By Karen Brune Mathis & Mike Mendenhall | Staff Writers
Atlanta-based Columbia Ventures LLC filed civil engineering plans with the city Oct. 21 for its proposed Lennox on Park apartment and retail development in Brooklyn.
Columbia Ventures wants to build a five-story, 342-unit apartment project on 3.23 acres at 380 Park St. at Park and Forest streets.
The construction plans in review are dated October 2022. Kimley-Horn and Associates Inc. is the civil engineer.
Site data shows a 303,424-square-foot apartment building area; 4,685 square feet of restaurant space; 5,856 square feet of restaurant and retail space; 1,725 square feet of apartment accessory space; and a 169,350-square-foot parking garage.
A geotechnical engineering report shows a seven-floor building with a two-level parking deck with five floors of apartments above it.
Plans show 218 spaces on the first level and 232 spaces on the second level.
There also is ground parking.
Ventures is the developer through Park Street Owner LLC.
The plans in review include site demolition, building construction and paving, grading, drainage and utility connections.
Plans show existing one- and two-story concrete block structures that will be removed.
The Downtown Development Review Board voted 7-0 on July 14 to grant final design approval for the project that Columbia Ventures co-founder and Managing Partner Dillon Baynes said in an email May 9 will be a $100 million investment.
The company “loves the Florida Story, the Sunbelt Story and the Jacksonville Story,” Baynes said in the email.
“We are all in,” he said. “We have an office in Savannah two hours away and have been in the market for almost four years. We hope to find other great opportunities in time.”
The project site sits on nearly two city blocks bounded by Forest, Myrtle, Price and Park streets that Columbia Ventures finished acquiring in November 2021 through Park St. Owner LLC.
The development will close and be built over Chelsea Street west of Price Street, the site plan shows.
The review board complimented the overall project, which includes 8,338 square feet of retail and restaurant space without outdoor seating along Forest and Park street.
To gain approval, Columbia Ventures agreed to the board’s request to add public art and seating to the southwest corner of the project and remove six planned street parking spaces on Forest Street.
Columbia Ventures also is working with the Florida Department of Transportation to buy 0.61 acres that connects to the project site for open green space.
The board’s support on adding the parcel to the project was contingent on the developer making the green space available to the public.
Columbia Ventures Development Manager Ryan Akin said they wanted to keep some of the space separated from public areas to give residents in planned ground-floor units a feeling of safety.
Akin agreed to work with the board to make some of the space an improvement to the public right-of-way.
The renderings show Kimley-Horn and Studio Architects of Atlanta as the project design team.
It would be Columbia Ventures’ second high-density proposed residential project in or bordering Downtown.
In May, City Council approved an $8.285 million incentives deal for Columbia Ventures to convert the historic Union Terminal Warehouse at 700 E. Union St. into 228 apartments and more than 35,000 square feet of commercial and “makerspaces” in a $64.37 million project.
