The hotel once featured many attractions, most located in what is now known as
Plant Park. Today, as part of both the University of Tampa's campus and the museum's grounds, several of these attractions can still be seen. At the entrance to the park is the "Henry Bradley Plant Memorial Fountain," commissioned by Margaret Plant in 1899 after her husband's death. The fountain's title is
Transportation, and reflects Mr. Plant's system of trains and ships with carved representations of each on the sculpture. The eagle holding the strongbox is the logo of The Southern Express Company, Plant's first company. The fountain was carved from solid stone by
George Grey Barnard and is the oldest public art in the city of Tampa. Conservation of this fountain was completed in 1995. Facing the
Hillsborough River near the University of Tampa's library are two historic
cannons from
Fort Brooke, the early 19th-century military post (established 1824) around which Tampa was developed. These are model 1819 iron 24-pounder seacoast guns and were originally part of a three-gun
Confederate battery guarding Tampa Bay during the
Civil War. On May 6, 1864, a
Union naval raiding party captured Fort Brooke and, before withdrawing the next day, disabled the three heavy cannons by blowing one
trunnion off of each (trunnions are the side projections on which cannons pivot to elevate or depress). This damage is still evident on the two Plant Park guns today. In the 1890s, Henry Plant moved two of the long-abandoned cannons from the site of Fort Brooke to the grounds of Tampa Bay Hotel, placing them in a small earthwork
revetment as a curiosity for the hotel's guests. Later the guns were placed on
plinths made of
coquina blocks. Recently, Tampa's Rough Riders civic group remounted the Fort Brooke cannons on replica gun carriages in a new stone revetment in Plant Park. For many years the lost third Fort Brooke cannon was a lawn decoration at 901 Bayshore Boulevard but was donated to a World War II
scrap metal drive on October 9, 1942. Facing Kennedy Boulevard in Plant Park is another historic weapon, a turn-of-the-century
coast defense gun. This gun memorializes the important part Tampa played in the 1898
Spanish–American War and symbolically points south toward Cuba. The inscription on the monument base describes it as an
eight-inch (203 mm) gun on a "
disappearing carriage" taken from
Fort Dade, an old coastal defense fort located on
Egmont Key at the mouth of Tampa Bay. The true story is a bit more complicated. The original Fort Dade gun described on the base was placed in Plant Park in November 1927 but was donated to a steel scrap drive during World War II. Following the war, an eight-inch (203 mm) gun of similar vintage (both were
M1888 weapons) was obtained from
Fort Morgan, Alabama and installed on the 1927 memorial's vacant plinth. The new gun is mounted on the top portion of a 1918 railway gun carriage dating from World War I rather than the "disappearing carriage" of the original Fort Dade weapon. Plant Park once housed a small
zoo located along Biology Creek, a stream that runs through part of the park. The creek is fed from an underground spring beneath the hotel and empties a few hundred yards away into the Hillsborough River. While in operation, the zoo contained a
bear, an
alligator, plus many smaller animals. The zoo was famous for its hundreds of
squirrels and small
lizards, which are still on campus. The bear and alligator were eventually moved upriver and became the core attractions for what became
Lowry Park Zoo. The creek's name derives from a later period in its history when students from the university used its water to conduct various
biology experiments. A statue called
Au Coup de Fusil, meaning
The Shot (as in gunshot or rifle shot), can be found outside the hotel. These two
bronze hounds represent two-pointers being alerted by the sound of a gunshot. The statues were sculpted by famed canine sculptor Eglantine Lemaître (French, 1852–1920) and were cast in
France by Maurice Denonvilliers in 1890. == Accreditation, awards, and registrations ==