Promenade Breaks Ground at Town Center’s 1st Mix of 200 Apartments and Array of Shops After 20-Year Wait

In about 22 months doors will start opening to retail stores and restaurants along the entire length of Central Avenue from Bulldog Drive to beyond Park Street in Palm Coast’s Town Center, and the first set of keys will be handed out to students, nurses, doctors, firefighters and retirees, among others moving into what will be the 204 apartments in three stories above the shops and offices below: that will be Promenade, Town Center’s largest–well, its only–mixed use development to date, and what so much of Town Center was imagined to be when it was conceived out of 2,000 acres of scrub 22 years ago.

The six-building, 230,000 square-foot project (almost five football fields), with 70,000 square feet of retail and commercial space, will give Town Center and Palm Coast a jolt of urban energy, further alleviate its need for apartment space, and, if city officials and developers have their way, serve as a magnet for more mixed-use developments like it.




City and county officials–more county commissioners than city council members showed up–gathered under a punishing sun approaching noon today to break ground on the 17 acres opposite Central Park and, in the distance, City Hall, ending what Mayor David Alfin called “20 years of anticipation.”

“Today is the day that we finally push the green button to go,” Alfin said. “So this for me is as exciting as when they do the countdown on the Space Coast when they’re launching a big payload. This is what that is for me. Now, I don’t know that the rest of the community understands the significance of this. They will over time. But for me, who’s trying to look a little bit forward for a vision for the future, this is the starting point, which we hope obviously will become the magnet, the lead, the first step in really the original vision updated for Town Center.”

Similar words were used when Epic Theatre broke ground 15 years ago, when City Hall broke ground 10 years ago, when the Palm Coast Arts Foundation broke ground on its venue on the other side of Central Avenue in 2016: shovels in the ground were seen as catalysts for the Town Center to come. But Town Center never quite emerged.

City Hall remains a boxy island amid vacant fields. Covid claimed the arts foundation. Two apartment complexes grew around Epic, but nothing else: no retail shops, no commerce, other than the businesses at the Chiumento Building, along with the two annexes of the University of North Florida and Jacksonville University–no small accomplishments for the city, but not quite the catalytic activity envisioned 20 years ago, when Palm Coast turned 2,000 acers of scrubland into Town Center.




The difference with Promenade is stark and hopeful: its mixed uses of shops, offices and residents will finally open the way to the walkable city Town Center wants to be–the walkable city own Center can only be, if it is finally to be the viable city center it was designed to be. Otherwise it will remain an archipelago of projects disconnected one from the other by the streets and car-centric habits the sparseness of their density would not have been able to break.

“How many times do we make a plan and set a vision and then, spur the moment, those things change and people lose sight of the vision,” Andy Dance, a landscape architect and the chairman of the County Commission, said. “But this was how Town Center was intended to be developed, with the commercial and residential component, and will add to the vitality of the area.”

For a town center concept to become vibrant reality, as in Jacksonville or Gainesville or Des Moines’ Cityville on 9th (in the Promenade developer’s hometown), it needs density. And density, as Toby Tobin, the Realtor and real estate journalist and radio host put it today at the groundbreaking, is not a dirty word. Ideally, Promenade would be the first project of many like it up and down Town Center’s fallow lanes. “The success of this I think would be a big step in and spurring additional investment from private development,” Dance said.




For now, Promenade will be the anchor. It may have taken this long because of the way the Great Recession chilled development, said Bill Angrick, a Flagler Beach resident and the CEO of Persimmon Capital Partners, the firm financing the project, and co-founder of Liquidity Services, a leverage capital company. “Fast forward almost 14, 15 years and you’ve had very pro-growth policies established at the state of Florida, which has been a catalyst for in-migration, young professionals, families and retirees looking for the live-work-play business concept, a place where they can live in peace and security and also have the amenities that they’re accustomed to from where they come.” In his public remarks at the groundbreaking he credited city officials and staffers and local business leaders for helping the project along.

As for what sort of shops and businesses may set up at Promenade, “we have tremendous interest in a pipeline of ideas coming in from three three categories,” Angrick said. “Institutional commercial users, retail shops, and dining establishments. And I would say quick service convenience type of users that could help with graduate students, people going to the high school to grab breakfast or lunch. So those three are very synergistic, because what you want is a destination.”

Tyler Wilkins of Orlando-based Crossman Company is tasked with lining up commercial tenants for the buildings. He’ll be pairing up wht Palm Coast Chief of Staff Jason DeLorenzo on the effort. Wilkins is not expecting difficulties. “In the greater part of a decade, I would say that the interest in Palm Coast is the highest I’ve seen. As people move to Florida, establishing homes, Palm Coast has really been a kind of a haven for people moving in from other states. The demand is the highest I’ve ever seen.”

DeLorenzo said the floor plans of the retail spaces will be left open, in the sense that the spaces will be left particularly bare until they have a tenant, so that the space can be tailor-built to that tenant’s specifications. The approach makes it easier and more attractive for tenants to take ownership of a space.




The contractor is RLH Construction of Oviedo. The project is designed by Mike Berg of Clow Berg architects, a Minneapolis-based form that designed a rather unique set of buildings in Town center, “a project that will be here 100 years from now,” Angrick said. “This building will be designed in insulated concrete, the most resilient material to withstand weather events and provide our commercial and residential tenants the lowest costs for energy. Fantastic sound insulation, beautiful views from a fourth floor that perhaps stretches to the ocean. We’ll find out. But we’re going to welcome everyone back in a few years to take that view with us.”

Groundbreakings are usually centered on the ceremonial shoveling of a pile of sand with golden shovels that are never used for any other purpose, on sites where shovels are a rare sight anymore. In this case there was the ceremonial shoveling, but there was also the actual signing of the development order, then and there, by Alfin and others–a nice, unusual touch that truly signaled impending construction. Frank Mendola, the director of real estate development for Persimmons Capital, confirmed it: the silt fences are about to go up, and the ground will move and shake along Central Avenue as soon as next week.