Gainesville City Commission approves Streatery design with brick pavers

BY JENNIFER CABRERA

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – During the afternoon session of the February 20 Gainesville City Commission meeting, Commissioners voted unanimously to move forward with a proposed design for the Streatery with brick pavers, but they postponed decisions on where to place the seating and under what conditions food trucks and stages will be permitted.

Streatery was established in September 2020 so patrons could eat and drink outside

Public Works Director Brian Singleton described the project, which spans two blocks on SW 1st Avenue between SW 2nd Street and Main Street. The Streatery was established in September 2020, when indoor gatherings were prohibited, to help businesses have space for customers to eat and drink. The City Commission voted in October 2024 to keep the street closed and transform it into a walkable area designed to host street festivals, farmers’ markets, food truck rallies, and other activities. 

Singleton said the priorities are to repair the substandard conditions, improve pedestrian accessibility, provide infrastructure for more programming, and activate the entire two blocks by redirecting traffic from existing parking lots to 1st Street.

Singleton said the proposal includes a curbless street and dimmable street lighting for a softer atmosphere during events; there will also be overhead string lighting and lights in the trees that will be fully programmable. Forty power receptacles will be placed along the corridor and will be locked so they can only be used during events. Businesses will have access to the space for outdoor seating from the building to the front of the tree wells, and the remaining area would be available for City programming. Staff also proposed planters and seating along the center of the corridor and some gateway amenities on Main Street. 

Singleton said the historic bricks that are already in use downtown have “a lot of concerns about walkability,” so staff is proposing a hybrid option with modern brick pavers on the sidewalks and concrete down the center. That center portion could also include lighting stencils that would show up on the concrete. The design cost is the same for both options, with the hybrid option costing about $400,000 less to build. 

Singleton said the proposed design could accommodate 72 tents or some combination of a mobile stage, tents, and food trucks, “completely flexible for any type of event as a festival street.”

Singleton said the Downtown Advisory Board did not like the design and strongly recommended keeping the street open to traffic and parking. The board was concerned about businesses such as kiosks competing with the businesses in brick-and-mortar buildings and also preferred modern brick pavers and additional green space. The Gainesville Community Reinvestment Area (GCRA) board also did not want the street to be closed to traffic at all times and requested a re-evaluation after a year. 

Singleton said the project will cost $3.2 million if the full brick option is selected, with design and pre-construction fees covered by about $200,000 from local option gas tax funds; the remainder could come from a combination of GCRA funds, the local option gas tax, and the tree mitigation fund. He said staff can come back with a guaranteed maximum price for construction around October, and construction would be complete near the end of 2026. Staff recommended proceeding with the proposed design with brick pavers (using the historic bricks as accents), gateway amenities at S. Main Street, and planters and seating in the center of the corridor and at the parking lot frontages. They asked the Commission to vote to enter into a task agreement with Jbrown Professional Group in the amount of $162,734 for the final design of the Streatery.

Commissioners: center seating would be hot

Commissioner Bryan Eastman wanted to know why staff recommended seating in the middle of the corridor, and Singleton said it was flexibility and “that’s where the most sunlight is” for planters. He also said that emergency vehicles need to be able to get into the area.

Commissioner Casey Willits asked whether the center seating and planters would be movable, and Singleton said it would require equipment and would only be done a few times a year for festivals. 

In response to a question from Willits, Singleton explained that the roadway would be completely reconstructed and would be able to handle traffic if the corridor is reopened in the future. 

Commissioner James Ingle was concerned at how hot it would be to sit in the center of the corridor for much of the year, and Singleton said they hoped to use large planters to get some additional shade, plus they could add umbrellas. Ingle said, “I think it’s a really good way to kind of balance where we’re putting some of these resources and where we can have some real opportunities to have events aside from just the one spot that really doesn’t have a whole lot of business around it. This is gonna be a good opportunity to really kind of spread that around, so I think it’s a good idea.”

