A new luxury apartment community has broken ground on Highwoods Preserve Pkwy. across from the Muvico Starlight 20 movie theaters, and could be a boon for those seeking corporate lodging in the future.
The Oasis at Highwoods Preserve will offer 1-, 2- and 3-bedroom apartment homes, and “the amenities are incredible,’’ says Anna Hoang, a spokesperson for Picerne Real Estate Group, which is one of the largest diversified real estate management and development firms in the country.
Some of those amenities include a clubhouse with computers with free WiFi, faux wood flooring, a dog park, a theater room, cabanas and outdoor grills and a beach entry, saltwater pool.
Hoang says special added touches, like soft-closing drawers, granite countertops, crown molding and distinct archways will “make it feel more like a home than an apartment.”
The Oasis at Highwoods Preserve will have 302 units, and will be four stories tall, with elevators.
Construction began earlier this month, and the first building is expected to be completed by September, with a grand opening of the entire community in spring of 2018.
For more info, visit Picerne.com.
A New Learning Experience
New Tampa and Wesley Chapel continue to be fertile ground for companies offering a mixture of childcare and early education, and the latest entry into the local market is The Learning Experience.
Work has begun on the physical structure of the new facility, which will belocated at 20780 Trout Creek Rd. The Learning Experience will be almost directly across from the Wesley Chapel Super Target, but on the New Tampa side of County Line Rd.
The facility will be large. According to site plans on the City of Tampa website, The Learning Experience is being built on 1.39 acres and will be a 10,000-sq.-ft. facility, with a 9,310-sq.-ft. playground.
A similar venture, the Goddard School in Wesley Chapel, is opening a mile or so to the north off Bruce B. Downs (BBD) Blvd., across from Florida Hospital Wesley Chapel.
The Learning Experience offers childcare and early education for kids ages six months to six years old.
According to the company’s website, the curriculum includes sign language for infants and toddlers, a phonics program, foreign language programs (like Chinese), manners and etiquette, physical fitness and a philanthropy program that teaches children the value of selflessness and giving.
Boca Raton-based The Learning Experience was founded in 1979 by Michael and Lina Weissman, and is currently run by their son Richard. It began franchising in 2003. Forbes.com picked it as one of the top franchises to own in 2015, with $42.6-million in revenue that year from its 200-plus locations, as well a 73-percent growth rate over the three preceding years.
The Learning Experience uses its proprietary L.E.A.P.® (Learning Experience Academic Program) that is guarantees will provide children with exceptional core academic skills. For more info, visit TheLearningExperience.com.
Clemson fans were in the majority in our area for the National Championship game, which helped fill our local hotels, including the Holiday Inn Express in New Tampa.
The total economic impact of the recent College Football Playoff National Championship game between Clemson and Alabama at Raymond James Stadium is debatable, but there is no disputing that even though the game was held nearly 20 miles away, New Tampa felt some of the effect.
While certainly no Super Bowl, whose impact is larger and usually stretches more than a week in areas where it is held, Holiday Inn Express & Suites general manager George Sandona said the Tigers’ thrilling victory over the defending national champion Crimson Tide on Jan. 9 helped fill all of the rooms the day before and night of the game at his hotel, located on Galbraith Rd. off Highwoods Preserve Pkwy. in New Tampa.
“It was particularly good that it was a Sunday and Monday night, because, in the world of hotels, those do not typically sell out,’’ he said.
Sandona said that all 100 rooms at his Holiday Inn Express & Suites were booked Sunday and Monday, and he estimates that at least 60-70 of those rooms were occupied by Clemson and Alabama football fans.
And, at the Spring Hill Suites on Primrose Lake Cir. in Tampa Palms, rooms also were packed with football fans, but not the ones general manager Barbara Scott says she initially anticipated.
According to Scott, as many as 25 rooms had been booked months in advance by Ohio State supporters. But, when the Buckeyes were beaten by Clemson 31-0 on New Year’s Eve, those rooms were cancelled.
Most of them, she says, were filled by Clemson fans, the rest by Alabama fans.
Scott said her hotel (which will be undergoing a transformation this summer) was nearly sold out on Sunday, the day before the game, but all 127 suites were filled Monday night, with 50 percent of those bookings by football visitors.
“Was it lucrative? Yes,’’ Scott says. “Was it as lucrative as we thought, with people booking six months out? No.”
The Clemson fans, Scott said, were a delight. She said the big group took it easy on the breakfast tables of Alabama fans, who had, “their heads in their plates” the morning after the Tigers’ 35-31 victory.
“They (Clemson) are a lovely travel team,’’ Scott says.
