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BayWalk rises from Bay Plaza's wreckage
By BRYAN GILMER © St. Petersburg Times, published November 12, 2000 Ev'rythin's up to date in Kansas City They've gone about as fur as they c'n go! They went and built a skyscraper seven stories high About as high as a buildin' oughta grow Ev'rythin's like a dream in Kansas City It's better than a magic lantern show! -- from the song Kansas City in Rogers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! ST. PETERSBURG -- City Council members Bill Bond Jr., Bob Stewart and Chuck Fisher were bowled over. Here was a vibrant collection of 150 upscale shops linked by pedestrian-friendly sidewalks and manicured courtyards; people traveled more than 100 miles to visit. The place: Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Mo. The date: June 21, 1986. Downtown St. Petersburg, was, depending on the harshness of one's view, either asleep or dead. Remarkably, the company that built Country Club Plaza was offering to help bring a similar development to the heart of St. Petersburg -- something called Bay Plaza. The council members began to dream. It would be a drawing card bigger than anything even Tampa had. "Magnificent, awe-inspiring," Fisher gushed. "Give them (St. Petersburg's) downtown and turn them loose. Let them go." The council did, but 10 years later, the dream collapsed. Now the BayWalk development is about to open on 11/2 blocks of the downtown land the city assembled for Bay Plaza, a project that was supposed to be several times as large. BayWalk, city leaders hope, is the delicious soup made from the naked bones of Bay Plaza. The Pied PiperG. Neil Elsey III saw Interstate 275, its two spurs on the northern and southern edges of downtown and Tampa Bay as a huge empty frame. He decided he would fill the canvas with real-estate art. It was the '80s, and Elsey was in his early 30s. He had been doing highly leveraged real estate deals with his Elcor Cos. around Phoenix. When he got the chance to team up 50-50 with J.C. Nichols of Kansas City on a St. Petersburg project modeled after Country Club Plaza, he thought big. The city would agree to build the domed stadium it had been thinking about near I-275, and Bay Plaza would manage it, along with The Pier and the Bayfront Center. The city would build three new parking garages downtown to hold 2,500 cars, with empty lower floors for retail. Bay Plaza would persuade the Saks Fifth Avenues and Neiman-Marcuses of the world to move in. Bay Plaza would tear down and rebuild six aging blocks in the heart of downtown, essentially turning them into the small-shop space of a new downtown shopping mall, with pedestrian sky bridges between buildings. If landowners didn't want to sell, the city would take them to court and force them. There would be a landscaped parkway three streets wide between First avenues N and S to connect the dome to the downtown development. As nice as it would be to walk, there would be a tram to move people among the attractions. Elsey envisioned all this in a downtown where he found only two restaurants open the first night he spent there in 1986. "I can't tell you we felt there was a great deal of momentum, but we did feel there was a great deal of determination (among city leaders)," Elsey remembered last week. "With the density of population, the growth of Tampa Bay, we just felt like it had a lot of great potential. We approached that whole project with a feeling of why not." The Bay Plaza Cos. were born, and the City Council basically did what Fisher had suggested: handed over downtown to its new "master developer." Bay Plaza promised to pour $160-million in private money into the downtown if the city would kick in $40-million. Bay Plaza's leaders spent years buying up land, tearing down buildings and swearing that leases with spectacular tenants were just around the corner. All this while the department store chains Bay Plaza pursued were crippled by a retail recession. Elsey left town in 1991 when he experienced his own financial crisis. An Alaska bank sought to collect a $325,000 personal loan he had defaulted on, and a California bank sued him for defaulting on a $2-million note. Barnett Bank sought to foreclose on his $630,000 home in the Old Northeast. Bulldozer BobJ.C. Nichols took over the entire project. It brought in an aggressive executive named Robert L. Jackson. He rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, especially when he tore down the historic Soreno Hotel on Beach Drive in January 1992. Last week, Jackson blamed his bosses: "I did what I had to do, and I followed not only my conscience but what I was told to do," he said. "I was a corporate employee." Jackson did move the Bay Plaza plan away from Elsey's grand scheme. He realized that the department store idea was outdated, especially downtown. He envisioned a smaller downtown complex of upscale shops anchored by a multiplex cinema, and he even got the AMC chain to sign a lease for a proposed building in 1994. "We had scaled it back to what we thought was a marketable concept," Jackson said. But J.C. Nichols and Jackson became engulfed in a corporate power struggle, and Jackson suddenly resigned. A string of lawsuits tied the company in knots. It pulled the plug on Bay Plaza in 1996. There was only one new building to show for it all, and the city government had paid for that: a parking garage between Central Avenue and First Avenue S with two floors of unleased retail space. (Florida Power finally leased it as offices in 1998.) There also were three expensive new gravel parking lots downtown. A dream downsizedWhy did Bay Plaza fail? Terrible timing. Delusions of grandeur. Outdated ideas. Outsiders who tried to steamroll the community. Pushover city councils. Big talkers who couldn't back it up. Why has BayWalk worked? The economy is healthy. It is one of several small, more realistic downtown projects executed by specialized developers. There was a neat tract of vacant land available. Local businessmen that the community trusted -- notably Mel Sembler -- were behind it. Though Elsey and Jackson both left under a cloud, they were happy to hear that BayWalk will open Friday. "When do they plan to open this?" Elsey asked, then responded, "Friday! That's not speculative, is it? The community deserves it; it's great." Elsey again lives near Phoenix and has a new real estate development corporation. "I wish them the best and hope it works," Jackson said from Kansas City, where he has his own real development company doing projects in the Midwest. "If it does, it will be extremely helpful for St. Petersburg." St. Petersburg Area Chamber of Commerce executive director Russ Sloan agrees. "It makes downtown a destination every single night of the year," he said. "We've enjoyed that to some degree with our major events, at times with our museums, at times with baseball. We've never had anything that would bring significant amounts of people on a daily basis. And it's going to consistently bring an even younger group." City Administrator Tish Elston said the lesson is that such major change comes slowly. "You've got to be willing to lay the groundwork 15 to 20 years in advance and be persistent," she said. She would like the city to maintain itself better from now on so it doesn't need major overhauls: "How, as a community, do we tend to keeping all parts of the city healthy, so that you don't have these peaks and valleys?" Two Fridays ago, Mayor David Fischer walked through the nearly complete BayWalk. Here was an upscale collection of two dozen shops and restaurants that would attract people from perhaps 25 miles around. There were Mediterranean-style buildings, fountains and a tile mosaic of a sundial in the courtyard. "It's beautiful," he thought. "Absolutely beautiful." It's no Country Club Plaza. "A lot evolved between the original vision that the city had and finally BayWalk," Fischer said. It's St. Petersburg, not Kansas City. -- Times researcher Barbara Oliver contributed to this story, and information from Times files was used in this story.
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