Signing of tech tenant prompts Station House to change course
By Eric Snider
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Aug 18, 2014

Station House, a bold mixed-use project in downtown St. Petersburg, has altered its plans due to the acquisition of a key tenant.

The boutique hotel rooms planned for the third floor of the 103-year-old building are being replaced by The Iron Yard, a school that offers 12-week programs in popular computer coding platforms. Founded in Greenville, S.C., two years ago, the Iron Yard has strong ties to startup culture. The St. Petersburg campus will keep company with 11 others in such tech-savvy markets as Austin, Texas, the Research Triangle in North Carolina, Atlanta and Houston.

Other Station House components - a basement restaurant in the former home of Café Alma, a top-floor condo, retail and co-work spaces - still are a go.

"The Iron Yard fits right into our concept,” said Station House developer Steve "Flip” Gianfilippo, who's working with Tampa-based Gries Investment Funds. "Part of the idea is to create an incubator/co-work environment, and Iron Yard emphasizes that. The traffic in the facility will be much higher than we had initially planned.”

The Iron Yard will occupy 6,000 square feet of the five-story, 30,000-square-foot building at 260 1st Ave. S. The school's first sessions - in Ruby on Rails and Front-End Engineering - start Sept. 22 with a maximum of15 students in each. That accelerates the timeline for the third-floor build-out, but Station House and The Iron Yard both say the second floor will suffice if a permanent home is not yet completed. The Iron Yard's growth surge is largely due to the pressing need for programmers and coders in an increasingly tech-oriented world. The business landscape, from mega-corporations to startups, routinely cites a shortage of tech-educated talent as a primary workforce problem.

If Station House can become the hub of co-work/incubator energy downtown, it will ostensibly enhance Tampa Bay's reputation to the larger tech universe.

When Iron Yard CEO Peter Barth, a graduate of New Port Richey High School, started scouting Bay area locations, he was "really thinking we'd end up in Tampa,” he said. "I wasn't getting very far, and one night I went to St. Petersburg, and it was exactly the vibe I was after. Our student demographic tends to be young. They want an urban setting, so they can walk to where they sleep, walk to where they eat, walk to where they play. I wasn't able to find that in Tampa.”

Barth spent a couple days walking the streets of downtown St. Pete. With the help of a real estate agent, he honed in on Station House. Other Iron Yard campuses are located in open, rustic spaces. They inked a lease late last week.

George Junginger, director of the St. Petersburg campus, is thrilled with the location. "I'm coming from the North Carolina research triangle,” he said. "And I get the vibe from [Tampa Bay] that it's ready to cross over the edge. St. Petersburg is a vibrant city, with a lot of human capital. We want to stay there and contribute to it.”

While Gianfilippo had to give up his planned 10 to 14 boutique hotel rooms at Station House, he closed on the 32-room Pier Hotel , three blocks north at 253 2nd Ave. N. "I can see a lot of synergy between the boutique hotel and what we do at Station House,” he said.

Eric Snider is a reporter for the Tampa Bay Business Journal.