by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
Like any good meal, the chef often spends much more time prepping than he does actually cooking. Hours of shopping, chopping and mixing may only require about 30 minutes in the pan to produce a meal fit for a king.
If you’ve driven down East Bay Street recently, then you noticed the chef — LandMar in this case — is still prepping for what will become the nearly $1 billion Shipyards project, a mixed-use community with a heavy emphasis on public space and access.
“We are staging equipment and prepping the area to start the public improvement phase,” said Jim Doyle, the vice president of marketing and sales for LandMar, adding the sales was recently opened which contains a model floor plan that’s fully-decorated. “First thing, the bulkhead has to be done. It’s a major project. It’s like a road — it’s beautiful on top when it’s done, but all the real work is underneath. We are staging to kick in that phase. We are placing cranes on the site and we have barges in the water.”
LandMar took over The Shipyards project last year and the property — and the project — sat dormant for nearly a year-and-a-half after TriLegacy failed to make good on its promise to convert the riverfront property into a mixed-use community complete with residential housing, office towers, a hotel, restaurants and a public park. Last summer, LandMar officially announced its plans for the site. Until just the past couple of months, all of the work being done on the project was conceptual. Today, there are bodies and heavy machinery moving dirt and tearing out portions of the old bulkhead.
The 40-acre project represents one unique to LandMar, which specializes in full-amenity communities all over Florida and Southeast Georgia, often with an emphasis on golf. Doyle said The Shipyards will be everything everyone expects and part of it will begin soon. The first phase of construction includes four mixed-use towers on the property west of Hogan’s Creek. The towers will include 1, 2 and 3-bedroom units starting in the $300s and going into the millions, restaurants, shops, a fitness center and spa, tennis courts and a marina. A 700-foot park called “Pier Park” will extend into the St. Johns River and it will be publicly accessible.
LandMar is best known for its golf course communities including North Hampton in Nassau County, South Hampton in St. Johns County and four in Palm Coast. Closely aligned with Duke Energy, he and his staff have built a string of successful developments throughout the state.
“This will be the jewel,” said Ed Burr, LandMar’s president and CEO when the company went public with its plans. “It is not often that a developer has the opportunity to bring a unique project to a downtown area. This will be part of Downtown; we have far exceeded the requirements to provide public spaces, so it will have the community feel that we wanted.”
The first phase also represents about half of the developable 40 acres at the site.
“We are supposed to start, per our agreement with the City, in July,” said Doyle. “We are ahead of that. We will finish the first phase well within the time frame that we have agreed to with the City.”
Doyle said The Shipyards is more similar to other LandMar communities than most might think. He said there is a comparison between 600 acres in the suburbs and 40 acres in Jacksonville’s urban core. To have 40 contiguous acres on the river is rare, said Doyle.
“This is a master-planned community on the river,” he said. “There are very few of those in the state and we have one. We are approaching this like any other master-planned community. There will be amenities and residential buildings, but those neighborhoods will be vertical.”
While there won’t be an 18-hole golf course, Doyle said there will be a huge putting green on the property and anyone who buy’s into The Shipyards’ “inner circle” program will get a golf perk — their initiation fee to North Hampton, another LandMar community, will be waived.