By Eve Samples
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 11, 2006
To understand why a Palm Beach Gardens-based developer is planning a $100 million-plus shopping-and-dining district just west of Port St. Lucie, one needs to look no further south than Downtown at the Gardens.
There, eight months after the open-air mall opened off PGA Boulevard, visitors are flocking to restaurants including the Yard House and opening their wallets at stores such as Whole Foods Market.
The scale of the project's success is something market studies never could have predicted, said Rob Jacoby, chief operating officer for Downtown at the Gardens' developer, Menin Development Corp.
And that's adding fuel to Menin's newest proposal, Main Street Village, a similar retail hub that's slated to sprout more than 30 miles north.
Menin revealed this week it intends to develop the 260,000-square-foot open-air "lifestyle center" on 22 acres at the northwest corner of Interstate 95 and St. Lucie West Boulevard, just west of Port St. Lucie's city limits.
"There are tens of thousands of rooftops there and more coming soon, so it's a terrific area," Jacoby said.
Main Street Village will include 40 to 50 shops and restaurants, Jacoby estimated, slightly smaller than the 70-tenant Downtown at the Gardens.
Already, some of Downtown's tenants have bought into the new venture.
Though Main Street Village is more than two years from opening — Menin is aiming for late 2008 or early 2009 — the Irvine, Calif.-based Yard House committed to opening there.
Sales at the Yard House's 12,000-square-foot Downtown site have been 50 percent higher than expected, restaurant founder and Chief Executive Officer Steele Platt said.
"We just feel that, with the success of Palm Beach Gardens, that Port St. Lucie would be the next natural city," he explained.
The restaurant, known for its lively atmosphere and a bar that includes some 150 types of beer, also is considering opening in Aventura and Boca Raton, Platt said.
Main Street Village won't include a movie theater like Downtown at the Gardens, but the shopping and dining selection will be similar, Jacoby said.
As at Downtown, he said, Main Street Village is likely to include several national chains that are looking to expand their Florida footprint.
"Several of the people you would expect from Downtown are going up and doing tours of it now," he said.
Yet Main Street Village won't be a clone of the Palm Beach Gardens project. Unlike Downtown, where visitors park in large lots at the perimeter of the development, Main Street will include on-street parking for quick access to specific stores, a hallmark feature of the increasingly popular lifestyle-center design.
"It will have the feel of a downtown area without height," Jacoby said. "It will be a place where people can come together, shop, dine."
Port St. Lucie's swift expansion — it has consistently ranked among the fastest-growing cities in the country — has attracted more retail developers to the area, said Anne Roman, a Boca Raton-based retail researcher for CB Richard Ellis.
"It is an underserved market, from what we've been able to tell," she said.
Just south of Main Street's planned site, Tradition developer Core Communities is building its own retail hub.
The Landing at Tradition will include 600,000 square feet of mostly big-box retailers including Target, and a nearby 75,000-square-foot lifestyle center of shops also is in the works.
"With what Core is doing and what we're planning, people are going to start thinking of that as a center of shopping, dining and entertainment," Jacoby said of western Port St. Lucie.
The company is refining its plans for Main Street Village and intends to submit an application to St. Lucie County this fall.
It has a contract to buy the 22-acre parcel, one of the last large undeveloped swaths in the PGA Village development, from Kolter Property Co. Jacoby declined to reveal the price. "It's vastly different than anything else in the county now," Kolter spokeswoman Mary Kay Willson said of Menin's plans. "So we think it becomes a destination of sorts."
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