Marriott hotel, food hall planned for St. Pete’s Edge District

ST. PETERSBURG - A 161-room Marriott hotel and a European-style food hall will anchor the Edge Collective, a mixed use project in St. Petersburg’s Edge District.

Located in the 1200 Block of Central Avenue, the collective will also include a coworking space and a "paseo,'' a throwback to the 1920s mid-block passageways found elsewhere in the city.

"We’re bullish on the state of Florida in general and more locally we like St. Petersburg, the market, the quality of life, the organic growth story there,'' said Scott Meyer, chief investment officer of Miami-based PTM Partners, which recently bought much of the block for $13 million. "And right down to that block we’re seeing a lot of activity and potential development.''

The first phase of the Edge Collective, due for completion in 2022, will have:

* A Marriott Moxy, a boutique hotel with a rooftop pool, bar and lounge, and "the Garden,'' an outdoor space connecting to the project’s other components.

* A 12,000-square-foot food hall dubbed the Hall on Central, described as a “chef-driven food and beverage concept” with existing locations in Tampa and Orlando. Located on the lower two floors of the 1246 Central Avenue building, which now houses the Furnish Me Vintage retro store, it will be managed by the team behind Tampa’s popular Hall on Franklin Street. Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it will serve as an entertainment space at night and "transition seamlessly'' to the Garden as a shared outdoor space for weddings and other events, a release says.

* A 16,500-square-foot coworking space run by Station House, a regional operator with two existing St. Petersburg locations. That will be on the top two floors of the 1246 Central building, which dates to 1926 and is among the few surviving relics of the city’s largely African-American Gas Plant district.

* Complementing the paseo will be 4,500 square feet of retail space. PTM plans to develop the space with "experiential wellness concepts,'' unique dry-goods retailers and local art galleries.

Partnering in the project is Tricera Capital, another Miami company, and Eastman Equity, a St. Petersburg firm owned by developer Jonathan Daou. The two companies, which sold the site to PTM, have several other properties in the Edge District.

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Launched last year, PTM focuses on acquisitions in opportunity zones, created under the 2017 federal tax law to provide incentives for investing in distressed areas. PTM also is developing a 360-unit apartment tower in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood and converting the former FBI/Coast Guard offices in Washington D.C. into a 452-unit rental project.

Critics of opportunity zones say money too often is flowing into projects that already were underway or that are planned for areas already seeing significant redevelopment. The Edge District, where three other hotels are planned or under construction, has become one of Tampa Bay’s trendiest areas in the past five years.