Leukemia may have kept John Roush (far right) from school and his friends since his diagnosis in May, but it wasn’t going to spoil the drive-by 7th birthday celebration he shared with his twin brother Donald (left), as the Wesley Chapel community turned out in force out to wish the boys well from a distance.
Robert Roush knew a traditional birthday party was out of the question for his twin sons Donald and John, after John was diagnosed with leukemia in May.
So, Robert took to Facebook and crossed his fingers. A 26-year resident of Wesley Chapel, he hoped he could rally enough people willing to drive by his home and offer a happy seventh birthday wish for the boys from their vehicles.
Wesley Chapel didn’t let him down. More than 100 vehicles drove by the Roush home in two hours in Fox Ridge, honking and hollering birthday wishes, including fire trucks, a motorcycle club and some classic cars. Many waved elaborate signs wishing the twins a happy birthday, others handed out gifts for them.
“Honestly at first, we were apprehensive,” Robert said. “We’ve lived in Wesley Chapel for 26 years and I’ve seen how much it has changed with so much growth (and new people) the last two years and worried maybe it was losing that sense of community…but I was overwhelmed in a very good way. We saw that, at the core, the community is still there.”
Donald and John waved back from the front lawn of their home. They posed with firefighters, who brought gifts. John got to see teachers and his classmates from Quail Hollow Elementary, who he never got to say goodbye to this school year due to his untimely diagnosis.
“That was a big deal for him,” Robert said. “Missing the last weeks of school was really, really tough for him.”
John will not be able to attend classes in the fall, and will be home schooled by Robert. John’s mother Laura is a teacher’s assistant at Quail Hollow and is taking classes to become a teacher.
In May, John, who hadn’t been himself for months, was taken to St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital, where he was diagnosed with leukemia.
He spent the following 11 days in the hospital. The doctors say there is a two-year battle ahead of the family, but Robert says people who have children with leukemia or have already been through it have told him that two years “is a pie in the sky” prediction.
“We think we’re looking at 3-4 years of chemotherapy and other treatments,” said Robert, a self-employed counselor and pastor. “We’ll just have to take it one month at a time, and pray for the best.”
On the twins’ actual birthday — June 24 — John had a bone marrow draw and a spinal injection, where he had to go under anesthesia and have chemotherapy directly injected into his spine.
As a result, he was worn out 45 minutes into his birthday drive-by celebration the following day, but not before he was able to enjoy a reprieve from the loneliness of his illness.
“It absolutely was good for him, not only seeing how many people were supporting him and rooting for him, but it also gave him closure for the end of school,” Robert said. “It really helped him.” — JCC
Note – On July 1, Robert Roush posted the following on Facebook:
“After a wonderful birthday, due to the love and support of the community, John has had a few setbacks. He had to undergo an additional bone marrow draw…and his blood counts have dropped, requiring him to be admitted back into St. Joseph’s. His spirits are high, but his energy is low. Please pray for our little man and our family…God willing he may be home for the 4th (of July).”
The road from K-Bar Ranch through Meadow Pointe III was opened for utility workers, not the general public, and has been closed again. Final work, like removing the sign above, should be completed by the end of this month.(Photo: John C. Cotey)
It was open.
Now it isn’t.
However, it will be open again. Really.
That’s basically where the Meadow Pointe Blvd. connection to K-Bar Ranch Pkwy. saga stands at the moment, after a few weeks of confusion for Wesley Chapel and New Tampa residents.
The long-awaited connector is currently closed. According to Tampa City Council member Luis Viera, who represents the New Tampa area, the roadway is “technically private property until the Tampa City Council approves the plat later in July 2022.”
Following that approval, the roadway will have to pass an inspection by Pasco County, which will then officially approve it. The City of Tampa has already inspected the connector.
Until all of that red tape has been completed, developer M/I Homes will retain ownership of the roadway and the barricades will stay up.
