As David Ergisi discusses his resolve to build his $450 million signature tower along the Downtown Northbank, he tells a story that began 40 years ago.
In it, he is an 18-year-old stepping off an airliner at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. In his pocket is $80. It is all the money he has.
He also carries the phone number of a North Carolina resident he met in Turkey, his home country. This is the only person he can turn to for help in the U.S., the nation to which he has immigrated.
He has arrived on a one-way Pan Am flight from Istanbul, his first time traveling by air. His family told him not to get on the plane.
“I’ll never forget them sitting down and saying, ‘We don’t support you to go. You should just go to college here, and you’re not going to get any support from us if you leave,’” he said.
“So I knew then that I was on my own.”
Four decades after that day in May 1984, Ergisi is pursuing the most ambitious project of a development career that has progressed from shopping centers to the 100-acre Fountains at St. Johns mixed-use development in St. Johns County to what would be his crowning achievement, the proposed 720-foot Ergisi Tower in Downtown.
The proposed tower is complex, and not just because of its size.
It is planned for a cramped site adjacent to the Main Street Bridge, where the easternmost ramp would have to be demolished to shoehorn the project into the small space.
At least one large underground utility pipe would have to be rerouted, and unmapped lines could be found upon further inspection.
What it would take to deal with the infrastructure issues, and how much it would cost, have yet to be determined.
Ergisi knows there are questions about whether he, or anyone, could pull off the tower.
His answer stretches back to 1984, when the 18-year-old arrival to the U.S. went from having practically nothing to finding footing on a path to become a U.S. citizen and realize the American dream.
“What was in me back then, that trust and faith and determination, is still in me today,” he said.
“That’s what’s going to help me build that tower. It’s challenging. It’s got a lot of complications. But I’ve been through challenges.”
‘I learned the value of a penny’
Ergisi was born in the Mediterranean-region city of Kahramanmaras, the second youngest of seven children in what he calls a middle-class family. A self-described average student with a lifelong interest in business, Ergisi said that in high school he began feeling constrained by Turkey’s government-controlled higher education system.
“You pass an exam, and based on your score you qualify to go to a specific college. So if I had stayed in Turkey, that would be my destiny: Graduate high school, take the exam. A lot of times, kids ended up going on a career path that they didn’t particularly choose.
“I just wasn’t interested in that. I wanted more control over what I did with my life and my future.”
That future would eventually flower into a successful career as an entrepreneur, a business manager and a developer in the U.S.
The path wasn’t easy.
After landing at JFK, Ergisi took a bus to North Carolina to see the person he had befriended in Turkey.
“We were pretty good friends, and I thought this individual would help me out,” he said.
“But from that point, I hit a whole lot of challenges.”
Ergisi is guarded on details about this period, saying he may eventually include them in a biography he plans to write.
What he will divulge is that he wound up in Virginia Beach, Virginia, working three jobs.
On weekdays, he delivered pizzas for Domino’s and worked on a roofing crew. On weekends, he washed dishes at a seafood restaurant.
He said it took about a year to begin supporting himself. He implies that he sometimes went hungry during that time. Asked if he was homeless, he smiled and said, “That’s maybe something for another interview.” He said he never sought financial assistance.
“I learned the value of a penny through that process,” he said. “One penny sometimes makes the difference of having lunch or not having lunch.”
Hard work and determination to be self-sufficient changed his fortune, he said. At Domino’s, he would “do jobs that other people didn’t seem to want to do,” such as folding boxes, washing dishes and cleaning the kitchen.
A manager noticed, and offered Ergisi a management training position. An assistant management position followed, and about 18 months later he ascended to a full management position.
Eighteen months after that, he bought a Domino’s franchise in New York City. Then 23, he said he was told he was the youngest franchisee in the company’s history.
A Domino’s spokesperson confirmed that Egisi became a franchisee at 23 in 1989 but said she did not know whether he was the youngest at that time. Since then, a 22-year-old became the youngest Domino’s franchisee to date.
Ergisi opened two more Domino’s locations in New York, where he employed a workforce of 150.
By his mid-20s, he said, he had sold them and made his first million dollars.
“America is a good place if you work hard,” he said. “Keep your head down, just focus on what you have to get done and you can accomplish anything.”
The road to Jacksonville
Ergisi said that in selling the Domino’s stores, part of his motivation was to move back south.
He returned to Virginia Beach, where he took a job selling cars at a Dodge dealership.
