Few offers from developers to build on Jacksonville’s old city hall, courthouse land along riverfront
It was the center of power in Jacksonville once, but only two companies offered plans Wednesday to redevelop the downtown riverfront where City Hall and the Duval County Courthouse used to stand.
The responses leave the Downtown Investment Authority with scant choices as it tries to map a future for a stretch of East Bay Street linking the downtown core to the city’s sports and entertainment area.
The project could be discussed when the DIA board meets again Feb. 19, but contents of the plans from New York-based Spandrel Development Partners and Miami-based The Related Group haven’t been released.
RELATED | Read more Jacksonville-area news
DIA staffers are supposed to analyze each proposal, which required a mix of retail and multifamily residential development but left developers leeway to decide their project’s scale and whether to include elements like a marina, office space and hotel rooms.
The city advertised for interested developers in October, offering just over 5 acres on the 200 and 300 blocks of East Bay along with about 3 acres of submerged land that used to hold a parking lot built on piers over the St. Johns River.
Despite the small number of responses, the site gets good marks from people familiar with downtown real estate.
“This is the best site that’s in play in the downtown area,” said Tom Ingram, a development attorney whose office is across Bay Street from the empty property.
“This project can help complete the street and provide that active atmosphere that people are looking for when they go to a conference downtown,” he said.
The property next to the riverfront Hyatt Regency was the subject of a 2018 search for developers interested in building a convention center.
The DIA received three offers for that but scrapped the idea a few months later, telling developers in October that these latest proposals for the site it renamed Ford on Bay should instead pay special attention to “residential unit count and maximizing the opportunities afforded by the site.”
Any development has to help draw people and activity onto the Riverwalk and increase the public’s involvement with the riverfront, potential developers were told.
The biggest recent activity at the property between Newnan and Liberty streets was the implosion of the old 15-story city hall a year ago, followed by the demolition of the old courthouse on the adjoining block.
The city hall building had been renamed the City Hall Annex after most city offices moved out in the 1990s, and the courthouse across the street went vacant after the current Duval County Courthouse opened on Adams Street in 2012.
Redeveloping those blocks would add a big jolt of life to Bay Street and a broader part of the Northbank generally, said Katherine Hardwick, marketing vice president for Downtown Vision Jacksonville.
Besides bringing more people who would live downtown — that number is about 6,000 now, and downtown boosters want 10,000 — Hardwick said the project would fit with a chain of others along the river that could eventually remake downtown’s face for decades to come.
“We’re looking at a generational change for the riverfront,” she said, pointing to still-evolving plans that include development of the Shipyards property to the east of Ford on Bay and, beyond that, Metropolitan Park and Lot J in the sports and entertainment area near A. Philip Randolph Boulevard.
Steve Patterson: (904) 359-4263