The owners of the Catalyst on the Deuces lounge have made an unsolicited offer to the city of St. Petersburg to buy the next-door Woodson African American Museum of Florida, should the museum relocate.<\/p>\n
One of those owners, Dan Soronen,offered on Friday to pay $800,000 or the appraised value for the property at 2240 Ninth Ave. S., according to an emailed letter he shared with the Tampa Bay Times.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Woodson seems to be in everyone else\u2019s plans to move to another location,\u201d Soronen said. \u201cWe\u2019d like to purchase that so our business is allowed to continue on in perpetuity.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Woodson has been included in former and new proposals to redevelop the former Gas Plant<\/a> district, where Tropicana Field is located. Prior to that, there were plans to build a new Woodson Museum on 22nd Street South, north of Interstate 275.<\/p>\n Two spokespeople for the city did not respond to text messages and an email seeking comment.<\/p>\n Soronen and partners Jeff Copeland and Jason Bryant want to turn the building into an event space and use its parking lot for the lounge.<\/p>\n \u201cThe addition of this currently under utilized property would allow us to provide more jobs, more parking and more events on the Deuces while also taking the financial burden of the operation off of the taxpayers,\u201d reads Soronen\u2019s offer.<\/p>\n Copeland said he\u2019d like to see a \u201cSunken Gardens\u201d type of venue on the Deuces that could host weddings and events.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not insulting anyone by putting an offer in for it. It\u2019s just being on top of what\u2019s going around in the community,\u201d Copeland said. \u201cHow many times have we had buildings in our community that have been for sale and we didn\u2019t know that it\u2019s been sold? We thought we\u2019d get ahead on this one.\u201d<\/p>\n Soronen said his patrons use city-owned land a few blocks south of the Catalyst that was once home to the Merriweather Building<\/a> as parking. But the city recently chose a developer to build rent-restricted apartments as affordable housing on that land.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re concerned our parking is being taken away … for affordable housing,\u201d Soronen said. \u201cIt\u2019s going to be detrimental to our business so we need to replace that parking.\u201d<\/p>\n The City Council is scheduled to vote Thursday on giving Fort Lauderdale-based Green Mills Group a 99-year ground lease and development agreement on the former Merriweather land for $885,000, the appraised value as of March 2024.<\/p>\n Soronen was among the investors who operated the historic Manhattan Casino<\/a> until it shuttered in 2022. They blamed the city for not maintaining the building<\/a>, which they said led to them canceling booked events and falling behind on rent. Soronen also ran unsuccessfully for City Council<\/a> last year, coming in fifth place out of six candidates.<\/p>\n The Catalyst\u2019s landlord, Elihu Brayboy, once owned the Merriweather property. When the building crumbled following Hurricane Irma in 2017, the city put a lien on it.<\/p>\n Brayboy turned that land over to the city so that the lien could be forgiven. He then competed to redevelop the property and build condominiums with a grocery store and laundromat on the first floor, but Welch went with Green Mills instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The owners of the Catalyst on the Deuces lounge have made an unsolicited offer to the city of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[2382,202,204,203,199,201,200,2383,2381,2384],"class_list":["post-1752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-jeff-copeland","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news","tag-woodson","tag-woodson-african-american-museum-of-florida","tag-woodson-museum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}