This morning, Joyce Development Group and District 11 council member Danny Becton hosted a groundbreaking ceremony for Baymeadows Park, a five-acre, $30 million “urban mixed-use village” development on the site of the former golf course for Baymeadows Golf Club.
The project, which was announced last year, will feature four commercial buildings with mixed-use tenants including First Watch and Starbucks, as well as a 120-room Springhill Suites by Marriott.
First Watch and Starbucks are expected to open next year, while Springhill Suites will open in 2021.
The project is inspired by Tapestry Park, a village-style, mixed-use development on the Southside that was also developed by Joyce Development Group. It will be built on land that has sat vacant for nearly two decades after Baymeadows Golf Club’s closure.
The land was purchased by development company D.R. Horton in 2005 with plans for a much larger mixed-use project featuring large single-family housing subdivisions, but those plans were shut down by neighbors’ concerns over increased traffic on an already busy stretch of Baymeadows Road near I-95.
D.R. Horton sold part of their property to Joyce for their development and plans to build a smaller-scale single-family neighborhood on the remaining land. Florida Department of Transportation will also be reconfiguring Baymeadows Road to add a traffic signal at Baymeadows Circle West, providing two different ingress and egress points from the development.
John Joyce, president of Joyce Development Group, credited Becton for the project, saying he “more than anyone else is responsible” for the realization of these plans.
Becton, in turn, referred to the groundbreaking as something that he has “been working on for about eighteen years.”
He went on to reference how several Jacksonville residents have told him that they used to live in the Baymeadows neighborhood, back when it was the “place to be.”
Becton believes that this will be the spark the area needs to win back some of its former residents.
“This is going to be the ‘place to be’ again,” he said, “and this is the start of that transformation.”
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