Stock Development has paid $32.5 million for one of the most conspicuous gaps in downtown St. Petersburg’s skyline. In June the Naples-based, family-owned homebuilder closed on the former Tampa Bay Times building at 490 First Avenue South and the historic Tramor Cafeteria around the corner at 123 4th Street South, a combined 1.8 acres it plans to remake as a high-rise condominium tower.
The two properties sold separately inside the same transaction: $18 million for the eight-story, 240,000-square-foot Times complex, and $14.5 million for the Tramor. Together they hand Stock a contiguous site zoned DC-1, one of the densest designations the city grants, in a downtown that has spent the past several years trading low-rise parcels for residential towers. An assembly of that size on the First Avenue South corridor rarely reaches the market.
The math tells the story of the block. The combined price works out to roughly $18 million an acre, and Stock paid only about $3.5 million more for the wrecked 240,000-square-foot tower it intends to demolish than for the small 1929 cafeteria it is legally required to keep. In a core where surface lots and aging mid-rises keep giving way to condominiums, the value sits in the land and its entitlements, not in the buildings standing on it.
Why the Times tower is coming down
The larger building has sat empty since October 2024, when a construction crane at the neighboring 400 Central project toppled during Hurricane Milton and tore into it. The damage left the complex uninhabitable, and for close to two years it has been among the most visible pieces of storm damage left in the downtown core, a fenced-off eight-story shell on a prominent corner. Stock has said demolition will begin as soon as possible. The structure went up in 1924 and was expanded in 1968 and 1988, and it long housed the Tampa Bay Times before it emptied out. What rises in its place will be a condominium high-rise with ground-floor commercial space, and possibly office uses, according to the developer.
Stock, led by president Keith Gelder, has not disclosed a height, a unit count, a timeline, or even a project name, saying it is too early to discuss specifics. Founded in 2001, the company built its name on master-planned luxury communities in Southwest Florida, more than 6,000 homes from Naples to Sarasota with Lely Resort among them, and a condominium tower in downtown St. Petersburg moves it into direct competition with the developers who have remade the city’s skyline, the 400 Central project whose crane caused the damage among them.
The Tramor survives
The Tramor Cafeteria will not meet the wrecking ball. The building opened in 1929 as Bob’s Cafeteria, most recently housed the Hofbräuhaus St. Petersburg beer hall, and carries a historic designation that prohibits demolition, so Stock plans to fold it into the redevelopment rather than clear it. Its Spanish-Mediterranean facade and its ceiling trusses, salvaged nearly a century ago from a 1920s airport hangar, are the kind of detail a new tower cannot manufacture. Preserving them hands the project a street-level anchor with a provenance the new construction will never have.
That split fate, one landmark razed and one kept, is increasingly how downtown St. Petersburg grows: DC-1 density pushed vertical, with the older fabric the city will not let a developer erase folded in at street level. For Stock, the Tramor is both a constraint and a gift, a required preservation that also hands an out-of-town builder an instant piece of the block’s history.
The next markers are concrete. A demolition permit for the Times complex will signal how soon the site clears, and the first renderings will disclose the tower’s height and unit count, the numbers that show whether Stock is matching the scale of the towers now defining the skyline or building beneath them. How much of the Tramor’s 1929 detailing survives contact with a modern high-rise will be the other thing to watch, and the answer will set the tone for what a preserved cafeteria can still mean inside a high-rise redevelopment.
