Developers transforming Downtown South district
New restaurants and apartments are coming to Orlando’s Downtown South, potentially remaking it into a walkable restaurant and shopping district.
Developer Greg Allowe started work last week on a $12 million, 54-room boutique hotel and restaurant called The Delaney Hotel and Delaney Tavern across from Orlando Regional Medical Center. To the north and south there are new mixed-use developments promising to add hundreds of residents.
Local businesses and investors say South Orange Avenue from Lake Lucerne to the Edgewood city limits is ripe for development because of its proximity to downtown jobs and several hospitals and medical offices on the thoroughfare.
But one local businessman said the opportunities are becoming more diverse.
“The atmosphere is starting to shift from the
lunchtime crowd to dinner and night,” said Daniel Broyles, who has owned the Foreign Accents home decor store at South Orange Avenue and Grant Street for 20 years.
On the north edge of the district near Lake Lucerne and to the south near Pineloch Avenue, developers are planning large projects for apartments, restaurants and retail. Preliminary work has started at Orange Avenue and Lucerne Circle on a building called Crescent Lucerne. Plans call for 373 apartments, retail, restaurants and an open courtyard near the street. There would also be a 24,000-square-foot grocery store on the bottom floor, although the name of a retailer hasn’t been announced.
Just south of Pineloch Avenue, another group has bought property and submitted plans for an apartment and retail complex called Ecco on Orange. That would bring another 300 units, as well as a Twistee Treat icecream stand. Representatives on those projects did not return requests for comment and have not indicated when either project would be finished.
In building Delaney Hotel, Allowe and business partner Dr. Tom Winters are turning a largely unused office building into a hotel catering to medical professionals and patients visiting Orlando Health and Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women and Babies across Orange Avenue, he said.
“The neighborhood is a hidden gem that I think will reemerge in the next couple of years as something special,” said Allowe, who recently moved to Orlando from South Florida. “I’ve lived in a lot of cities and seen the redevelopment movement — and it’s coming here.”
Allowe said hospital jobs and new apartments are drawing young residents who want places to eat and shop near their homes and work.
But first, he said, there need to be changes to make it friendlier to pedestrians.
Young families are moving into the neighborhood to live close to medical jobs and downtown, said Genie Tuten, South Orange area resident and president of the Wadeview Park Neighborhood Association.
“We do have a lot of neighbors that want to walk over to restaurants and shopping,” Tuten said. “You can’t really do that right now.”
Some 35,000 cars a day travel down Orange Avenue near Orlando Health, according to figures from Orange County.
State and city transportation officials are working on plans for wider sidewalks and pedestrianfriendly intersections. Although years away, some say better sidewalks and crossings could spur the kind of walkable retail and restaurants found in Thornton Park or Mills 50.
The improvements would give South Orange Avenue a similar treatment to areas such as Orlando’s North Quarter or Thornton Park, with 7-foot sidewalks and another 6 feet of landscaping in areas.
That would sacrifice some street parking but move traffic through quicker, Orlando chief planner Jason Burton.
Burton estimates that work could be done as early as 2018.
“We like this area because of its density,” said developer John Crossman, president of Crossman and Co. “You have doctors, surgeons and nurses and a neighborhood as close to downtown as you can get.”
The neighborhood was also the site of the Pulse nightclub shooting June 12, just south of Kaley Street.
Business owners say the neighborhood is finally starting to feel normal again even with a makeshift memorial drawings thousands of visitors.
City leaders and Pulse owners are trying to decide what to do with the site of the shooting that killed 49 and injured 68 others.
In recent weeks, normal traffic has returned to the area. Broyles compared the Pulse shooting to a major hurricane barreling through the neighborhood.
“For weeks it just seemed like people were focused on other things,” Broyles said. “I was really out of whack for a month or a month and half, but it’s gradually come back to normal.”