Neighbors joked it was haunted.

Tampa has many ghosts, it seems. They were summoned recently in a battle over the future of an old neighborhood and a children's nonprofit group embraced by Tampa's elite.

It began at an event in Macfarlane Park one afternoon, when Mayor Pam Iorio mentioned that a new West Tampa Boys & Girls Club soon would replace the house, built in 1952 by businessman George Guida.

Maura Barrios felt as though she had been slapped. As a child, she had loved the pink building.

``It's like they were trying to wipe us off the map, like they didn't care if our Latin history disappeared totally,'' says Barrios, a local historian already alarmed at the loss of other Latin buildings in town.

She didn't know that about five years earlier, then-Mayor Dick Greco had quietly promised the site to the club, whose leaders were planning for when they would lose their building to a widening of Interstate 4. The club's board members are among the most powerful people in Tampa.

Had they decided the Guida House was expendable, Barrios wondered? She called a friend active in community preservation, Jason Busto. Petitions were circulated. Influential Latinos weighed in. And Iorio agreed that the house should be saved. It was, a city report would later say, a strong example of the design style known as Art Moderne.

Club officials agreed to build elsewhere in the park - and briefly all seemed well.

Then it got complicated.

Neighbors complained that the new site was in the park's last open area. Soon, many were writing letters to the mayor.

By March, as sentiment tipped toward preserving the park, longtime club supporter Georgy Levy decided enough was enough. The club had only months to relocate, and time was running out.

Levy, a businessman active in Tampa's social institutions, told reporters that if the preservationists won, the club's children would be out on the streets. It was a ``test of the community's consciousness,'' he said.

Then the debate turned hostile. The preservationists are worried about ``an old, abandoned, rundown house,'' wrote Dan DeFossett and William Ohrt, chiefs of Walter Industries. ``We fear the protesters in fact are trying to keep our kids out of the park.'' Others repeated the claim.

Geraldine Barnes, a black woman active in West Tampa issues, said it plainly in a Tribune story: It was racism. ``Anything that involves African-Americans, there is always a problem,'' Barnes said.

There had been the fights over turning a onetime slave ship into a tourist attraction. Then the loss of the African- American Art Museum and the Florida Classic, the traditional game between two historically black universities.

To black families who believed they were losing the club, it was happening all over again.

Thus did one ghost heighten the debate. Others, far older, were also hovering.

For decades, segregation laws had divided Latinos and blacks, even though many of the blacks were themselves Latinos. Blacks and Latinos each had their own areas of West Tampa, but urban clearance projects of the 1960s destroyed many traditional neighborhoods and threw them together in new ways. Many older people couldn't adjust. They struggled with change again when local leaders sent black children to West Tampa schools to meet early desegregation rulings.

Over time, the two groups learned to live together in West Tampa and to share Macfarlane Park. But the charges of racism rustled up all those older phantoms.

Meanwhile, the club quietly had been researching other sites at West Pines and Riverfront parks.

In early April, a group of concerned black residents sat with Iorio to find a solution. The group wanted the club in Macfarlane Park, but its members were beginning to see that this wasn't an all-or-nothing fight. There were alternatives.

The group threw its support behind a move to Riverfront Park, on the eastern edge of West Tampa. Boys & Girls Club officials approved the site. The debate that had set neighbor against neighbor in the sensitive, diverse neighborhood soon ended.

``It worked out,'' Levy concedes, saying he has no idea where the charges of racism began.

For some, the confrontation once again revealed the darker side of Tampa, powerful people exploiting long-standing divisions between two minorities to gain the upper hand.

But it also showed the city may be moving toward a better way of resolving racial and ethnic conflicts and putting old demons to rest.

Yes, tempers flared.

But in the end, everyone embraced a solution - a compromise that preserved a piece of Latino history while ensuring the future of the Boys & Girls Club, and further out, perhaps, a future for its children.

Lindsay Peterson