Efforts to reconstruct the tower, one of Temple Terrace’s greatest icons, have been on and off for years. The tower was in the process of being relocated to a nearby park and placed on the National Register when it was burned down in 1979. The move towards recreating a new Temple Terrace Bat Tower would recreate an historic icon, allow the city to reduce its use of harmful pesticides, provide a habitat for local native bats and create a local tourist attraction.
The current plan is to rebuild the tower based on the measurements taken from the remains of the tower and the existing historic Campbell bat tower on Sugarloaf Key, Florida. The exterior proportions, structure, and materials of the new tower will match exactly with those of the previous historic tower. The interior of the tower will be re-configured with assistance from Cyndi and George Marks of The Florida Bat Conservancy.
The proposed site for the new tower will be in the soon to be opened 150-acre Temple Terrace Riverfront Park. The tower will be designed to be the focal point for the new park and will complement the award-winning ‘bat tower-viewing pavilion’ which was designed and constructed by USF School of Architecture and Community Design (SACD) students in 2008.
Construction cost of the new tower spanning three phases is estimated to be $40,000. Disparate to its 1920s predecessors, the interior of the new tower will feature plywood sheets spaced 3/4 of an inch apart to encourage bat nesting. Campbell’s original design contained wooden lathing spaced 1 1/2 inches apart.
The three-phase project involves constructing the tower’s concrete base and legs, building the structure’s steel frame and covering it with cedar shingles, and placing the plywood slats inside. When completed, the tower is expected to house up to 500,000 bats.
The original ‘Temple Terrace Bat Tower’, or ‘Hygiostatic Bat Roost’, as it was coined by its inventor, was built on the banks of the Hillsborough River by Temple Terrace’s original developers in 1924 and was based on the plans of a Dr. Charles Campbell, an early pioneer of bat studies and subsequent Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Campbell’s intent was to create a structure that would act as a roost for bats, so that the bats would eat the local mosquitoes that caused malaria. Today, there are three Campbell bat towers still in existence, out of original 14 world-wide, including seven in Italy.