Asked why he became interested in the automotive industry after leaving the pizza business, he said he had heard selling cars was a lucrative and low-obstacle way to enter a sales career and that friends had told him he had a talent for salesmanship.
He flourished in the new role, he said, and soon was promoted into management.
His next step was Washington, D.C., where he sought a return to a bigger-city atmosphere and became a sales manager for a large Mercedes-Benz dealership.
“I was in my mid-20s, working crazy hours. It was an extremely busy location, so we would work 12, 14 hours a day,” he said.
The workload, piled on the years of hustling to establish himself, got to him. So did the big-city grind.
Having visited Florida, he scouted out Miami, Orlando and Jacksonville as relocation spots.
Ergisi liked Jacksonville’s weather and relatively slow pace, but also its growth potential.
In 1998, he took an offer for a sales job at the Brumos luxury auto dealership in Arlington and moved to a condo across from what is now the St. Johns Town Center.
“My first morning, I woke up and walked out to the balcony. I looked at where St. Johns Town Center is now, and there were cows feeding,” he said, laughing. “And here I am, this city boy. I had to question if I made the right decision.”
The answer came a short time later when he met the woman who would become his wife, Ozlem, after Brumos owner Bob Snodgrass suggested that Ergisi visit a restaurant owned by her family.
Ergisi said he would later find out that Snodgrass was vetting him for a management position and wanted a read on him from Ergisi’s future father-in-law, a friend and business partner of Snodgrass.
“I probably would not have taken the position if he (Snodgrass) didn’t tell me about his strategy,” Ergisi said, explaining that he was content with his lower-stress sales job.
“Then at that point, I had so much respect for him. I said, this is a brilliant individual. I am going to move into management with this guy.”
Ergisi spent 10 years with Brumos, helping the company expand to West Jacksonville.
From cars to commercial development
After investing some of his extra income into residential real estate, Ergisi made his first foray into commercial development with construction of the Tyler Plaza strip mall in Yulee during 2006.
He said he intended to keep the 24,000-square-foot center as a retirement asset. But after what he described as a “silly, silly offer,” he sold it and began developing another commercial property.
During that project, he said, he made “one of the most complicated decisions I’ve ever made” and left Brumos in 2007.
“I loved the people there like a family,” he said. “I loved the job and my career path, and the future was amazingly bright. But I moved on again. I followed my passion.”
Anyone who lived through the 2008 recession can likely guess what happened next. After experiencing rapid growth, Ergisi faced a reset as the economy crashed.
He became a commercial real estate broker and said that within two months he sold a $7 million property “that just turned everybody’s heads.”
He remained a broker for two years, then returned to development as the economy rebounded.
His real estate company, Cross Regions Group, was born in 2014.
A year earlier, he and his family became friends with St. Augustine residents Alan and Jen Stevenson. They went on to partner on stand-alone building purchases and then to a ground-up shopping center development, Diane’s Marketplace in St. Augustine.
Jen Stevenson describes Ergisi as a friend and mentor who helped her and her husband establish their own development business, Stevenson Holding Co.
“His knowledge and professionalism were instrumental to making each of those transactions successful, and it’s because of the experience our family has gained through our relationship with David that we eventually transitioned from operating retail businesses and moved into commercial and residential real estate investing and developing,” she said in an email.
The Fountains and Ergisi Tower
Today, Ergisi is making news as the developer behind the Fountains at St. Johns development and his proposed Ergisi Tower in Downtown.
The Fountains development is a community within a community at northeast County Road 210 West and Interstate 95 in northern St. Johns County, that when fully built-out will include apartments, a Home2 Suites Hotel, a Jacksonville University satellite campus, restaurants and retail.
In June, St. Johns County issued a permit for a $5.2 million, 42,000-square-foot Ascension St. Vincent’s Health Center to anchor the development.
Also planned at The Fountains is something personal for Ergisi.
In July 2024, the St. Johns County Board of County Commissioners unanimously approved a $621,031 incentives package for the development of the $20.5 million TyMe Institute, a cancer prevention clinic named for Ergisi’s late son, Tyler Mert Ergisi.
In early 2022, Tyler died of bone cancer at age 19. The clinic’s name comes from the first two letters of his first and middle names.
Ergisi’s first development, the Tyler Plaza shopping center in Yulee, also is named for his son.
“TyMe Cancer Research Institute is founded to honor his courageous battle against cancer,” Ergisi said in a release at the time.
