What's Going Where Wednesday 3

Saw Loren, proprietor of VT Clark's, working in one of the empty spaces in their building located at the corner of Westshore and Interbay the other night. Stopped in to introduce myself and ask what's up. Here's the scoop from the interview.

Port Tampa: "Hi, saw you working in here two nights in a row now. What's going on?"
Loren: "Getting it ready to rent to an Army colonel from MacDill. He has a lot of military stuff like WWI and II posters."
Port Tampa: "Oh cool, so this is going to be retail space then?"
Loren: "Yes."

(The space the new military memorabilia shop will occupy is the one in the middle above. The door is right behind the orange "buried cable" sign.)

Now you see why the great, and now late, Louis Rukeyser was such a genious in financial reporting. It's pretty darn hard to make business writing riveting.

Loren and I then went on to a much more interesting conversation about Port Tampa and "newbies" such as myself (no offense either meant or taken). If you want to sport a "Port Tampa City" shirt VT Clark, purveyor of General Merchandise, is the place to go.



In other developments, this sign at the junction of Commerce, Ingraham, and Hoadley has been up for more than a year but pretty much escaped notice because it didn't look like anything was happening. The area behind the fence was recently cleared so I talked to Bill at Precision Design Builders. They've been trying to get through permitting for a while now and the sticking points with the city revolve around parking and fire department access. Precision Design wants to move their offices to this site, locate some warehousing for their own use here, and put in 3 retail spaces. Their current office is located on Barcelona St. near MacDill Ave. in the Palma Ceia area. Originally slated to include more warehouse they've determined that doesn't make sense with recent Port Tampa development and the emphasis would be more on the office/retail with the warehouse disguised to fit in with the office. Ingress and egress are also an issue as the three streets meet at an unfortunate angle on the east side of the property. When asked if he thought they'd get started within a year, Bill said they still hoped to be done within the next year