Central Park's Top Floors Just Opened. The Ground Floor Was Only the Preview.

Walk past 551 Central Avenue any Tuesday since February and you've seen the same thing: a line at Palm Avenue Deli, a burger crowd at Constellation Burger, maybe a taco order from Don Ricardo's if you timed it right. For seven months, that's what Central Park St. Pete has meant to the people who live near it. A fast counter with good bagels. A place to grab a reuben before a Rays game or a Rowdies match.

That was never the finished building. It was the warm-up act, and this month the headliner is finally taking the stage.

Seven Months of Burgers and Bagels

Central Park opened the way most six-year projects open when the developer has finally run out of patience with delays: in pieces, and starting with the easiest pieces first. Palm Avenue Deli and Constellation Burger launched on February 19 for takeout and delivery only, five to ten each night, while the rest of the 27,700-square-foot building still had drywall waiting for paint. Strawberry Fields joined a few days later with smoothies and acai bowls. By early July, seven concepts were running the main hall: Constellation Burger, Park Pie Pizza, Palm Avenue Deli, Strawberry Fields, Don Ricardo's Taqueria, Speaks Pasta, and Kojo Wok, the fast-casual Asian street food sibling to a much bigger name upstairs.

That's a real food hall by any normal definition. It's also not what Hi Hospitality Group spent six years and a $3.75 million property purchase building.

The Two Floors That Were the Whole Point

Kojo, the full-service modern Asian restaurant that's supposed to anchor the building, and Bar Hana, its rooftop offshoot with tropical cocktails and skyline views, were still under construction as of early July. According to the building's Director of Operations, Robert Castellon, both were targeted to open by mid-September. If that timeline held, the restaurant the entire project was designed around only just opened, seven months after most of downtown had already decided it knew what Central Park was.

The basement told the same story a little earlier. The Winfield, a 22-seat cocktail parlor tucked beneath the food hall, opened in early July. It's named for Frank Winfield Woolworth, whose retail chain occupied that Central Avenue address for most of the twentieth century before the building sat empty, then briefly housed Dome Grill, then sat vacant again for years before this project broke ground. Castellon described the design intent plainly:

"Knowing that The Winfield was limited on space, we knew that the experience had to be different, more refined. It gives us the opportunity to be more detail oriented and to control every moment of the guest experience, so you're transported somewhere else when you walk in."

That's the register the whole upper half of the building is built for. A members-only fifth-floor concept called Night Owl is still to come. None of it looks like the ground-floor counter you've been ordering from since spring.

Six Years to Get Here

The gap between what opened first and what the building was actually for isn't an accident of construction scheduling. It's the residue of a genuinely difficult build. Hi Hospitality Group bought the property in 2018 for $3.75 million, on the site of the old Dome Grill inside a Woolworth-era building that's roughly a century old. Construction ran into the pandemic, then hurricane seasons, then structural integrity work the aging building itself required before anything new could go in. Founder Natalia Levey has said the project's name is a nod to both its Central Avenue address and to Central Park in New York, where she and her husband used to live, calling it the place that's "always felt like it is the heartbeat of the city."

Six years is a long time for a storefront to sit behind a construction fence. It's long enough that a lot of downtown residents formed their opinion of the building before the building was capable of representing itself.

What Opened Around It While You Weren't Looking

The bigger pattern this fall isn't really about one address. It's that downtown's smaller storefronts kept filling in on their own schedule, with no connection to Central Park's construction timeline at all.

Mocha Bay is bringing Yemeni coffee to the ground floor of the Princess Martha senior living community at 401 1st Avenue North this fall, in the space that used to be Deja Vu Café. Traditional Yemeni coffee is brewed in a decorative metal pot called a dallah and can be flavored with cinnamon or ginger. It's a small, specific addition to a stretch of downtown that doesn't get much foot traffic attention, and it opened without waiting for anything else to finish first.

A few blocks over in the EDGE District, chef Essi Tadrus and a local franchisee with more than 30 years of restaurant experience have signed a lease for a 1,256-square-foot space at 900 Central Avenue, formerly part of an Anytime Fitness, to bring Southern Luv BBQ downtown. The Tampa-born concept plans to expand to 13 locations across Florida, and the St. Pete shop is expected to open later this year with roughly 20 indoor seats plus outdoor tables along Central Avenue.

And next to St. Pete Brewing Company at 554 1st Avenue North, St. Pete native Nico Leeper is building Apt 34, a beer and wine bar designed to look like a Manhattan apartment, complete with spaces resembling a rooftop, a kitchen, and a living room, modeled on the apartment where he lived and hosted gatherings from 2015 to 2024. Leeper is aiming for a late 2026 or early 2027 opening.

Three different owners, three different buildings, three timelines with nothing to do with each other or with 551 Central. That's a more accurate picture of how this neighborhood actually grows than any single headline project can give you. The big, six-year build gets the attention. The smaller ones just open.

What This Means If You Live Here

If your read on Central Park is still "good burger, decent line, not much else," that read is about to be out of date, assuming the mid-September timeline for Kojo and Bar Hana held as planned. The building you've been visiting since February was never wrong, it just wasn't finished. The floors that justify six years of construction delays and a near-century-old building's worth of structural work are the ones that just opened.

Worth treating this fall as a reset rather than a return trip to the same counter. Go up instead of just walking in at street level. And if you haven't been over to the EDGE District or up toward the Princess Martha building lately, this is the season three more owners bet on those blocks without any of the fanfare that follows a food hall six years in the making.

Downtown St. Petersburg keeps changing in exactly this uneven way, one long-delayed anchor project and three quiet storefronts at a time. Keeping track of which is which, block by block, is most of what makes a neighborhood feel like home instead of a construction zone with a good bagel counter.

If you're watching this stretch of Central Avenue for reasons that go beyond dinner plans, that's exactly the kind of block-by-block read Becky McConnell keeps on downtown St. Pete. Reach out anytime you want a local's read on where this neighborhood is headed next, or get your instant home valuation whenever the timing is right for you.