The college football championship game was a pleasant economic boost during what can be a slow time for area hotels. This year’s DICK’s Lacrosse Tournament in nearby Wesley Chapel (see pg. 54) had 20 fewer teams than last year, so the usual infusion of visitors for that event didn’t materialize in New Tampa.
But, the Tiger and Tide faithful made up for it.
“2017 is starting out well,’’ said Sandona, who anticipates the success to continue as the Florida Hospital Center Ice hockey facility opens, even though there is another Holiday Inn Express opening directly adjacent to the hotel off S.R. 56. FHCI already has booked almost half of its year with events that are sure to fill more local hotel rooms.
Jackie Ramos, who has been the general manager at the 84-room La Quinta Inn on Doña Michelle Dr. for three years, said that hotel didn’t sell out for the championship game, but hit definitely received a large increase in bookings due to the game.
“We certainly did,’’ she said. “Mostly Clemson fans.”
The Tampa Bay Business Journal said the number of out-of-town visitors for the game was estimated at 75,000-100,000, with more than half of those booking hotel rooms. Southern Hillsborough and Pinellas County, which are closer to the beaches, were expected to receive the lion’s share of that total.
Tampa Bay Sports Commission executive director Rob Higgins estimated that the economic impact to the Tampa Bay area was roughly $300 million.
Last year’s championship game — also played between Alabama and Clemson — was played at the University of Phoenix Stadium and, according to Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business, generated $273.6-million from out-of-state visitors. That was the highest total ever reported for a national championship game.
Scott says Tampa came off great on television and seemed to be a hit with visitors, adding that measuring the success of the event by that standard reaps more benefits than the final financial figures. “The success can not be tethered to dollars,’’ said Scott, who has been with the SpringHill Suites since 2013. “We got some great press, and these things help put (Tampa) on the road to being the next great city.”
While final economic impact figures for Tampa Bay aren’t yet available, Sandona says these events definitely provide a boost to local businesses, and not just his own.
He said his staff fielded dozens of inquiries from fans looking for things to do locally, with the most common question being — where are the best restaurants?
“It was great for local restaurants, and it probably had a positive impact on Busch Gardens attendance,” Sandona said. “Most people had already done a lot of research about the events at the (downtown Tampa) RiverWalk near the stadium. And, everyone tries to include a beach day in their trip.”
Sandona has been the general manager at the Holiday Inn Express since 2010 (and before that, also held the position from 2003-07), and has worked through a few Super Bowls, which booked his hotel full for 4-5 days at a time.
Sandona only wishes the event had more staying power. Clemson and Alabama didn’t win their semifinal games until Dec. 31, so fans couldn’t plan too far ahead, creating some special booking process requirements.
And, because the game was held on a Monday night, that meant, at most, only a likely weekend stay.
However, Sandona said it was a friendly, festive crowd that filled his rooms over the weekend. He said even the Alabama fans remained upbeat after the loss, confident their team would return to the championship game next year.
But they don’t win the award for most faithful fan at the hotel.
“One of my favorite interactions was with a Clemson fan who booked his rooms on June 1, 2016,’’ Sandona says. “I spoke to him a week before the game and told him he gets my ‘Boatload of Faith’ award. He told me he just figured the best thing to do was stay positive.”
For those of us who have previously toured the new Florida Hospital Center Ice (FCHI) off S.R. 56 in Wesley Chapel, there were only two things missing — people skating and the ice itself.
Well, as of Jan. 19, the largest ice skating and hockey facility south of New York state began the process of creating the ice, so that it can be painted, finished and open for skaters.
The facility and the Greater Wesley Chapel Chamber of Commerce (WCCC) hosted a ceremonial puck drop on Jan. 25. We’ll have extensive coverage in our next edition, which hits mailboxes Feb. 10.
Learn to Skate will hold its first lessons in Saturday morning.
And there are open skate sessions all weekend, starting today from noon-2 p.m. and tonight from 8-10 p.m., Saturday (noon-2 p.m., 4:30-6:30 p.m., 8-10 p.m.) and Sunday (1-3 p.m., 6-8 p.m.).
Macy’s has announced that it will be closing 68 store sin 2017, but the good news is, one of them won’t be ours.
The department store chain, which announced in August that it would be closing 100 of its 700 stores by next year, announced 68 of its store closings and the Macy’s location at the Shops at Wiregrass mall was not on the list.
That’s good news, says Shops at Wiregrass general manager Greg Lenners.
“Having a Macy’s, it basically rounds out the selection of stores that we have and it’s a great anchor to have,’’ Lenners says.
When Macy’s announced its potential closings last year, Morningstar Credit Ratings identified 28 locations that had sales below the company’s national average for 2014, the most recent year information was available, putting them at higher risk.
