A Short History of the DeSoto Building

The DeSoto Building at 1304 DeSoto Avenue South began its life not as an office building but as a church. It was built in 1928 as Bayshore Baptist Church, part of the building boom that was transforming Hyde Park in those years. Constructed in the Spanish-mission style, the church was designed to seat 400 members in its auditorium.

The congregation grew well beyond that. By the mid-1950s, Bayshore Baptist had outgrown the building, and on Thanksgiving Day 1956, more than a thousand members celebrated their first service in a new home at 3111 Morrison Avenue, at MacDill.

The old church on DeSoto Avenue found its second life in 1983, when architect Peter Pizzi bought it and converted it into a multi-unit office building — the DeSoto Building it remains today. One detail rewards a careful eye: the original bell tower dome is gone, a quiet marker of the transformation from church to office.

Nearly a century after it was built, the building faced its hardest test. Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which battered the Tampa Bay region in 2024, left the DeSoto Building severely damaged. Rather than see a piece of Hyde Park's history lost, its stewards undertook a major restoration across 2025 and 2026, repairing the storm damage while renovating the building for the years ahead. That work is set to be complete by the end of the year.

It's a fitting kind of history for Hyde Park, a neighborhood that has always been good at letting its old buildings grow into new purposes without losing what made them worth keeping — and, when the weather demands it, at rebuilding them rather than giving them up.