Walking to Poynter

Everyone tells me there is evil crime in the world and it's hot, but then they tell me Poynter is "within walking distance" of the hotel. So I decided to walk the eight blocks to Poynter, to see what I could see.
• The streets are wide.
• There are numbered streets and numbered avenues; they use the same numbers, and they intersect. For example, Fourth Street crosses Fourth Avenue.
Also, there is North Fourth, South Fourth. East Fourth, West Fourth ...
To reach Third Street, you have to pass Eighth Avenue (I think).

Evidence

• The streets have bike lanes, but the bikes ride on the sidewalks.

   I passed some beautiful facades, Mission-looking buildings with Art Deco-type detailing and shabby people sitting on worn stoops. I couldn't tell if the shabby people were poor or merely dressed for the climate, which seems warm but very comfortable to me.

I saw banyan trees, including this one in a park that belongs to the University of South Florida along Third Street and Dali Boulevard not far from Poynter.

I saw another, bigger banyan tree on a corner marked with a crudely hand drawn "boundary" post. And I THINK this was on the corner of property that well might be the headquarters of the U.S. Geological Survey.

While I was taking a photo of the gate there (for Michael's benefit), a truck drove up. The driver looked at me oddly, and it flashed into mind that there was still a federal shutdown. So I tried to explain about all the dear apostrophes that USGS removed from geographic sites and how that became a Neverending Wrong and how that annoyed Griffin and that was why I was taking a photo of this sign for my husband's benefit and ...

   I saw the Piano Man Building. That's where I crossed over to the lefthand side of the Third Street, because the two people I stopped to ask directions to Poynter told me it would be on the left. I didn't see Poynter over there; it all appeared to be various parts of University of South Florida St. Petersburg, but while I was realizing that and carefully denying awareness of the sweat beginning to seep into my least out of date jacket, I spotted a sign with a map and building names.
   This was on the corner across from the Piano Man Building. The sign spelled Piano Man as one word — Pianoman — directly across the street from that building, which has its name on the front, in very large letters.
   Also, Poynter is on the righthand side of the street.

This is across the street from Poynter.

   I finally learned that by walking around the USFSP structure and, after discovering I was on a marina, by asking directions of a third person who was not even staring at all the sailboats floating around in the large body of water beyond the big field on the lefthand side of the street directly across from Poynter.
   Poynter also has its name across its front. I walked under a vine-oppressed portico through a stone courtyard and up some wide and welcoming steps to a bank of doors that clearly were intended by the architect of the building as its front entrance. But the doors were locked and a sign on the glass directed me to the "south" entrance. South?
It was so shady in the courtyard I wasn't sure where the sun was, so I wandered back toward the vines.
   A man was outside of Poynter, near its windows but on the other side of a moat of landscaping, and he was smoking. He must have just walked out a side door. I waved and caught his attention so I could ask if I was walking in the right direction to find the south entrance. In a heavy Nordic accent he said something like "huh?" And then he said "parking lot."
   Was I headed the right way? He said yes, I was, or I could go the other direction too. So I kept walking, walking north or northerly, as it turns out, and then east, and then south — until I was all the way around the building and looking at a parking lot ... behind very tall green fencing.
   There was only one way into the parking lot, and it was on the other side — the side I'd started from.
   Briefly I considered squeezing through a gap, but some people with name badges were standing on a sidewalk in there, speaking English in Nordic accents. I imagined trying to explain to David Bailey why photos of me trapped with my least out of date jacket snagged on chainlink fencing were making the rounds of Nordic blogsites.
  So I walked back the way I'd come, noting the deliveries entrance and nearly circumnavigating the Poynter Institute. But I did enter the building eventually, which was more or less empty except for Steve, the laconic, lanky guard, who unwound himself like a cartoon of a basketball player to stand and walk me to where to find the water fountain.
    And so, success! I am arrived.