The Wiregrass Macy’s was No. 8 on that list, reporting $118 in sales per sq. ft. The average for Macy’s overall in 2014 was $169 per sq. ft.
The other Florida store on the Morningstar Credit Ratings list was the Lakeland Square Mall location. That location did not survive and will close this spring.
Lenners says that despite the report, he never thought the location at his mall would be axed.
“We always anticipated it wouldn’t close,’’ he says. “We are in one of the fastest-growing communities in the state. It didn’t make sense why they would close it.”
Of the 68 stores Macy’s will close, three have already been shuttered, with another 63 closings expected by the spring. The remaining two are set to close later this summer.
Lenners says he is pleased Macy’s, whose storefront faces the center – and, probably, busiest — section of the mall, is staying open. He says the store’s selection, as well as the selection at the other anchors, JC Penney and Dillard’s, fits the local shopping demographic perfectly.
Big-name anchors are generally considered vital to a mall’s success, and the loss of one can sometimes be a hint of a downward spiral.
Lenners, however, points to some recent and planned openings that show the mall is still growing and going strong.
A few months ago, PhoLicious, a Vietnamese noodle soup café, opened, and on Jan. 8, Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt debuted.
By the time this issue arrives in your mailbox, the Chinese stir-fry kitchen Wok Chi, located near the Barnes & Noble, should be open as well.
Despite rumors to the contrary, Irish 31 is still expected to open this spring, and an Avalon Spa is under construction next to Dillard’s. Lenners says the mall also recently completed a lease agreement with Noble Crust, a trendy and popular St. Petersburg restaurant that offers “Seasonal Italian with Southern Soul.”
Lenners also said the so-called “connector site” to the east of the existing Shops at Wiregrass, which will include luxury apartments, a movie theater and a green grocer, is still making it’s way through the environmental permitting process, but hopes to break ground sometime in the fall.
“There’s going to be lots of activity,’’ Lenners says.
Schuyler Arakawa and her mother Meridith Hankenson in their Citrus Park home.
Dyane Elkins IronWing can still picture Schuyler Arakawa as a long-haired little girl filled with fire, prancing around her New Tampa Dance Theatre (NTDT) floor in rainbow-colored socks, cowboy boots and a mini skirt, her beaming smile lighting up the room with an energy so pure it was impossible to resist.
When she looks at Schuyler today, Dyane says she sees the same thing. The smile is still bright, the dimples are irresistible, the energy still pure.
“She was angelic then, and angelic now,’’ Dyane says.
It’s as if nothing has changed, even if everything has.
On Feb. 19, Schuyler, her mother Meridith Hankenson, sister Saya and brother Lyndon will quietly mark a one-year anniversary that many in the same situation would rather forget.
Meridith doesn’t know if her youngest daughter ever saw the large boulder roll off the 30-foot-high cliff that day and plummet towards the water. Schuyler doesn’t remember it crashing into her face, driving her deep under the water, crushing her skull, breaking her leg, collapsing her lung, fracturing five vertebrae in her spine and almost killing her.
What they do know, however, is this: it changed their world forever.
Schuyler Arakawa with her sister Saya.
Today, Schuyler, who is 23 years old, is moving forward, with many of the same hopes and dreams she had before.
A former Arbor Greene resident and longtime student at the NTDT on Cross Creek Blvd., Schuyler had the world at her feet a year ago.
She is a Berkeley Prep and Yale University graduate, and was on a mission to make the world a better, happier place. There was nothing she couldn’t do.
Now, she is starting over.
She goes to therapy three days a week, travels once a week to Tarpon Springs for aqua therapy, takes a yoga class and is trying to learn how to speak again, how to get up out of her wheelchair and walk again.
She is still joyous, however, in an amazing sort of way. She breaks out into smiles and laughter while finishing off leftover tacos for lunch in the Citrus Park townhome she now lives in with her mother.
Forrest Maddox, a friend from Yale who visits from New York every few months, smiles and laughs with her, reaching over to rub her arm.
Frodo, the family’s 13-year-old dapple dachshund, clickety-clacks across the floor at her feet, a treat in her mouth, perhaps to keep it from Tinkerbell, their chocolate, long-haired dachshund.
It is a quiet, peaceful, normal day. Schuyler had physical therapy in the morning, ate a big lunch, and is looking forward to her daily three-hour afternoon nap.
Her therapy is exhausting. “Everything is hard,’’ she says, quietly. “But I have to do it.”
