With flour mill dismantling, downtown Tampa's most significant construction project is underway
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Jul 22, 2022

The most significant construction project in downtown Tampa has arrived without the drama of a wrecking ball or even the raising of a tower crane.

Business and civic leaders on Friday held a ceremony to mark the dismantling of the Ardent Mills flour mill, which has stood between the central business and Channel districts since 1938. The plant, which produces up to 1.75 million pounds of flour daily, relocated to Port Redwing in Gibsonton earlier this year.

Since the Channel district's development boom began in the early 2010s — and Water Street Tampa began vertical construction in 2018 — the flour mill has served as a physical and visual barrier between the urban core's neighborhoods. While the neighborhoods are walkable distances from each other, it's not a comfortable walk: Long stretches are without shade or sidewalks, and there's no clear path between them.

That will change as the flour mill comes down. Water Street developer Strategic Property Partners purchased the last 3 acres of the flour mill property in 2018. With that land acquisition, SPP also announced a partnership with the city of Tampa and the Tampa Hillsborough Expressway Authority to create a better-connected street grid between Water Street, the Channel district and the central business district.

Some of the silos from the plant will be preserved and incorporated into the next phase of the Water Street district.

The dismantling "completes downtown's 50-year evolution" from an industrial area to a true live-work-play neighborhood, Tampa Downtown Partnership CEO Lynda Remund told onlookers at the ceremony.

It's too soon to say exactly what will rise on the flour mill's former site beyond the new street grid. SPP is in the early stages of planning Water Street's second phase, which will expand northward onto the flour mill property. But the developer has said only that the district's next phase will look a lot like its first and include roughly the same mix of uses, though that's subject to change along with the real estate market.

Tampa Mayor Jane Castor, who used an excavator to bring down a shed on the flour mill site as part of Friday's ceremony, said the dismantling is "absolutely transformational" for downtown Tampa, and that the new street grid will be "magnificent" for pedestrians and cyclists.

"With a 48% increase in traffic fatalities over the last year we have a lot of work to do," said Castor, who has committed to Vision Zero, a movement to make traffic fatalities nonexistent. "So we’re trying to provide not only multimodal forms of transit but a safe environment in which our public can travel."

Hillsborough County Commissioner Harry Cohen used the ceremony to stump for a sales tax that will fund transportation-related improvements if voters approve the referendum in November. Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik, a partner in SPP, is also a backer of All for Transportation, a movement to support the referendum.

There will be 1.6 million residents in Hillsborough County by 2026, Cohen said, and downtown ZIP code 33602, where Water Street is located, is among the county's fastest-growing.

"If we want to continue to grow and attract the type of development we've seen, we have to continue to invest in infrastructure," Cohen said.