Tag Archives: Jeff Vinik

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Tampa Bay Times: Finally, Jeff Vinik’s vision has a name: Water Street Tampa

Strategic Property Partners announced the name of its new development: Water Street Tampa. This rendering shows the Tampa skyline with SPP's future buildings in place. [Photos courtesy of SPP]

By Justine Griffin

TAMPA — For years, Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik and the real estate executives he employs have been dreaming how to transform 53 acres of downtown Tampa into a major hub of living, working and entertaining in the city’s core.

And for more than two years, they’ve been designing that new neighborhood without a name.

Today, Strategic Property Partners, the real estate firm backed by Vinik and Cascade Investment, is unveiling an official name for the highly anticipated $3 billion revitalization project.

It’s Water Street Tampa.

“The goal of the project is to be grounded in what makes Tampa, Tampa,” said James Nozar, CEO of SPP, in an interview on Monday. “We’ve been dealing with pretty much a clean slate, with surface parking lots that don’t have a lot of history. One of the key attributes that we picked up was Water Street, which has always been part of downtown, even though it’s changed names over the years.”

Read more here.

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Tampa Bay Times: How do you transform a downtown like Tampa’s that has such little history?

By Justine Griffin for the Tampa Bay Times. Sept. 23, 2016.

It’s one thing to decide which building goes where when mapping out a new $3 billion district for downtown Tampa. But it’s another challenge entirely to create a sense of place and identity that has been lacking in downtown Tampa for decades when there isn’t much history in that part of town.

hat’s the problem facing James Nozar, the man in charge of Strategic Property Partners’ plan to build a new 53-acre urban core for Tampa from the ground up. As the chief executive of SPP, the real estate firm owned by Tampa Bay Lightning owner Jeff Vinik and Bill Gates’ Cascade Investment, he’s working with 17 architects, planners and designers to create a unifying theme across the entire district as they build it block by block.

“There’s not a neighborhood or great historic presence to look back to. That’s our biggest challenge,” Nozar said about the greater downtown Tampa area. “So we’ve had to use the unique Tampa climate to influence the sense of place we’re trying to create.”

Read more in the Tampa Bay Times here.