The Guitar Hotel at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Hollywood is illuminated on Jan. 19, 2021, in Hollywood, Florida. | Wilfredo Lee, AP
Published on August 1, 2025 at 4:26 pm
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A Hard Rock Hotel floated as a possible development project for the vacant Berkman Plaza II site on Downtown’s Northbank Riverfront would not include a casino, according to the city.
The city’s chief communications officer, Phil Perry, confirmed Thursday that the city is speaking with several groups looking at Downtown properties for development — with one considering developing a Hard Rock.
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“(One) of those groups is interested in the possibility of a hotel at the Berkman II site — and it potentially being a Hard Rock Hotel,” Perry told Jacksonville Today in a text message Thursday.
When asked in a follow-up message Friday whether the Hard Rock would or could include a casino or gambling, Perry said, “Just a hotel, no casino.”
The Florida Times-Union first reported the possibility of a Hard Rock. The hotel would be on 2.02 acres at 500 E. Bay Street where a partly finished high-rise condominium stood for nearly 15 years before the city demolished it in 2022.
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That property was recently sold for $7.3 million by Choate Construction Co. to Curtis D. Hodgson of Addison, Texas, according to a report by the Jacksonville Daily Record, a Jacksonville Today news partner.
If a developer or operator did want to establish a casino or gambling facility on Jacksonville’s Downtown riverfront, that would be up to Duval County voters and state regulators.
Jacksonville attorney Mitch Stone said Florida has created a rule that allows communities and localities to decide if they want a casino to operate in a jurisdiction through a ballot referendum.
“Then you have to go through all the processes within the state to determine what type of gaming you can have, whether or not it would be licensed and permissible,” Stone said.
Stone is a criminal defense lawyer with experience defending cases involving alleged racketeering, gambling and gaming.
A large percentage of Florida’s gambling activity is regulated by the state’s compact with The Seminole Tribe of Florida, which allows tribal leadership to offer multiple types of gaming on their lands and gives it partial exclusivity to specified gaming activity in the state.
The compact also provides for revenue sharing between the Seminole Tribe and the state.
“There would be a lot of discussion in government — local, state and, to a degree, federal — to determine whether or not such a casino could operate in Downtown Jacksonville,” Stone said.
If a hotel — Hard Rock or otherwise — is developed at the site, it would sit less than a mile west of where Iguana Investments LLC, the development company of Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan, is building a Four Seasons Hotel on the river across the street from EverBank Stadium.
This is not the first time a Hard Rock Hotel has been proposed for a riverfront property on Bay Street. In 2022, developer Southeast Development Group LLC proposed a concept at city-owned Ford on Bay property with hotelier Reverb by Hard Rock. That bid was ultimately passed up in favor of a mixed-use project called “The Hardwick,” which was never developed.
Any developer who builds on the Berkman II site or the vacant Ford on Bay could have access to a $30 million city fund of cash incentives. Those and other properties were identified as sites that could support residential projects a bill approved by City Council in June meant to spur more housing Downtown and throughout the county.