Ward: “We’ve got to make some progress”

Mayor Harvey Ward said there will never be a perfect solution, “nothing is getting cheaper,” and “we’ve been working on this for four and a half years, and we’ve got to make some progress.”

Public comment

During public comment, Mike Warren from AMJ, which plans to develop 173 affordable housing units on Lot 10, said he was concerned that “instead of a small, bucolic park in the middle of the concrete city, we may end up with… an outdoor nightclub on a paved street with a stage and over a dozen food trucks… We need to have an environment that allows people to have quiet evenings… We already have several festival areas in downtown, Bo Diddley Plaza and Depot Park.”

Matthew Hurst said the historic bricks are designed to last longer than modern pavers and added, “The material you have right now is unquestionably the best for a street” and has been used for festivals for many years. He suggested leveling and doing spot maintenance on the historic bricks, which would have the added benefit of keeping the street open during the construction phase. 

Teresa Callen, from the Downtown Advisory Board, said the City needs to think about how the street is going to function. She mentioned the lack of green space for walking dogs and how the amenities on the Streatery should enhance living downtown. She said businesses find it disruptive to have food trucks parked outside and there are a lot of vacancies downtown because “we don’t have enough people living in the district to make an impact economically during the day.”

Linda McGurn said the Downtown Advisory Board had four comments: it’s not a good idea to put food trucks or 72 tents in front of businesses; the most important thing is the quality of life for people living downtown; they need to think about noise; and the street needs to be attractive. She asked the City to use pavers instead of the hybrid option and urged them to use the historic bricks somewhere else: “They are not easy to walk on, especially for women.”

Melanie Barr also did not want food trucks to block access to the businesses in the buildings along the street. She wanted to see the historic bricks remain in the street because “when people come downtown, they want to experience downtown. They want the ambience of a historic district.”

Betsy Hurst also asked the Commission to preserve the original brick roads, which she said “have meant ‘Gainesville’ to many of us. We knew we were downtown when we reached those nice red brick roads… I thought the idea of the Streatery plans, when they came up, were to preserve that street… Yes, it might be a little bit bumpy, but it has worked.” She also asked for more detail on the funding for the project.

After public comment, Ward said, “The majority of [funding], I believe, comes from the GCRA; there’s some local option gas tax funding as part of it, as well as tree mitigation funding as part of it because part of what we’re trying to accomplish is be able to keep those live oak trees where they are and add some new trees.” 

Ward: “We’re talking about the basic infrastructure that’s going to go there”

Ward said they were not discussing whether to allow food trucks, but the plan adds electrical outlets, which can also be used by festival vendors. He added, “We don’t have to make a decision about stages today… We’re talking about the basic infrastructure that’s going to go there… The focus needs to be, ‘Let’s get started on getting something moving here,’ instead of a constant back-and-forth, because we’ve had four years of back-and-forth, and the puddles get bigger while we do that, and everything gets more expensive while we do that.”

Ward said he also grew up in Gainesville, and “I walk across those bricks every day, literally every day of the week, but… there is a way to honor the legacy of the bricks and to use some of those bricks in very specific ways but not to have them as the basis of what’s going on here.”

Eastman said that although they were not making decisions on food trucks or live music that day, they would “use a bit of common sense with all of this stuff… And we will figure all that out, just like every downtown has to make sure that all the needs are balanced out there.”

Eastman said he supported preserving sections of the brick roads, but “we also need to have a mix of usability… This [section] needs to be something that works for pedestrians, works for people, looks nice, is a focal point in the city – and what we’re hearing from the engineers is that it is very difficult or impossible to balance all of that out.” He said he didn’t like the seating in the middle: “Everything I’ve read about how you design plazas is – people prefer to sit around the outside and look in, while the pedestrian area’s in the middle.” He suggested not making that decision that day. 

Eastman said he never liked the “Streatery” branding, and he supported letting the public vote on names from a list for new branding.

