New Marriott hotel set to break ground in St. Petersburg’s Edge District

After more than two years of development, a new hotel with rooftop dining will soon break ground in St. Petersburg’s Edge District.

But a planned food hall and co-working space isn’t coming with it just yet.

The Moxy Hotel by Marriott will begin construction in mid-2022 at 1234 Central Ave., on the site of a parking lot northeast of Tropicana Field, South Florida investor-developers PTM Partners and DoveHill Capital Management announced Tuesday. The hotel could open by early 2024.

The news came more than two years after PTM purchased the properties for $13 million in 2019. At the time, they outlined plans for a mixed-use project called the Edge Collective that would include the hotel plus a 12,000-square-foot food hall and 16,500-square-foot co-working space in the former Gas Plant Antique Arcade building at 1246 Central Ave.

“The world has changed, St. Pete and Tampa have changed, so we want to see this find the right utilization and operation as we move forward,” said Michael Tillman, PTM’s CEO and chief information officer. “For us, the plan for the project still remains to build a mixed-use, inclusionary development anchored by the 163-key Marriott Moxy.”

Marriott’s Moxy brand is comparable to a W hotel, in that it’s geared toward younger guests looking for active bars and common areas. The St. Pete Moxy will feature a rooftop pool, bar and dining, as well as a garden area accessible from Central Avenue. Tillman envisions it as an “arts-centric hotel” with space for rotating art exhibits and events, including outdoor mural space.

“We were trying to evoke the arcades that St. Petersburg had in a lot of the buildings,” said Nicholas Pantuliano, PTM’s chief development officer and chief operations officer. “We wanted to put something there that was very active and engaging with the street, but also drew people into the heart of the actual property.”

The hotel will sit directly west of the old antiques building, the plans for which have been pushed to the development’s next phase. Tillman said pressing pause on the food hall and co-working space was a result of developers studying the Edge District and St. Petersburg as a whole during the pandemic, and looking at what residents might want or need long-term.

“We think there’s so much opportunity for such a unique building to look at alternative uses right now,” Tillman said. “For sure, there’s not going to be co-work there in the short term. But the food hall is very much something that is on the docket; we just are candidly not looking to announce everything that’s happening right away.”

The Edge Collective project isn’t the only major development in the area.

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A block or so west sits Orange Station at the Edge, a mixed-use development on the site of the former St. Petersburg Police headquarters. Ground on that project broke in October.

To the south sits the city’s 86-acre Tropicana Field site, which is poised for a multibillion-dollar redevelopment in the next decade. Last month, outgoing Mayor Rick Kriseman named Miami’s Midtown Development his preferred choice to lead the project. Their proposal includes one hotel with 510 rooms and a 50,000-square-foot conference center. Mayor-elect Ken Welch has said he’ll review the proposal in the coming months.

“To us, that’s just hugely additive to the long-term prospects of this market,” Tillman said.