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Column: Park trades isolation for downtown destination

 
Published Sept. 18, 2014

In a city that touts its long-ago ties to the motion picture industry, this may be one of the most notable entertainment/hospitality expansions in New Port Richey since silent-screen star Thomas Meighan saw a for-sale sign along the Pithlachascotee River.

Or not. After all, it's just a simple lease agreement paying the city less than a thousand bucks a year. Maybe what we have here is a city finding a suitable use for a redevelopment project dating to the Clinton Administration.

Whatever your view, the New Port Richey City Council's approval this week of an agreement to lease the Cavalaire Square pocket park to the restaurant next door is an efficient way to let a private enterprise offer outdoor dining and entertainment. More importantly, it allows somebody else to try to draw the public to the under-utilized cement-surfaced park a block off Grand Boulevard.

The city developed the one-quarter-acre park, essentially an elevated platform with a stage and ornate brick sculpture, in the 1990s. It had a fountain, pavers and brick planters. What it didn't have was shade.

The city's desire to redevelop the property was understandable. It was an empty lot that had once been the site of a pool hall and restaurant destroyed by a 1987 fire that wiped out four businesses and half a city block. The adjoining parking area made the property acquisition attractive to the city, even if the whole thing was hidden behind the Moose Lodge and suffered the unpleasant aromas coming from a couple of nearby commercial garbage bins.

Then-Mayor Peter Altman, now the city's finance and human resources director, envisioned the park as a permanent home for the city's monthly outdoor Market Days — modeled after the farmers' markets in New Port Richey's French sister city of Cavalaire-sur-Mer — that had bounced around from one downtown site to another. The city bought the lot in 1996, but by the time it finished developing and dedicating the park in the fall of 1999, Market Days no longer existed and Cavalaire Square carried a price tag of nearly $300,000, 50 percent over budget.

"I was vilified,'' Altman remembered of the public reaction toward his role in the expensive, but out-of-the-way urban parcel that failed to attract the weddings, concerts and small-scale events for which it seemed destined. Indeed. "Boondoggle'' and "ill-conceived'' were just some of the adjectives tossed around by critics, including yours truly.

For all the wrong reasons, Cavalaire Square became the city's second-most noteworthy park after Sims Park, the downtown expanse of waterfront green space that the city obtained for free.

The city then tried to capitalize on the pocket park's off-the-beaten-path location by using it as the site for alcohol sales during downtown events. Even that exclusivity failed to hold interest and the city now permits sale and consumption of alcohol on other downtown municipal property during nonprofit groups' fundraising events.

Well, Cavalaire Square is about to be reborn as Cavalaire Patio, adjoining the Dulcet Restaurant and Lounge, an upscale restaurant, opening in the former Moose Lodge at Grand Boulevard and Missouri Avenue. The patio will offer a different, more casual menu for up to 64 outdoor diners. Under the lease terms, the restaurant owners are paying a nominal fee of $980 annually for the first three years of a five-year contract. The rent doubles over the final two years.

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That might seem like pocket change for a pocket park, but the planned use is the vital component.

"It's nice to think that it can be utilized and be integrated into this whole outdoor cafe theme that has taken off since those early days,'' Altman said this week.

Nelson Ohihoin, one of the partners developing the Dulcet Restaurant and Lounge, offered similar sentiments.

"We want to use it to bring some more outdoor activity downtown,'' he said. A soft opening is planned for November.

It's a sensible solution assisting both the city and the private sector. It's also a sign of the longevity of the city's downtown improvement efforts: Hang around long enough and you get to watch the redevelopment projects get redeveloped.