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Business & Tech

Former News Anchor Returns to the Heights as Entrepreneur

Charles Billi left behind a TV news career in Miami to open a store in Tampa Heights, launch a website, and rekindle his ties to Seminole Heights.

”I gave up a quarter of million dollar a year job to come home," said Charles Billi, a man who's nothing if not forthright.

The former TV news anchor knew there were things he wanted to accomplish back in Tampa when he graduated from the University of South Florida in 1994 to embark on a 17 year journalism career. So after his contract expired at WSVN-Ch.7 in Miami in January 2011, Billi returned to Tampa to open 300 East furniture and decor shop in early December in Tampa Heights, and launch  BigTampa.com, an entertainment and lifestyle website in October 2010.

"I always to wanted to help Tampa," said Billi (pronounced "bih-LIE") and raise the bar. Because I think Tampa is a diamond that is slowly being polished."

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And there's plenty of polishing going on, and needed, in the area around 300 E Columbus Drive, where Billi chose to open his store. Since the early 1990s Tampa Heights has slowly gentrified, but remains pockmarked with blighted blocks and criminal activity. Billi happened to hostcall at 300 East, wherein he and other residents gave Tampa police officers an earful about neighborhood crime.

As to why he chose this location, "The space is interesting," Billi said, referring to the 1926 vintage building 300 East resides in. "And it's in an inner city urban environment that is growing. It's wedged between two established areas, downtown and Seminole Heights. And whenever you have money on two sides of an area, and the area in between is barren and an enterprese zone, the squeeze is on."

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300 East stocks an eclectic array of furniture and home decor that includes modern, contemporary, and Miami style genres. "Very cutting edge, very cosmopolitan," said Billi.

A similar sensibility informs BigTampa.com, a site that features "Only the most progressive, most visionary, most sophisticated and cutting edge places in Tampa to party. And we show only the prettiest people," Billi said.

Billi lives in Old Seminole Heights, a short drive from where his grandmother, Elizabeth Hanlon, grew up on Giddens Avenue. Billi's late grandfather was Robert K. Rees, a prominent Pasco County businessman and county commissioner who developed Green Key Beach in New Port Richey, where a memorial park bears his name.

Billi lived in an apartment on Seminole Avenue while attending USF. After graduating from there with a degree in visual communications in 1994, he got a job working as an editor, producer and photographer for WTOG-Ch.44 in St. Petersburg.

Billi eventually transitioned to the news anchor desk working at local TV stations in Macon, Ga., and Cleveland from Oct. 1995 to 1998. Later that year, he settled in at WSVN-Ch.7 in Miami. He held the 4 and 6:30 p.m. anchor slots when he left the station in January 2011.

Shortly thereafter he moved back to Tampa because, "The only thing I have for the city is love," he said.

 

 

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