Midtown Tampa

Midtown Tampa opened in 2021 on 22 acres that had sat between downtown Tampa and the Westshore business district without a reason to stop there. Bromley Companies built the reason: 185,000 square feet of retail under 700,000 square feet of office, 390 apartments and a 225-room dual-branded Marriott hotel, bounded by Dale Mabry Highway, Cypress Street and Himes Avenue at the I-275 interchange, four miles from Tampa International Airport.

There is no department store and no fashion anchor. Whole Foods Market and REI hold the anchor positions, and the rest of the retail floor follows that choice: Sephora, Madison Reed and Buff City Soap in beauty and personal care, Ballard Designs and Casper in home, Element for surf and skate, F45 and Core Reform for fitness, and The Escape Game as the entertainment draw. The selection reads as a grocery-led, health-led mixed-use district, which is what the office population above it shops for on a weekday.

Dining is the larger tenant category by count and the one that brings the rest of Tampa in. True Food Kitchen, Shake Shack, Walk-On’s Sports Bistreaux, Ponte Modern American, Colony Grill and Kale Me Crazy cover the range from fast casual to sit-down, and Sal y Mar, the rooftop bar above the hotel, is the address that made Midtown a destination on Raymond James Stadium game days. Joffrey’s Coffee & Tea, the Tampa roaster founded in 1984, anchors the café trade with a local name.

Bromley’s economics do not depend on the retail alone. The offices and apartments supply a captive daily population, the hotel supplies the weekend, and retail rents are set against that traffic rather than against comparison shopping. A tenant evaluating Tampa’s urban core gets a site where the catchment is stacked above the store, and where the nearest competing format, the enclosed regional mall, sits several miles away in the suburbs.