With Port Tampa Bay’s unveiling of a $1.7 billion redevelopment vision for its 45 acres of waterfront property near the Channel District, a cornerstone piece of greater downtown Tampa’s potential renaissance has arrived.
The bold port plan, highlighted by the purposely sky-high 75-story twin towers, seeks to resurrect a stretch of waterfront still pockmarked with vast parking lots and aging industrial storage structures. That’s commendable by itself.
“Is there a single waterfront project like this? I can’t think of one like this in the country,” Luis Ajamil, a Miami designer of many urban waterfronts in the United States and abroad and a project partner with Port Tampa Bay, told me this past week.
But the port project is so much more.