For six years, the storefront glass at 1701 North Franklin Street has done nothing but reflect whatever was happening across the street. The building, sometimes called the Farris Building, sits inside the stretch of North Franklin known as Yellow Brick Row, and it closed as Hall on Franklin in early 2020, one of the earlier casualties of that spring. It never reopened. Anyone who has walked or driven that corridor regularly has watched the same dark windows for the better part of a decade, long enough that the building stopped registering as a question and became part of the scenery.
That changed this year. A Tampa investor named Joshua Pardue and a group of partners, Al Rogers, Dor Haim, Enrique DeJesus, and Robert Stern, bought the building and started gutting it for a roughly $15 million buildout, according to reporting from Hoodline that cited the Tampa Bay Business Journal. The new project has an internal name, "1701," and it's arriving not as one restaurant but as three separate businesses sharing a single roof and back-of-house.
Three Businesses, One Address
The anchor tenant is Hail Mary Social Club, a sports bar built around a wraparound island bar with televisions on every side, run in the kitchen by chef David Reyes, a three-time winner at the Tampa Bay Wine & Food Festival with training in Michelin-starred kitchens, according to coverage in That's So Tampa. The design work, both for Hail Mary and for the building's nightlife elements generally, comes from ICRAVE, the firm behind LIV Miami and Komodo Miami, with TVS Design handling additional buildout under Ken Cowarth.
Behind Hail Mary, on the same ground floor, is Uno Mas, a Mexico City-style taqueria also fed by Reyes' kitchen, with two hidden speakeasy spaces built into the back of the space for mezcal and tequila service. Upstairs is the third piece, Boogie Heights, a retro dance hall built around a disco ball and a 1970s-themed dance floor, with lighting design from SJ Lighting layered on top of the ICRAVE interior work. None of the three had announced a firm opening date as of late summer. Partners told reporters in late March they expected the building open within 60 to 90 days. By August, local coverage was still describing the rollout as active but not yet settled into a routine, with concepts opening in stages rather than all at once.
What is settled is the shape of the bet. Three tenants, one shared kitchen infrastructure, a building that sat empty since the pandemic now getting a nightlife identity built for daytime sports-bar traffic, late-night tacos and mezcal, and a dance floor, all under one address on North Franklin.
The Loop That Was Already Working
None of this is happening in a neighborhood short on somewhere to go. Half a mile away on the Hillsborough River, Armature Works has been running its own version of a Tampa Heights evening since 2018, inside a 73,000-square-foot building that started life in 1910 as a maintenance facility for the city's streetcars. The Heights Public Market, a 22,000-square-foot section of that building, holds a rotating lineup of vendors, and the building's restaurant slate currently runs Steelbach, Stones Throw, M.Bird, and Champagne Porch, according to the venue's own site.
That loop, market for dinner, a walk along the Riverwalk, maybe a drink at the rooftop, has had years to become a habit. It doesn't need an introduction for anyone who already lives in the neighborhood. The Franklin Street loop does, because it's new, and because until this year there wasn't one.
Why These Aren't the Same Walk Yet
The two halves of Tampa Heights sit close enough on a map that they read as one neighborhood. On foot after dark, they currently behave more like two. The infrastructure that would physically connect them is under construction but not finished. The West River BUILD project, a federally funded expansion of the Tampa Riverwalk, broke ground in November 2025 and includes new pedestrian bridges at Platt Street and Brorein Street along with an observation overlook at Tony Jannus Park. Crews have been drilling dozens of shafts and piles into the Hillsborough River, some as deep as 50 feet, to support the new overwater structures. When finished, the project is meant to extend a continuous stretch of Riverwalk connecting downtown to the surrounding districts, including the stretch of North Franklin where the Hall on Franklin building sits.
The project's target for substantial completion is February 2027. That means for at least this fall and likely into next year, someone planning an evening in Tampa Heights is choosing between two separate destinations rather than moving fluidly from one to the other. A dinner at the market and a stop at Uno Mas afterward is a drive or a longer walk, not the short stroll it will eventually become.
What's Already Landed While the Bigger Project Finishes
The bridges are still years out, but smaller pieces of the same push toward a more connected riverfront have already shown up. Water Works Park, right next to Armature Works, added an ADA-accessible We-Go-Round in March 2026, part of a broader effort to make the Riverwalk's playground infrastructure more usable for more people. A few minutes south along the same river, in downtown proper, Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park opened two new dog parks in February 2026, a $1.4 million investment funded through the Downtown Community Redevelopment Agency as part of the Tampa Museum of Art's larger expansion. Neither addition sits directly on the Franklin Street stretch, but both point in the same direction as the bridge project: money and attention flowing toward making the connected riverfront easier to use on a normal Tuesday, not just for an event.
What This Actually Looks Like on a Given Night
Right now, a night in Tampa Heights still tends to be one loop or the other. A river night means the market, the Riverwalk, and whichever restaurant at Armature Works still has a table. A Franklin Street night means whichever of the three new concepts has opened its doors that week, since the rollout has been staggered rather than simultaneous. Franklin Street itself carries its own momentum beyond this one building. Tampa's Community Redevelopment Area approved $6 million in late 2024 for streetscape and infrastructure work along the corridor, spread across three fiscal years starting in 2026, and Tampa Downtown Partnership president Kenyetta Hairston-Bridges has described the street as connective tissue linking the River District, downtown, and Tampa Heights.
Armature Works also keeps its own calendar running independent of any of this. The venue hosts a multi-weekend Fall Fest most Octobers, typically split across two weekends with a riverside pumpkin patch, a petting zoo, and family activities on the lawn and pier, a tradition that's been running long enough to reach its later annual installments. It's the kind of fixture that doesn't need the Franklin Street side of the neighborhood to finish anything first.
For now, the honest way to think about Tampa Heights is as a neighborhood mid-build, with one side of its evening life already established and the other just getting its doors open, and a bridge project in between that will eventually make the choice between them beside the point.
We've spent a long time watching Tampa neighborhoods change shape one building at a time, and Tampa Heights right now is a good example of how much a single vacant address can hold up a whole corridor's momentum until someone finally does something with it. If you've got questions about what's happening on your own block, or just want to talk through what a stretch like this means for the neighborhood around you, The Lewkowicz Group is always glad to talk shop.
