The Beatles are coming to St. Petersburg.
Not the real Beatles, of course. They’ve been consigned to history, to a vaunted place of the highest regard in the annals of pop culture.
Dr. Robert Entel’s massive collection of Beatles memorabilia, which has been on display in a 560-square-foot space in downtown Dunedin since 2017, will relocate to the corner of 2nd Street and 2nd Avenue N. in St. Pete midway through 2026.
The new location for the nonprofit Penny Lane Beatles Museum, in a vintage 1926 building known as the Palais Royale, has nearly four times the space.
“As soon as we moved in, eight years ago, I knew we would eventually need a bigger spot,” explained Entel, a radiologist with Morton Plant Mease Healthcare. “We looked around, and we tried to focus on other places, but St. Petersburg seemed to be the sweet spot for us.
“It’s kind of a museum city, it’s already built up, and there’s a lot of enthusiasm. That’s really where I wanted to be from the start but I never felt I had a good opportunity to find a place there.”
Until now.
“The owner of the complex is a big Beatles fan. It’s an historic building, and he was trying to do something with it for many years. But it didn’t fit in. It wasn’t trendy. But when he thought about having a Beatles museum there, he was very excited.”
Entel estimates between 9,000 and 10,000 visitors seek out the Dunedin museum on a weekly basis, which is only open Thursdays through Sundays. “And we’re on the second floor in Dunedin,” pointed out Vicky Fulop, Entel’s Director of Educational Development. “Many people say they have trouble finding us.”
(Fulop hopes to partner with area educational institutions to bring students of pop culture history to tour and learn about the collection.)
The St. Pete location will be open eight days a week.
Although there are rare records, musical instruments and signed documents, the collection is heavy on toys, games and dolls from the Beatlemania years (1964 and ’65). There are posters and promotional items from throughout history (the Beatles’ reissued recordings continue to sell at a brisk rate today).
For Entel, the payoff of this new location is the size (2,100 square feet). “We’ve been collecting a lot over the last eight years,” he said. “There’s been a lot of stuff that I’ve had for 20, 30 years we could never fit in, because of space considerations.
“We collected a lot more toys and games, and posters and some other rarities that just don’t fit. And we’ll hopefully be able to fit some of them, at least, into St. Petersburg.”
Some things come with actual Beatle DNA.
“We’ve collected a lot more of the Beatles’ clothing that they actually wore. We’ve got a lot of the stuff they wore in India. We’ve got a lot of their musical instruments that they actually played; we don’t have room to show those.”
At last, he’ll be able to showcase his Beatles pinball machine, his Yellow Submarine jukebox and the drum kit played by Ringo Starr in a 2000 TV commercial.
The new facility is being designed by Pinellas Park’s Creative Arts Unlimited, which designed (among other things) the Tampa Bay History Center, the Marco Island Historical Museum and the RMS Titanic exhibit in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
Entel loves the idea of being in the center of downtown, a stone’s throw from the James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art and the Museum of the American Arts and Crafts Movement.
If you’re not in downtown St. Pete, you’re nowhere, man.
“It was hard for me to get excited any more, because we hadn’t found it yet,” he said. “But now that we’ve found this spot, I’m very much looking forward to it. And St. Petersburg is so welcoming – it’s Museum City, basically.”
Penny Lane Beatles Museum website
This content provided in partnership with StPeteCatalyst.com
