Circle for street parking near Ferg's Sports Bar and Grill on a Friday night and you will lose ten minutes before you find a spot. Pull into the garage across Central Avenue instead, and you are parked inside a minute, inside a structure that did not exist before the summer of 2025 and that will, at some point, have a 76-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton looking down at you from the roof.
Those two facts are not on the same timeline, and that gap is the actual story if you live anywhere near the EDGE District right now. The garage is finished, open, and already handling real traffic. The rooftop garden built around that dinosaur is still a plan on paper. Understanding which parts of this project are real today and which are still renderings changes how you should think about parking, construction noise, and what's actually coming to this stretch of Central Avenue over the next year.
What You Can Actually Park In Today
The garage sits at 1301 Central Avenue, directly across from Ferg's, and it opened to the public in June 2025 as the first completed piece of The Central, a mixed-use project from Ellison Development. It includes EV charging, and you enter from 1st Avenue North. Payment runs through the Park with U app, managed by Universal Parking.
The rates, reported by the Tampa Bay Newspapers, work out to $2.50 for the first hour, $1.50 for each additional hour, or $21 for a full day. Monthly parking is available but limited, starting at $100.
A few things worth knowing before you use it:
- Address: 1301 Central Avenue, EDGE District
- Entrance: 1st Avenue North
- Charging: EV charging on site
- Capacity: 540 spaces, nearly double the EDGE District's prior public parking count
- Payment: Park with U app, run by Universal Parking
That capacity number is the one that matters most for daily use. Before this garage opened, EDGE District visitors relied almost entirely on two-hour street parking. At the ribbon cutting, Jason Mathis, CEO of the St. Petersburg Downtown Partnership, said the added capacity would let visitors park once and stay longer instead of feeding a meter every two hours, and Mayor Ken Welch pointed to the earlier shortage as a sign of how much downtown had grown.
The site itself has some history worth knowing too. It once housed the St. Petersburg Police Department, and plans for redeveloping the 2.1-acre parcel date back to 2019, when the project was still called Orange Station under former Mayor Rick Kriseman.
Why All 540 Spots Won't Stay Public
Here is the part that changes how you should use this garage right now versus how you will use it once The Central is finished. Ellison Development has committed to keeping 400 of the 540 spaces dedicated to the community once construction on the rest of the project wraps up. The remaining spaces will go to tenants and hotel guests.
Right now, while the office tower, hotel, and housing units above and around the garage are still under construction, all 540 spaces are open to anyone. That will not always be true. Construction on The Central is expected to finish around mid-2027, and once it does, roughly a quarter of the garage effectively gets absorbed by the building's own tenants. If you have gotten used to easy, plentiful parking in the EDGE District over the past year, that ease has a shelf life measured in months, not years.
What's Going Up Around It
The garage is the ground-floor piece of a larger $200 million project. Ellison Development is building it in partnership with J Square Developers, DDA Development, and Backstreets Capital. Once complete, The Central will include an 11-story, roughly 125,000-square-foot office tower called Halcyon, with ARK Invest signed on as anchor tenant. Mayor Ken Welch has pointed to Halcyon as the city's first new Class A office space downtown since 1987.
Alongside the office tower, the project includes a 168-key Marriott Autograph Collection hotel and a seven-story residential building with 42 workforce housing units set aside for households earning at or below 120% of the area median income. None of that is finished yet. The parking garage is the only piece a resident can actually walk into today.
The Idea Behind the Dinosaur
The plan for the garage's rooftop did not stop at a place to park. In September 2025, Ellison Development announced that the nearly one-acre space on top of the structure would become a public garden built around a fossil display, with native Florida plants and walking paths surrounding a glass-encased Gorgosaurus skeleton named Devaiah.
Casey Ellison, the developer's CEO, put it plainly:
"Let's be honest, no one expects to find dinosaur fossils on top of a parking garage."
Devaiah is named for Dr. Devaiah Pagidipati, the father of Ellison co-founder Sidd Pagidipati. The Gorgosaurus predates Tyrannosaurus rex by roughly 10 million years, and the skeleton is described as one of only 20 known specimens of its kind and the only one held in private hands.
That is a genuinely rare fossil attached to a genuinely unusual idea: turning required parking infrastructure into a destination instead of dead space on a roof. It is also, as of the most recent public reporting, still a plan rather than a finished attraction. The September 2025 announcement described the concept as being in its early planning stages, with additional details on the garden and dinosaur display promised in the coming months. As of Florida Politics' January 2026 roundup of projects to watch for the year, the rooftop garden was still listed among things coming to The Central, not among things delivered.
So the honest way to describe where things stand: the garage you can park in tonight is real and has been for over a year. The dinosaur you may have heard about is still a rendering and a press release, not a ribbon cutting.
What This Actually Means If You're Nearby
If you live in or near the EDGE District, a few practical things follow from all of this.
First, this is the window to get comfortable using the full 540-space garage for EDGE District dinners, whether you're headed to Ferg's or somewhere else on Central Avenue. That convenience narrows once The Central fills in and 140 of those spaces get absorbed by tenants and hotel guests.
Second, expect construction activity in this stretch of Central Avenue to continue through the office tower, hotel, and housing build-out, with completion targeted around mid-2027. That's not a short runway, and it's worth factoring into how you think about noise, traffic patterns, and sidewalk detours near 1301 Central for the next several months.
Third, if the rooftop garden does eventually open as described, it would add a rare patch of green space to a stretch of downtown better known right now for construction cranes than gardens, roughly half a mile from Tropicana Field. Whether that happens on the timeline Ellison Development laid out in 2025 is still an open question. Nothing in the public record since that announcement confirms a firm opening date.
None of this requires a real estate decision from anyone reading it. It's simply what's true about a building most EDGE District residents drive past several times a week, and it's worth knowing which parts of the story are already built and which parts are still just a very good idea.
If you're curious about how projects like The Central tend to shift value and demand on the surrounding blocks over time, that's the kind of pattern Paul Simon tracks closely across downtown St. Petersburg. Let's Connect.