Viera was under the impression that the connector was completed when he noticed that the barriers had been removed and contacted the Neighborhood News on May 30.
A few weeks after driving the road a few times and posting a story online about the connection finally being made, the Neighborhood News received more than a dozen inquiries via email and social media asking why it was suddenly closed again.
After a number of social media conspiracy theories were floated, Viera says he was told by City of Tampa staff that the connector was only meant to be open to provide utility access to fully complete the work, as well as removing old signs like the dead-end sign on Meadow Pointe Blvd.
However, the thirst for a connection heading north from New Tampa to Wesley Chapel was bound to attract K-Bar Ranch residents, who have been clamoring for years for additional points of egress. Currently, the only way out of the western end of K-Bar Ranch is via Kinnan St., or by driving through busy neighborhoods and past Pride Elementary on Bassett Creek Dr.
“This was absolutely important,” said Cindy Gustavel, a K-Bar Ranch resident since 2015. “I think some people saw this as a way to get to malls and restaurants, but most of us just saw it as a way to make living here safer.”
The City of Tampa will organize a formal opening ceremony when the roadway has been completed, likely later this month or in early August.
That keeps with the original schedule that City of Tampa chief traffic management engineer and head of the Smart Mobility Division Vik Bhide laid out in March. Bhide said then that the roadway would officially open in July.
The Meadow Pointe Blvd. connector is one of four connection points originally planned on K-Bar Ranch Pkwy. for the K-Bar Ranch community. The first, where Kinnan St. meets Mansfield Blvd. in Meadow Pointe II, was denied by Pasco County and continues to only be open to emergency rescue vehicle and police traffic. Meadow Pointe Blvd. is the second, and the other two — at Wyndfields Blvd and Morris Bridge Rd. — are at least two years away, according to Bhide.
So, while a new connection is something to be happy about, many K-Bar Ranch residents still strongly believe the Kinnan-Mansfield connection should still be opened to vehicular traffic as well.
“There’s a huge appetite for that,” says Gustavel, who serves on her neighborhood’s HOA board as well as on the K-Bar Ranch CDD board. “I don’t think that will ever go away.”
The New Tampa Peforming Arts Center could be ready for its ribbon cutting in September.
The decades-in-the-making New Tampa Peforming Arts Center (NTPAC) should be ready to open this fall, says Hillsborough County Commissioner Ken Hagan.
Hagan, who represents New Tampa in District 2, said a ribbon cutting is tenatively scheduled for September 22 or 23.
“Nothing is set in stone yet,” Hagan says. “But that’s what county staff is looking at right now.”
The 20,000-sq.-ft. NTPAC, which can be expanded later to 30,000 sq. ft., will have a 343-seat theater with retractable seating, a stage, a catwalk and an orchestra pit. There will be four multipurpose rooms and parking for 215 vehicles. The facility, located behind the Village at Hunter’s Lake shopping plaza, across from the entrance to the Hunter’s Green community, is expected to be used for community performances and arts training of all kinds.
No one has been selected to run the facility yet, a responsibility the county may end up assuming. It had originally chosen The Florida Cultural Group, formerly known as The Manatee Players, Inc., but some of the commissioners objected and said they preferred a local group be hired to manage the NTPAC.
A new company was expected to be chosen to run the programs at the PAC by March but nothing has yet been announced.
But, the NTPAC ribbon cutting isn’t the only thing the county has planned for September in our area — Hagan says he also expects the new Branchton Regional Park to break ground that month.
The park, which will be located on Morris Bridge Rd. just south of Cross Creek Blvd., will have pickleball and basketball courts, a splash pad and a Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) substation in its first phase, to name a few of the amenties.
“County staff is finalizing plans and getting the final permits,” Hagan says.
And, prior to the NTPAC and Branchton events, Hagan said there will be a public meeting held in August so local residents can weigh in on a proposed public recreation center, which would be the first such county-run facility in New Tampa.
The recreation center will be located at Cross Creek Park, adjacent to Pride Elementary just off Kinnan st.
