Gateway Jax: For Pearl Square to work, it has to be done ‘all at once’

Gateway Jax Inc. CEO Bryan Moll shouted over the hum of construction equipment Tuesday and pointed toward a partially-built apartment complex sitting behind a sand mound-filled lot with porta-potties in Downtown Jacksonville’s NorthCore.

The 205-unit Vandeveer apartment at 515 N. Pearl St. Downtown will start leasing to residential tenants in August or September, Moll said. The 22,000 square feet or retail could be leased and open by the end of the year, with the first being a coffee house, bistro and wine bar combination.

A public park will open where the sand piles up today.

The Vandeveer will be the piece of Gateway’s nine-city block Pearl Square development to open. The project is under construction in what a few years ago was a mostly dead area of Downtown Jacksonville with vacant and shuttered buildings and vacant lots.

During a tour of the Pearl Square project site for local media, Moll said Gateway now owns and controls about 33 acres Downtown across 26 city blocks.

The acquisition of 220 Beaver St. earlier this year with a plan to build for-sale condominiums and retail has jumped the price tag to build Pearl Square from $750 million to nearly $1 billion.

That level of spending gets Gateway closer to the Jacksonville Jaguars and city’s $1.4 billion Everbank Stadium renovation.

Gateway says future phases could bring its total investment up to $2 billion.

The company wants nearly all the retail and residential in Pearl Square’s Phase I to be done by the end of 2028.

Moll says for the development to work, it all has to open at once.

“You can only create a place like this where maybe there’s not as much foot traffic today by going it at scale,” Moll said Tuesday. “Because you need people living there; you need people working there; you need people shopping there; you need people eating and dining; all the people staying; all the things that need to make a healthy (and) thriving, 18-hour-a-day environment. You have to create it all.”

Pearl Square

• 515 North Pearl Street — Vandeveer residential, retail and park space
• 310 West Church Street — Hotel Merrydelle (formerly the Ambassador Hotel)
• 655 Pearl St. — office and retail
• 440 W. Beaver St. — residential and retail
• 425 Beaver St. — residential and retail
• 721 N. Pearl St. — Pearl Garage (formerly the First Baptist Church Lighthouse Garage)
• 712 N. Hogan St. — The Hogan Street Garage
• 119 W. Beaver St. — the future Publix.
• 220 Beaver St. — future condominiums and retail

When complete, Gateway says Pearl Square will have:

• 2 million square feet of total development
• 1,250 residential units
• 200,000 square feet of retail
• 100,000 square feet of office space
• 109 hotel rooms
• 1 acre of park and public open space
• 2,500 parking stalls

“But, to your point, who would want to live in a neighborhood that didn’t have any services or restaurants or anything like that?” Moll told Jacksonville Today. “And so that’s why we have to do it all at once.”

Gateway’s effect on incentives

There’s already a debate among City Council members about whether the city’s cash complete grants policy Downtown is sustainable for the city’s general fund.

At the city’s Downtown Investment Authority meeting on Wednesday, that conversation specifically focused on Gateway, according to Jacksonville Today news partner the Jacksonville Daily Record. Some board members asked whether City Hall is investing too heavily in Gateway with other Downtown project’s like the Laura Street Trio, the Snyder Memorial Church and others likely to seek city support in the next several years.

“The projects I have the most concern on is when we look at these grants that are simply cash from taxpayers to a developer to make their capital project work on their end,” council member Will Lahnen told Jacksonville Today in April.

Ultimately, the DIA board on Wednesday approved another $10.1 million from the city for Gateway’s recent acquisition and plan to resurrect a renovation of the historic Ambassador Hotel that Gateway has renamed Hotel Marrydelle.

Gateway formed in 2022 and includes investment partners JWB Real Estate Capital and DLP Capital LLC.

The millions of dollars for the hotel adds to a growing list of proposed and approved city investment in what Gateway is doing on the Downtown Northbank. In 2023, the DIA approved nearly $39 million in completion grants for Gateway’s Pearl Square.

Publix Pearl Square

Demolition of the former first Baptist Church auditorium at 119 W. Beaver St., where Gateway plans to build a 35,000-square-foot, full-service Publix grocery store and pharmacy, will begin next month, Moll said.

That’s part of a larger 14-story tower project planned for the site with 285 apartments and an additional 7,000 square feet of retail. The DIA voted in December to advance a $28.25 million completion grant for that project, but Moll hinted on the tour that the final package could look different.

He says they’re working with City Council members, who still haven’t voted on the deal, on “elements” of the incentives package. It could become a combination of a cash completion grant and tax rebates. Moll says city officials have also discussed with Gateway a loan for the project.

But if Pearl Square houses the number of residents developers have planned, Gateway sees a full grocery store as essential to the project’s viablity.

“For what we’re creating Downtown, (a grocery store is) absolutely critical to what we’re producing. Without a full service grocery store which includes a pharmacy, it’s much more difficult next to impossible to be able to do what we’re doing at this scale,” Moll said.

At the nearby Lighthouse garage, a partial demolition is underway to add 16,000 square feet of retail. Moll says the lighthouse fixture built by First Baptist on the northwest corner of the garage will remain.

Riverfront Plaza

Gateway’s growing influence in the Downtown market extends beyond Pearl Square to the riverfront. On the tour, company executives said they expect to take plans for a hotel-anchored high-rise at Riverfront Plaza to the DIA in June for vetting.

City lawmakers struck a deal with the developer to swap 1 acre of land next to the riverfront park development in exchange for an office building in LaVilla for the University of Florida future graduate campus.

Moll said Tuesday that Gateway is in talks with three four- and five-star hotel groups to anchor what is expected to be a 17-story tower with ground-floor restaurants which will be designed to flow into Phase II of the park. Gateway says it could announce the hotel brand in June or July.

Any incentives package would likely need council approval, which Moll hopes they can move from DIA to city lawmakers by the end of 2026.

Gateway on the Skyway

The Jacksonville Transportation Authority’s aging Skyway system runs along the eastern edge of Pearl Square.

Last year, Gateway negotiated a 99-year land lease approved by the JTA board that allows the developer to build an apartment building as part of Pearl Square that will include workforce-rental rate housing in a vacant lot next to the Skyway’s Rosa L. Parks Transit Station.

Moll says Gateway has been involved in JTA’s recent effort to reassess the future of the Skyway, after some on City Council and the public have called into question the cost of the agency’s plan to convert the elevated tracks into a roadway for its Ultimate Urban Circulator autonomous vehicle program.

Whatever JTA decides, Moll says Gateway wants it to remain of form of public transit.

“There have been some conversations about tearing it down, and I would just like to say that I think, personally, it’s a great piece of infrastructure,” he said. “We have to figure out how to cost effectively and more frequently run (the system).”

Earlier this month, JTA paused a second round of community meetings to discuss options for the Skyway retrofit, as a recent survey showed support for converting it into an elevated, landscaped pedestrian walkway similar to the High Line in New York City.

Gateway expects that demand of a transit system on the track will grow once more people start living in the NorthCore neighborhood. Moll also sees some redundancy with an elevated pedestrian walkway with the Hogan Street Cycle Track segment of the Emerald Trailed planned to be build directly underneath the Skyway.

“I think the High Line idea, there are a lot of merits to it,” Moll said. “I don’t think we need to recreate something like the Emerald Trail right above it.”