“The Ergisi family has resolved to use all their resources, relationships, knowledge, and economic strength in the quest to find a cure for children like Tyler.”
Lofty ambition
Ergisi Tower is something else entirely. It would be the tallest tower between Miami and Atlanta.
The project would include 320 residential units and 35,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space on a 1.6-acre parcel of city-owned riverfront land just east of the Main Street Bridge.
The scale of the project is bold in a town where the last tower taller than 600 feet was built in 1990.
Ergisi sees the project as a jump-starter for Jacksonville’s long-standing effort to revitalize Downtown, a valentine to the place he now calls home.
“We need a thriving, vibrant and healthy Downtown. It’s such a beautiful place,” he said.
“How often do you get a riverfront where you can sit and watch dolphins swimming by? And if you build a building tall enough, you can actually see the Intracoastal, the ocean and the river, all of that. How many other cities around the world have this opportunity? I always felt that Downtown was amazing place and I was frankly surprised it wasn’t developed more.”
He envisions Ergisi Tower being home to Jacksonville’s first Michelin-rated restaurant, a place to bring family and friends for a cocktail and jazz music, and a community for residents that will feature health care services and a boutique grocer.
“It’s a very luxurious and very high-end experience that would not only serve the residents, it will serve the entire city,” he said.
“That’s how you bring people to Downtown, by offering some of the uses that don’t exist anywhere else. Once they start coming, and you establish some type of traffic into Downtown, then the next project developer — whether that’s me or somebody else — says, ‘These numbers are working. Let’s build more.’”
Pie in the sky?
The recent history of Downtown Jacksonville is filled with renderings of ambitious projects that went nowhere. Ergisi knows there are skeptics who believe his tower will be the latest to be put on the shelf.
In an Aug. 26 workshop, Downtown Investment Authority board members questioned the feasibility of the project and requested a study on the best use of the site as opposed to committing it to Ergisi.
Ergisi is undeterred. He said he would walk away from the site and seek another location for it if the bridge-adjacent property proves infeasible.
“But we’re nowhere near that at this point with this project,” he said.
He believes the tower can be built in five years. He makes it clear that finishing it would be a professional triumph for him.
“I don’t focus on saving pennies, I focus on creating magnificence,” he said.
“You have more interest that way. Businesses succeed, and ultimately it yields a better return. I focus on the return one time, to make sure the project’s viable, and then I focus on creating something special. If you go back and look at our projects, every project has to be better than the last one. We have to improve something on that project and with that strategy.”
Foreign investment
Also adding complexity to the project, Ergisi plans to fund it partly through the federal EB-5 program, which allows foreign investors who fund development projects in the U.S. to move to the front of the line for green cards.
Ergisi also drew EB-5 funding for the Fountains project. The funding source is more common in larger cities.
“It’s a very complicated process, but when properly done it yields amazing projects,” he said.
“These investors ultimately want to come to this country, and frankly they’re the people that we want, because they’re coming here with capital and to support our economy, not drain it.”
Developers and communities also benefit, he said.
“It brings capital into the local market here, especially in a time like today where capital markets are really tight,” he said.
Ergisi frequently returns to Turkey, drawn by family and opportunities to connect with prospective investors.
In 2023, much of his hometown was destroyed by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake that was followed by two major aftershocks.
The earthquake killed more than 12,000 people in Kahramanmaras and as many as 46,000 total, including some members of Ergisi’s family. An estimated 280,000 buildings were destroyed, many of them in Ergisi’s hometown.
In response, Ergisi founded the Cross Regions Disaster Relief Fund, which he started with a pledge to match the first $100,000 in donations.
Jen Stevenson said the fund was a reflection of Ergisi’s character.
“On a personal level, David is just a good and giving person,” she said.
“While he and his family have faced some professional and personal challenges over the years, he has always remained positive and committed to achieving the best possible outcomes professionally and for doing personally what’s best for his family, both at home and abroad,” she said.
“Our relationship with David has been a positive addition to our lives, and we couldn’t be happier for the professional success he has achieved, as it is the well-deserved result of the hard work and dedication he puts into everything he does.”
The past meets the future
Ergisi acknowledges that the Ergisi Tower project might be easier to develop on a different site. For now, he’s keeping his eyes fixed on his target location, saying the site near the iconic bridge will help set it apart.
“There are challenges, but there are always challenges,” he said. “I’ve never had anything given to me that didn’t come with challenges.”