The facility will include indoor basketball, volleyball and pickleball courts and be available for other sports, and there will be community meeting space as well.
The basketball courts and playground already at the park will be upgraded, and a splash pad also would be part of the improvements.
Hagan says he has secured $1.5 million for the project, and is looking at the rest of the funding to come from the American Recovery Plan Act (ARPA) federal funding. Hillsborough County has received $285 million from the federal program.
The recreation center’s proposed location, near Pride Elementary, could be an issue for many K-Bar residents without major road improvements in that area.
At various townhalls and meetings with city officials, residents have expressed safety concerns about school traffic in that area, due to the unusual configuration of the road leading past the school and into K-Bar Ranch, which has created logjams for years.
Annette Simmons-Brown, who plays the evil Dr. Annette, and Antony Capers co-wrote the Season 3 premiere that shot part of its episode at the Tampa Theater on July 1. (Photos: Charmaine George)
Here’s something that Grand Hampton resident and multimedia artist Antony Capers never imagined happening when he started shooting his campy, convoluted and creepy YouTube-based horror series during the pandemic — “Grand Hampton: The Movie Series” is headed for the big screen.
What began as a 45-second video clip of Capers’ son Merric and became an online series with two seasons and 27 episodes filmed exclusively in the Grand Hampton community with local residents mostly during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, is now going to have its Season 3 premiere — an hour-long movie — shown at the iconic Tampa Theater in downtown Tampa in October.
Part of that premiere was shot at the Tampa Theater Friday afternoon.
Filmmaker Antony Capers (with hat) and some of the cast members of his “Grand Hampton: The Movie Series” at a recent table read.
Capers, a freelance designer who owns his own production company, Reelistic Tales, continues to be humbled by the rection to his horror series, which is about a community filled with people in the witness protection program, whose children are disappearing as part of an organ harvesting plot run by an evil doctor and assisted by strange alien creatures. The show has more than 250 subscribers and 15,000 views on YouTube. While it has allowed Capers to build strong friendships in the Grand Hampton community, his primary goal when he started the series, it also could pull open some curtains for the 46-year-old filmmaker.
The first curtains to open will be those at the Tampa Theater. Last year, Capers attended a horror movie viewing of “The Conjuring 3,” starring Tampa’s Patrick Wilson, at the old movie house in downtown Tampa as part of a “Film Tampa Bay Presents” series showcasing the work of local writers, directors, actors and crew who are from the Tampa area.
During the Question-&-Answer session after the movie, Jill Witecki, the Tampa Theater’s marketing director, says there was a lot of discussion about the Tampa Theater’s mission to celebrate area films and filmmakers, and it struck a chord with the New Tampa filmmaker.
The next day, Capers and Annette Simmons-Brown, who plays the evil Dr. Annette, harvester of children’s lungs, in the series, emailed Witecki about the Grand Hampton project.
“It was fascinating to us,” Witecki says. “Not only because he was a local filmmaker, but because it was really something different. It was a great example of some of the creativity that came to light during the pandemic.”
Witecki says Tampa Theater officials and Capers had a number of conversations about working together. One idea was to have Capers speak to the theater’s summer campers.
“The film camp program is learning how to do exactly what he did, which is take what’s around you, take the people and the locations, and turn it into a movie,” Witecki says.
The other idea was to fit “Grand Hampton: The Movie” into the theater’s October horror series, “The Nightmare on Franklin St.,” where classic horror movies have been shown the last two weeks of the month for the past nine years.
Antony Capers.
“It seemed to be a good fit,” she says.
Not only did Capers jump at the chance, but he also talked the theater into letting him film part of the premiere inside the Tampa Theater.
Capers and Simmons have written the script for the Season 3 premiere together. They wrote a small part for Witecki, as well. And, Tampa City Council member Luis Viera, who attended the Season 2 premier at the Grand Hampton clubhouse and helped give the show some of its initial publicity, also has a small role.
