'A LITTLE CITY UNTO ITSELF'

STORY AND PHOTOS BY SUSAN BURGESS

There wasn’t much to see when visionary developer Thomas J. White first stood in front of 4,600 acres of sandy Florida pastureland in the early 1980s. But in his mind’s eye, White saw a vibrant community with a major league baseball stadium, landscaped streets, residents working in its stores and professional offices, children at school and playing in parks, and homes in neighborhoods with manicured lawns and flower gardens.

Today, St. Lucie West is part of the city of Port St. Lucie, but its own utility company, plenty of shopping, professional services, recreation, schools, houses of worship, entertainment and neighborhoods give it the feel and look of an old-fashioned but thriving small town.

“I think my father would be happy with the way it turned out,” said White’s son, Thomas J. White Jr. from the White Company’s St. Louis, Mo., office. “Very happy. He wanted a quality mixed-use development with good roads, and we have all that.”

In the opinion of Nancy Feldman, a 14-year resident of the Country Club Estates neighborhood, St. Lucie West is “a little city unto itself with a dozen or more residential areas. Kids can go to nursery school through college here, and we have all kinds of recreation. It’s a wonderful, very laid-back place to live.

“Tom White was a visionary,” she said. “I-95 did not have an exit here, and this was a cow pasture. If you can imagine a city where there’s a cow pasture, and a not-easy-to-find cow pasture at that, you have to be a visionary,” she said. “Today it’s a lovely community; we have the stores to shop in and a new shopping center opening up.”

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

Town Center at St. Lucie West on Peacock Boulevard opens this summer, bringing some much-wished-for national chain stores to the community. Beall’s opened in early May. “I’ll be happy when Stein Mart opens,” Feldman said.

Lowe’s, at the eastern border of St. Lucie West adjacent to the turnpike, also opened in early May, directly across the street from The Home Depot.

Thomas J. White Sr. bought the acreage in 1985 from the Peacock cattle ranch, and spent the next several years planning and applying for permits under the name of the St. Lucie West Development Corp. Tom White Jr. said his father came up with the idea for a major league baseball stadium as a way to put the subdivision he named St. Lucie West on the map and market it to out-of-state buyers.

NAME RECOGNITION

After extensive negotiations with St. Lucie County government to work out funding for the stadium and an exhaustive search for a major league baseball team, the stadium opened to cheers in 1988 with the New York Mets in residence for spring training.

“The New York Mets drew people from the northeast and gave the area instant name recognition,” said Scott Wingfield, general manager of Coldwell Banker Thomas J. White Realty in St. Lucie West, the local arm of the Missouri-based White Company.

As White was planning St. Lucie West in the 1980s, Wingfield’s family, under the name of Callaway Land & Cattle Co., was developing another massive project, the 2,300-acre development called The Reserve, now known as PGA Village and owned by Kolter Communities, on the west side of I-95. PGA Village is adjacent to the western boundary of St. Lucie West.

“I think my father and Tom were a little bit ahead of their time, but I think things turned out pretty much exactly as our fathers had hoped for,” Wingfield said.

Thomas J. White Sr. passed away in 1989, his son said, but had arranged with Callaway to become the first two privately owned firms in the state to jointly build an Interstate 95 interchange. It is located right between the two developments.

“St. Lucie West today, in my mind, is a self-contained community,” Wingfield said. “We have sports, entertainment, hotels, doctors, a great soccer field in McChesney Park, two colleges, a light industrial park. County government has a building out here and we’re getting more restaurants.”

St. Lucie West also has its own water and sewer utility called the St. Lucie West Services District.

Tom White Jr. said he kept his hand in the development of St. Lucie West, developing several commercial properties, including Clock Tower Plaza, the Coldwell Banker building, and Westbrook Plaza as well as some others.

Crosstown Parkway, which marks the southern border of St. Lucie West, will take the traffic pressure off notoriously crowded St. Lucie West Boulevard, Wingfield said. Drivers from east of St. Lucie West use the boulevard as a conduit to the interstate. Crosstown’s I-95 interchange will open in 2009.

TRAFFIC CHALLENGES

Residents, meanwhile, worry that if St. Lucie West Boulevard ever has to be widened, its attractive appearance would be destroyed.

“The traffic is growing like crazy,” said five-year Lake Forest neighborhood resident Arthur Swanson who was chatting with friends outside of Dunkin’ Donuts.

“I heard if they widen St. Lucie West Boulevard they may take out the median. I hope they don’t,” said Raymond Capece, who has lived in the Lake Charles neighborhood for five years. He described the massive subdivision as, “very self-contained. Everything you could want, almost, is right here.” Then he added, “But we could use a Carrabas restaurant.”

St. Lucie County Administrator Doug Anderson moved into St. Lucie West in 1995 when there was one traffic signal, the restaurant was McDonald’s, and traffic jams were something that happened elsewhere. He remembers what the president of St. Lucie West, Pete Hegener, called the area.

“Pete called Peacock Boulevard ‘restaurant row’ but he couldn’t get a restaurant,” Anderson recalled. “He finally landed Ruby Tuesday’s.”

In 1994, St. Lucie West Development was sold to a Canadian development company. After changing hands several times, it became Core Communities, a subsidiary of Levitt Corp. in 1997, but kept the same management team, White said. Like St. Lucie West Development, Core oversaw the coordinated development of St. Lucie West and sold off acreage to commercial and residential developers. Core has now moved its offices to its other major project in St. Lucie County, Tradition.

DOING ITS JOB

Anderson was the county administrator when the Mets’ first spring training contract was renewed for another 16 years in the spring of 2003, ensuring that the development’s attractor would continue to do its job.

Attendance has been growing since the county began making a strong effort to bring families out to ball games with special themed evenings, discounts and events. Anderson said several games were sold out this year. The stadium has 7,000 seats, and a grassy berm with palm trees overlooking the field has space for at least 100 more.

The palm trees were placed there at the insistence of Dave Howard, executive vice president of business operations for the Mets, who said seeing them on television would help encourage northeasterners to go down to Florida during spring training.

“We refer to them as Dave Howard’s palm trees,” Anderson said. “We also negotiated a deal when the contract was renewed that the county would get a full page ad in every program they hand out in Shea Stadium.”

Since 2004 the county has spent around $20 million on stadium renovations. The stadium was also renamed Tradition Field. In a nod to the founder of St. Lucie West who conceived of the stadium and poured millions of dollars into it, a brass plaque on a column at the front entrance says “Thomas J. White Plaza.”

“The Thomas J. White Stadium was the centerpiece of St. Lucie West,” Tom White Jr. said. “It put us on the map and it is still doing that today.”