ST. PETERSBURG — The boxy old St. Petersburg Police headquarters in the Edge district will soon be no more.
Making way for new apartments, condos, offices and shops, it’s scheduled to be demolished starting Tuesday, with workers beginning with its interior. Then comes the structural demolition, which will likely involve hydraulic equipment and excavators hacking away at the building and loading the debris onto dump trucks for it to be hauled away.
That step in the process could begin “potentially within a week” after the interior knock-down begins, according to Amber Brinkley, a spokesperson for the project, with the entire demolition expected to take three to four months.
This stage has been a long time coming, after the demolition was originally scheduled for the summer of 2020 but was pushed back because of the pandemic. St. Petersburg Police are now in a new $78.3 million facility that opened in March 2019.
The old complex, in a prime location on Central Avenue, will be replaced by a new development called Orange Station at the Edge. It will feature 60 condos and 42 “workforce” apartments, with rents based on the area median income ranging from about $1,100 to $2,300.
It will also have 50,000 square feet of high-end office space and 14,000 square feet of street-front retail along Central Avenue and 1st Avenue N, as well as a 600-space parking garage, 400 of which will be for public use, according to a news release.
Orange Station will “encircle a new public plaza with outdoor cafes,” and will also be a transit station for the SunRunner bus rapid transit line that will connect downtown St. Petersburg to the beaches, according to the release. It is also expected to feature a “public art tribute” to the Courageous 12, the 12 Black St. Petersburg police officers who successfully sued the city to gain the same rights as their white colleagues in the 1960s.
That project is scheduled to break ground in June 2022.