Tallest residential building on Florida’s Gulf Coast hits another milestone in St. Petersburg

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Briona Arradondo reports

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. - Downtown St. Pete became the center of its second-largest concrete pour Friday night as trucks filled a construction site on Central Avenue.

Workers laid the foundation for The Residences at 400 Central, a luxury high-rise residential building that will be the tallest on Florida's Gulf Coast. The project developer, Red Apple Real Estate, said the building will be a 46-story condominium with 301 luxury homes. It's a project about four to five years in the making. Now, the foundation can be established to bring the project forward.

"What's in that foundation right now is tons and tons of reinforcing steel which basically holds it all together," said Bill Unger, the senior vice president of construction at Red Apple.

Unger said the area to cover with concrete is about five full-size basketball courts that are about eight feet deep.

The construction site at Central Avenue before the concrete pour

"Trucks will be coming in one after the other in sequence, and they will come onto the site and stage on the site and empty their concrete into pump trucks. The pump trucks then pump it into the footing," said Unger.

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It will take about 68 trucks to dump about 650 truckloads of concrete from four local plants.

"When it's all done, it's going to be this gray field of concrete, and you’ll never know that there is all this steel and all this work that went into it," said Unger.

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Trucks will haul about two million pounds of concrete for the project. It's a significant milestone, and local shops on Central Avenue look forward to it getting off the ground.

"Besides the rattling and stuff from the construction, which kind of messes up things around here, some of the jars fall, and seasonings fall. Besides that, it's really exciting to see how explosive St. Pete is as far as infrastructure going up, new buildings," said Joseph Bruno, the manager at St. Pete Meat and Provisions on Central Avenue across the site. "I think it’ll definitely give us a boost once it finally opens, and we get our parking back. I think the tenants will be really excited to have a high-quality butcher shop right across the street."

The developer said the workers will work shifts to ensure the work gets done Friday night through Saturday. Unger said the work will be nonstop, and the process should take about 18 hours or so.

Construction to start vertically should start by the end of May.

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