USPS Publication Number 16300
T h is C o m mu n i t y N ewsp a p er is a pu bl ica t ion of E sca m bia / S a n t a Rosa B a r Assoc ia t ion
Se r v i ng t he Fi r st Jud icial Ci rcu it
Section A, Page 1
Vol. 19, No. 8
Visit The Summation Weekly Online: www.summationweekly.com
February 20, 2019
1 Section, 8 Pages
Developing the Future
SCI building will be hub for community growth BY WILL ISERN It’s a stormy Wednesday afternoon outside the groundfloor lobby of Pensacola’s tallest building. The rain battering the massive skylight echoes against the glass walls and barren tile floor. Though it’s empty now, the building’s owners envision the space as the central hub for the city’s thought leaders and community groups to exchange ideas and take action that will improve the lives of generations of Pensacolians. The building is the former SunTrust Bank tower at 220 W Garden Street. For the last 18 months, workers have labored over each the tower’s 140,000 square-feet replacing its electrical, plumbing and air conditioning systems, and have scaled every foot of its twelve-story exterior, cleaning surfaces and patching leaks. When the building officially reopens in April, it will be as the Studer Community Institute Building and it will be home to the University of West Florida Center for Cybersecurity, a PenAir Federal Credit Union branch, numerous businesses, a coffee shop, independent movie theater and an augmented reality observation deck on the ninth floor. The renovations are Quint and Rishy Studer’s largest ongoing project. The Studers purchased the building in April 2017 for $8.5 million and have spent $7 million fixing it up. Their goal, said Studer Properties president Andrew Rothfeder, is to transform a neglected downtown landmark into a hub for community advancement.
“There were two goals we had in mind when we saw and decided to buy this building,” Rothfeder said. “One was primarily we really wanted to buy the building just for this ground floor space to accomplish these (community) goals. But when we saw the building and saw the space and said this could work, we also saw this opportunity to take this iconic downtown building ¬– it’s one of these buildings if you’re downtown, it’s huge, you can’t miss it, but it kind of disappears. So, with our mission to improve quality of life and being in the real estate business as a part of that, what an opportunity to take this building and turn it into what this community deserves.” From a real estate perspective, the Studers’ investment is more than financial, Rothfeder said. While it is the case that the building will likely be fully leased come April, it may be decades before the project turns a profit. “The keys for investment in this building and what we’ve done are someone who defines return on investment as more than financial, and very, very patient capital,” said Rothfeder. “Which is I’m willing to do something and invest in something very high risk hoping and thinking that maybe in a generation it will at least have made sense. And that’s Quint and Rishy.” Already, the Studer Community Institute has taken up residence on the building’s ground floor. For years, the Institute has spearheaded local initiatives on early childhood learning, small business development and retaining local talent. The Institute’s community-
focused CivicCon lecture series, annual EntreCon professional development conference and its numerous early learning initiatives have been hosted throughout Pensacola. A big part of developing the Studer Community Institute, said Rothfeder, is about giving all of those initiatives a home. “We have these goals of small business growth, attracting and retaining our talent – which research has shown is absolutely critical to any town – and creating an environment where small businesses can thrive is a huge part of that,” said Rothfeder. “Those people need training and development and tools and resources to grow their small businesses, so what we’ve done there is create a whole suite of programming around small business development and training, CEO roundtables, EntreCon, a whole series of training and development programming that SCI puts on. Of course, the other goal is purely philanthropic which is our huge community mission of early childhood learning. So we wanted a place where that SCI training and development and CivicCon and the Center for Civic Engagement – we’ve just been housing those events at different places around town – where all of that came together. We said we need a home for this; we need a physical space where all of this happens, because it takes on an identity when you actually have a place. So that was the goal, we wanted this to be a place where all of our community solutions, all of our community ideas and
brainstorming are happening where it develops a brand to where this is the place you want to come to talk about your ideas to move this community forward.” The Studers have long sought to create a community center devoted to entrepreneurship in Pensacola. They tried in 2015 to build the UWF Center for Entrepreneurship at the Community Maritime Park but were stymied by former mayor Ashton Hayward’s administration. The Center was instead opened on the university’s campus. The newly renovated SCI building, said SCI chairman Chad Henderson, will fulfill the goal of creating a similar resource for the public in downtown Pensacola. “I think that building will be a great epicenter to come together, to exchange ideas, to listen to subject matter experts, to move forward personally and professionally, to help strategic initiatives like early learning and to help better the overall living environment of downtown Pensacola,” said Henderson. “I think it’s a great epicenter to do all those things.” The reimaging of the SunTrust building continues the trend of redevelopment that has swept downtown Pensacola in the last decade. One of the largest such projects to date, it is also one of the few to take place off of the Palafox Street corridor. While residential development has quickly spread to neighborhoods like Belmont-DeVilliers and the lettered streets from A to E, commercial development has been slower to venture from the heart of downtown. The Studers have sought to push development
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westward with the development of the DeVilliers Square building, the Maritime Place building at the Community Maritime Park, a forthcoming apartment complex in Belmont-DeVilliers and an ongoing attempt to convert the former Escambia County School District property at 215 W. Garden Street into an apartment complex. The Studers also own the massive former ECUA property just north of the Community Maritime Park. “We love the fact that it’s sort of the next step of things headed west,” said Rothfeder. “Everything’s sort of happened on the Palafox corridor, we’ve done some stuff just east of the Palafox corridor, it’s like, where’s the west side love? Because we feel like that’s the next logical place; it’s time for things to start moving westward. We thought this was the perfect spot to start to pull some of downtown’s traffic this way.” Back in the lobby, a week after the rain had stopped, community leaders including mayor Grover Robinson met with urban planners and landscape architects to discuss how to better connect the city’s waterfront assets to its neighborhoods and bustling downtown. They envisioned a future where the public could travel unhindered from Bayou Chico to Sanders Beach to Bruce Beach to Maritime Park and the foot of the Pensacola Bay Bridge. As the group batted ideas about bike paths and kayak launches back and forth across the groundfloor meeting room, it was clear: the new Studer Community Institute building is already serving its purpose.
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