Willits also didn’t like the seating down the middle and supported delaying that decision, but he said the Mayor was right about needing to move forward and that the main decision was between pavers and concrete; he said he was “fine with going forward with pavers, which are more expensive.”

Singleton: Design provides the flexibility desired by the Downtown Advisory Board

Commissioner Ed Book asked whether the design aligns with the request for flexibility from the Downtown Advisory Board, and Singleton said the proposed layout would “be flexible in a way to open the street up in the future.” He said they would use different paving patterns for different areas “to kind of delineate those spaces.”

Book was also concerned that seating in the center would be hot and recommended removing that from any motion to let staff come back with other options; he also recommended noise-dampening features such as baffles and surfaces to redirect sound away from residential buildings. He supported incorporating the historic brick into the design but said accessibility was more important to him, so he didn’t want the historic bricks used on the street surface. 

Singleton: Seating on the outside would limit access to the power outlets, could impact accessibility to businesses

Commissioner Desmon Duncan-Walker asked why staff recommended seating down the middle, and Singleton said that moving the seating to the outside would limit access to the power outlets. He also said that infrastructure along the outside could impact accessibility to the adjacent businesses and again mentioned access for emergency vehicles. He reminded the Commission that the design keeps the space between the buildings and the tree wells open for the use of the business owners for sidewalk cafes, “so that kind of limits our area from tree well to tree well, down the center.”

Duncan-Walker said she always prioritizes safety, and it sounded to her like staff had carefully thought about how to design the street to make it safe for everybody, so she supported their recommendations. She also liked the gateway design submitted by the Downtown Advisory Board and was interested in adding an arch like the one in the slide below if there was funding.

Duncan-Walker said she liked the pavers, both for making the street “easy to traverse” but also because it “gives us that homage, if you will, to the historic downtown Gainesville that we know.” She also said she would not support “anything that is going to cause any type of disruption to the new neighbors and families that we’re bringing into Lot 10, and I think it’s important for us to make those kinds of statements on the front end.”

Duncan-Walker asked if staff could bring back “something that incorporates that arch? I just really like that.” Singleton replied, “We can do anything, with the right amount of funding, of course.” Duncan-Walker said she would be curious to see what it would cost, and Singleton said that changing the design at this stage would add costs and could impact the delivery time of the project. 

Commissioner Cynthia Chestnut, who was participating via Zoom, had difficulties with the audio delay but said she also liked the arch and supported using brick pavers.

Chief Operating Officer Andrew Persons said that moving the seating to the outside could impact the amount of programming the City could do in that space. He said they might have to remove power receptacles and reconfigure how the space would be used for events, but staff could look at it, as long as the Commissioners understood there would be trade-offs.

Ingle pointed out that the seating could be moved in the future if they decided it wasn’t working in the center. He was also “a big fan” of using the historic bricks “for accenting and recognition of the history that’s been there.” He didn’t think food trucks would harm businesses if they were only there for festivals because the festivals bring so many people downtown. He also emphasized that the project should include fixing existing infrastructure problems that are impacting the current buildings, such as sewage back-up and grease traps, and he wanted to make sure local people are hired to do the work.

Motion

Eastman made a five-part motion:

• Proceed with the final design of the Streatery with brick pavers, gateway amenities at S. Main Street, and planters/seating (removing the recommendation that seating be in the center);
• Enter into a task assignment with JBPro in the amount of $162,734 for final design of the Streatery, subject to approval by the City Attorney as to form and legality;
• Bring back to the Commission a name and branding for the project, with feedback from the public;
• Bring back to the Commission the design of the landscaping and seating before construction;
• Bring back a discussion about whether food trucks and stages are allowed and under what circumstances.

Ward said, “To be clear, I’m going to call it the Streatery for the rest of my life because I’m used to it now – just like the Gulf of Mexico.” Eastman responded that he would “never call it the Streatery.”

The motion passed unanimously.