While Season 2 had to end abruptly due to the opportunity with the Tampa Theater, Capers says it is giving him a chance to revamp the series. Instead of it focusing on one family — him and Merric — each episode will be a 45-minute tale about a different family, which Capers compares to the way the old “Tales of the Crypt” series was filmed.
Season 3 begins with the parents of Grand Hampton going on a date night to the Tampa Theater, and while they are gone….well, you’ll just have to watch.
“A lot of action takes place back home during date night,” Capers says. “The new way of doing ‘Grand Hampton’ is pretty cool, if it works. It’s still ‘Grand Hampton,’ still the same characters, no paid actors, still 100-percent community involvement. It’s just revamped.”
The opportunity at Tampa Theater has Capers dreaming big.
He says a showing at an iconic theater will put new eyes on his series, which is a thrill. And, he’d love to get into the Sundance Film Festival, get on Netflix or even just get the chance to pitch the idea to a streaming service.
“That’s what I’m hoping for,” he says.
And, for Capers, Simmons and other Grand Hampton cast members, the chance to be seen on the big screen and then answer questions from the audience about what it’s like making a series and a movie will be the thrill of a lifetime.
“Branching out at an iconic location like Tampa Theater is going to be great,” Capers says. “I can’t wait.”
To view all episodes of the series, visit YouTube.com and search “Grand Hampton: The Movie”.
With rents sky-high & limited space available here, New Tampa entrepreneurs are finding success & happiness at the new container park in Wesley Chapel.
For entrepreneurs, finding a place to start a new business in New Tampa can be tricky. Space can be limited. Prices are high. New development is scarce.
At the new KRATE at The Grove container park in Wesley Chapel, however, the plan was to lure those entrepreneurs in with a flashy concept — a park filled with converted shipping containers with bright murals painted on the side — and a less expensive entry point, with some container rents beginning at roughly $1,500 a month.
After a wildly successful opening day, the container park continues to boom for many of its owners, including a group of current and former New Tampa residents.
Here are a few of them:
Nimesh & Felicia Desai, Blush Wine Room
The Blush Wine Room has been an idea the Desais have been planning for the last five years, but finding the perfect location had been a major chore.
The 14-year Live Oak Preserve residents scoured Bruce B. Downs Blvd. in the hopes of finding a launching pad for their hip and trendy concept.
It was a call from from Bernadette Blauvelt, the owner of B Creative Painting Studio at The Village at Grove in Wesley Chapel, that turned their attention to the container park.
“She said ‘You have to come take a look,’” Felicia says.
So they did. Although they had considered trying to get in a space at the The Village at Hunter’s Lake town center, the day after meeting with developer Mark Gold in late 2019, they signed a lease.
The timing couldn’t have been better. Covid-19 ended up wiping out her small business, two cafés in office buildings.
But now, nearly three years later, the Blush Wine Room is one of the KRATEs’ hottest spots. The weekends are non-stop packed, as the bar’s offering of wine, wine tastings, wine-based cocktails (many served in pouches for those walking around), and a menu that includes homemade meatballs, truffle fries, cheese boards and a variety of chips and dips are in high demand.
“It’s been crazy,” says Felicia, “But we love it. I have no complaints.”
Chris Ferraro & Brooke Wahlquist, Higher Flour
The tenant list at the KRATEs is filled with entrepreneurs who had been looking for a decent entry point into a physical location to sell their dreams.
Chris and Brooke, who are engaged and live in Richmond Place, came up with a concept that combined his passion for holistic medicine (Delta 8 THC, in this case) and her baking skills to make delicious gourmet edibles.
However, their efforts to find a landlord willing to rent out space for their Higher Flour store stalled, due to the stigma still associated with CBD, even though it’s legal in 30 states, including Florida.
“We were actually denied from 12 other locations,” Chris says. “I had pretty much given up all hope of opening this awesome idea that we had.”
