Wawa Opens 2nd Flagler County Store on Palm Coast Parkway and Florida Park Drive Friday

Wawa, the national convenience store chain with a strangely fervent following, is opening its second Palm Coast store and gas station Friday morning, on Palm Coast Parkway and Florida Park Drive. The store was built on the 2.5 acres formerly occupied by the Paul Katz office building, one of the many landmarks of Palm Coast’s earlier days as an ITT project that have been leveled to make room for housing or commercial redevelopments.




Wawa’s 5,000 square-foot-store will open at 8 a.m. with an “In My Wawa Era 60th Anniversary” t-shirt give-away to the first 100 customers before an 8:30 ribbon-cutting ceremony to be attended by Wawa personnel, including Karen Myers, the company’s store operations director, and the Wally Goose, the company mascot that drops in at its grand openings and what the company calls its Wawaversaries. There’ll be free coffee all day.

The 2020 opening of Palm Coast’s first Wawa, on Bulldog Drive near Flagler Palm Coast High School, was a more restrained celebration, since it coincided with the anxiety-ridden first months of the coronavirus pandemic. The city had a 50-person limit on gatherings, and the company did not want to take risks, so the announcement was muted. Gas was selling at $1.99 a gallon and still drew lines of guzzlers.

If the new Wawa follows the same model, it’ll be a 24-hour operation employing more than two dozen people, perhaps half a dozen of them full-timers. “The event will celebrate new associates and customers and simple gestures, like holding the door for one another, that together make a big difference in making Wawa’s family-like store atmosphere possible,” a company release announcing the opening of the Florida Park Drive location states. The opening will also feature a “Hoagies for Heroes hoagie building competition” pitting cops against firefighters.




The new gas station is within leaking distance of RaceTrac across Florida Park Drive, among other service stations on the Parkway, a glut to which Walmart is about to add with the construction of its own 10-pump gas station in its parking lot off Cypress Edge Drive.

“Wawa,” said to be a Native American word for “wild goose,” among many, many other attributions in this and other continents, is a small Pennsylvania community where the company founder opened a dairy processing plant in 1902.  The first Wawa Food Market opened on April 16, 1964, in Folsom, PA. (See: “Wawa: Behind the Name, a Rich Etymology from Around the World.”)

The new store rose in place of what had officially been the “B. Paul Katz Professional Center,” a hulking three-story building whose quaintly mixed up architecture couldn’t decide whether it was an office building, a nature preserve or a glass-encased bunker. It was the first thing people saw when they pulled off the highway in the fledgling development, before it became a city in 1999. “It certainly was one of the loveliest buildings, foyers, spaces anywhere in Palm Coast,” former Mayor David Alfin said this morning, “really one of the only buildings that offered such a grand entree.”

Alfin said in its later years it was also the only office building that provided space to companies and businesses on month to month leases with “incredibly low or well below market” rents. (Tenants a few years ago included Weight Watchers, Preferred Shipping, the NAACP’s local office, Hahn & Meyers Audio, Lovely Wig Boutique, Kingdom Crowns Hair Design, and so on.)




That sort of deal for smaller companies is not available now.”That problem has been around for a long time, but nobody has addressed it,” Alfin said. The building, though, “suffered from age problems and inferior maintenance later in its history,” so its days were numbered.

The acreage Wawa took over is still owned by Paul Katz’s Equity Holding Corporation Of Flagler, paying roughly $37,000 a year in property taxes before the Wawa took over the rolls.

The Palm Coast Parkway store is among 70 Wawas opening this year (a store is opening Friday in Virginia), adding to the company’s roster of more than 1,000 stores. The company is privately held.

Above and below, the Katz Building that used to be. (© FlaglerLive)