on those trails.

Ride in the morning, Gulf in the afternoon

Here is what Ocala and Wellington cannot offer. A Saturday in this pocket of the county holds a trail ride, a shower, and a sunset on the Gulf, and you never leave Pinellas. For a rider relocating from out of state, that is usually the combination they assumed they had to choose between. Horse country means rural. Coastal means no horses. Here it means neither.

Four miles south of the trailhead

Latitudes in the Park is a gated community of twenty-five new-construction townhomes on 64th Way North, roughly a four-mile drive from the equestrian center. Horses cannot be kept here, and we would rather say so in the second sentence than let you discover it on a phone call. These are three-story residences with two-car garages and private rooftop terraces, built for riders who board rather than riders who farm.

For many riders that is the better trade. The boarding barns are established, trail access is public and city-maintained, and the arenas are free during park hours. You keep the riding and hand off the acreage, the fencing, and the hurricane prep for a barn roof on top of your own.

There is a practical point too. A townhome locks and leaves. If you show, travel, or spend weeks at a circuit, no property sits empty needing someone to check the fencing. The residences are built with solid block construction and impact-rated windows and doors, approximately twenty-one feet above the floodplain, priced from $649,999, with tours Saturday and Sunday from 12 to 4. Ride the Helen Howarth trail first. It will tell you more about this town in an hour than any listing page can.

Common questions

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