The very last place on his list was KRATE at the Grove which, at the time, was only a concept. Chris says his initial inquiry was rejected, but he pleaded for a meeting with Gold, who liked the idea once Chris explained to him that it wasn’t going to be a smoke shop.
Since opening on June 4, Chris says Higher Flour has been “killing it.” The success has already inspired him to consider adding more locations.
The store sells five different flavors of cookies, from the traditional chocolate chip to Ube, which is a purple yam popular in Filipino deserts. Each cookie has 25 mg of Delta 8 THC, roughly the same as you’d get in a gummy, although everyone’s mileage varies, Chris says.
“Thank God for Mark Gold,” says Chris, whose previous business, LitFit, specialized in online sales of pashminas and was successful until Covid-19 hit. He added that Gold’s green light “changed the entire course of my family’s history.”
Luis & Olimar Ledezma, Mojo Grill Latin Infusion
Luis was the longtime general manager at the Wendy’s on BBD, and then managed the Inside The Box Café at Armature Works from 2018-20 until they raised the rent and forced him to look elsewhere.
Luis says at that moment, Olimar, a senior manager for a car insurance company, “challenged me” to start something. With his management skills, her talent as a chef (learned from culinary classes she took in Spain) and their experiences eating different cuisines while traveling around the world, it was time to take the plunge and “stop working for somebody else.”
So after reading about the container concept in the Neighborhood News in 2019, Luis wasted little time signing up for the chance to run his own business.
“It was a no-brainer deal,” he said. “The KRATE was a great concept.”
Olimar designed the menu at Mojo Grill. The result has been dishes like the Argentinian-inspired Chimichurri steak, the Uruguayan-inspired Choripan sandwich, Cuban-inspired nachos and a variety of other tasty Latin dishes. Drinks, too — Olimar makes a killer homemade sangria.
Like almost every restaurant container at KRATE, business has been hopping. The container is almost never empty and the weekends are a madhouse.
“When you work hard and put your concept out there and deliver good flavors, people will come back,” Luis said.
This is “definitely” something Luis says he could not have pulled off in New Tampa. While living in Live oak Preserve for 10 years, he saw enough small restaurants turn over to discourage him.
“It would be much harder to become known without spending much more money,” he says. “I wouldn’t take that risk in an expensive brick-and-mortar. This is perfect.”
Sheila & Osman Haque, Life Essentials Refillery
Sheila’s career in the zero-waste and better living business started on a boat, where she and her three daughters noticed trash floating in the water. That inspired her to start EmbraceLessWasteUSA.com, a website devoted to zero-waste, American-made products.
Haque, who lives in Cory Lake Isles, completed the Pasco Economic Development Council (EDC) business incubator program, and although she could use the EDC container on occasion to sell her products, she wanted her own store.
She put herself on the waiting list at the KRATEs while pursuing other opportunities. After passing on a few overpriced, high-rent options, Sheila says Life Essentials Refillery was ready to commit to a Trinity location.
Luckily, KRATE called and said there was an opening. “We were getting build-out pricing (in Trinity),” Sheila says. While she may be paying more per square foot at the smaller KRATE, she says, “the foot traffic is worth it.”
At Life Essentials Refillery, the Haques sell eco-friendly, healthy and locally-sourced items. In fact, Sheila says everything in the store is sourced from small American businesses.
Items like spices, herbs, teas and coffee are popular, as well as less toxic versions of things like detergent, soap and sunblock. But, because they also have a full kitchen, they are also able to sell food. You can bring in your own container and fill it with pasta, beans and candies, and there’s a gluten-free section to choose from as well.
And if you want to make your own nutbutter, Sheila can help you do that, too.
“The interest so far is better than I expected,” Sheila says. “We’ve met people that come from Sarasota and Gainesville because there’s nothing like this close by.”
All of these KRATE businesses have their own websites and social media presences, as well as their own open hours, but for a complete listing of and more information about all of the KRATE businesses, visit KrateatTheGrove.com.
