by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
For decades, starting at the turn of the 20th Century, the downtown riverfront was dominated by various shipyards and related industries.
As the shipyards started to migrate down river towards Blount Island and the mouth of the St. Johns, the riverfront become home to very little beyond a smattering of government buildings. The Duval County Courthouse, City Hall and the School Board building all established residences on land no one else wanted.
Today, the riverfront is once again en vogue. The Shipyards development is the latest venture — and the greatest. The $860 million mixed-use development may be the most scrutinized development in the history of Jacksonville. With about $75 million in economic incentives, there will be many eyes watching to see if the Spence family and their partners can pull off the 10-year, three-phase development that will surely propel Jacksonville to the forefront of riverfront living, dining and working.
And, it won’t be easy.
In addition to the expected remediation, engineers, architects and contractors are also having to deal with several other issues. At the top of the list is how to reclaim and fortify land that has been slowly swallowed by the St. Johns over the years.
“We are bringing in one half a million cubic yards of fill dirt, creating five new acres of property,” said Hamilton Traylor, president of TriLegacy Group, LLC, the local, and primary, developers of the Shipyards. “It takes 100,000 cubic yards of dirt to raise the site one foot. And, we are raising the entire site about two feet.”
Bringing in fill dirt is the easy part. Fortifying the development’s one mile bulkhead is proving a bit more difficult. After decades of tides, currents, storms and pounding from moored boats, the bulkhead is being essentially rebuilt and the job of designing that aspect has fallen into the laps of the engineers from BHR, primarily Andy Zarka and Mike Saylor.
Zarka said the intangible factors have made the job interesting and challenging.
“It’s the unknowns, the things lost to anyone’s institutional knowledge,” said Zarka, adding that fairly good maps of the area do exist, but there are always surprises when dealing with waterfront projects.
Zarka and Saylor explained the process being used to fortify the bulkhead to handle the construction traffic, multiple buildings and eventual pedestrian traffic the Shipyards will get. Massive sheets of steel, about 75 feet long, are being driven vertically into the river about six feet off the existing bulkhead. The same length steel beams are also being driven between the steel sheets and the bulkhead at a 45 degree angle away from the river. The space created is being backfilled and a new concrete bulkhead is being framed and poured.
Sounds simple enough, but it’s not.
“Half of the crew is on land and the other half is on a barge tied to the edge,” explained Saylor. “The logistics are considerable. And, they are also drilling out 80 year-old concrete.”
Once the bulkhead is complete, BHR will then turn its attention to another tricky aspect of the project. In a typical development, a storm water retention pond is dug close to the development and tied into the local storm water and sewer system. The pond is then attractively landscaped and incorporated into the development. At the Shipyards, there’s no room for a retention pond and the idea of emptying that water into the St. Johns may not go over real well with the local environmental agencies.
“We are using wrapped filtration boxes that no one has tried in this area yet,” said Zarka, explaining that the boxes will be underground and capable of holding three million gallons of water. “We will pump out the boxes with vacuum trucks a couple of times a year. The filtered water will just seep into the ground.”