Schuyler getting a view of the Glacier National Park in Montana. Photo credit: Brontë Wittpenn
Schuyler had traveled the world to so many places before the boulder rolled off that cliff in Colombia. She helped children and adults to read in Tanzania, and had worked with a pistachio plantation that was the lifeblood of a village in Indonesia.
She made friends everywhere she went, and created for herself a worldwide social network to help benefit the less fortunate.
Schuyler’s passion was social enterprise, and on a brief break from building schools in Peru, she was enjoying the cool water during a rafting trip. She had taken a few days of vacation before what was going to be the second installation of a Yale-affiliated post-graduate fellowship, which involved weaving for the Threads of Peru, a not-for-profit social enterprise which spreads Peruvian culture and creates a sustainable market for the local artisans by selling handmade panchos, scarves and bracelets, to name a few.
Meridith remembers getting the phone call from one of Schuyler’s friends with her at the time, Dana, frantically telling her Schuyler had been hurt.
She might not live, the friend said. Meridith needed to get to Colombia.
So began a frantic, spellbinding and critical 72-hour period in which every minute mattered, and every decision was life or death.
Schuyler on a mission trip to Tanzania.
Meridith didn’t speak Spanish, and didn’t know anyone from Colombia, but she knew she needed help. She’s not sure why, but she posted a plea on Facebook.
One of Schuyler’s friends knew a woman who was originally from Colombia. Her name is Amalita Estrada, and her daughter had attended Berkeley Prep with Schuyler. Along with another family — Chris and Georgette Tsavoussis, whose daughter Alexis went to school with Schuyler and immediately created a GoFundMe page for her classmate that raised more than $200,000 — they began helping to pave Meridith’s way in and out of Colombia.
“I got a phone call as I was checking out at the grocery store, and for some reason I felt a connection instantly,’’ says Amalita, who had never met Schuyler or her mother. She had to look in her daughter’s yearbook to even see what Schuyler looked like.
She began making calls from her Tarpon Springs home, trying to get Meridith to Colombia, eventually booking her plane tickets.
She called her cousin, a neurosurgeon in Bogota, the capital of Colombia.
Amalita told him he needed help getting Schuyler to Bogota, where the main hospitals would be. He asked where Schuyler was, and Amalita told him Socorro, in the northeastern part of Colombia.
Her cousin told her to take a deep breath and relax. It just so happened that one of Colombia’s best neurosurgeons, and his former teacher, had retired to Socorro, a small town of 30,000. And not only that, he had built an Intensive Care Unit in the middle of this small city because there had been so many motorcycle accidents in the area.
“Out of his own heart and goodwill, he built that there, because there was a need,’’ Amalita said. Without it, it is unlikely Schuyler would be alive today.
“That saved her life,’’ Amalita says.
Schuyler had been pulled from the river by the tour guides, and transported along dirt roads to the hospital in Socorro. Amalita doesn’t know how they did it, but they had help from an American man, she says, who just happened to appear and helped them get Schuyler up the ravine and into a vehicle. No one saw him again.
“An angel,’’ Amalita explains, because how else would you?
At the ICU, doctors stabilized Schuyler, but the prognosis was still grim. Meridith and her two other children couldn’t get a flight out of Tampa, so they raced to Miami to catch the last one out that night to Colombia.
Meanwhile, the woman back in Tarpon Springs that they had never met and didn’t know was making calls, talking to doctors, organizing transportation and making the biggest decisions of the family’s life.
“Amalita was a blessing,’’ Meridith says. “I didn’t know her, but I could feel her energy, and I think Schuyler could too.”
On the flight to Colombia, a near calm had come over Meridith. A deeply spiritual person, she says she reached deep into her soul and found a positivity, a peace, that even she didn’t know was there.
She decided, on the airplane, that Schuyler was going to be all right…and nothing could shake her from that belief.
When Meridith arrived, the doctors showed her the x-rays.
“A whole part of her skull was gone,’’ she says. “They told us for sure she would not see, ever again, no possible way. She would never smell, or taste, if she survived at all.”
By the next morning, on Feb. 20, a CAT scan revealed dramatic improvement. Though in a medically induced coma, Schuyler had already begun the fight.
In the ICU, Meridith told Saya she wished she could play music for Schuyler, because she loved it so much. She fiddled with her cell phone, but there was no Wi-Fi, and she was not receiving service despite her efforts to load Pandora.
She says she placed her phone on top of the paper towel dispenser while she washed her hands, and “all of a sudden Izzy’s ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ comes blasting from my phone.”
Meridith reaches out her arm as she recalls the moment. “Look, my hair still stands on end when I tell this story.”
Somehow, the Pandora app on her phone began playing, even though her phone still had no bars. They gently placed it on Schuyler’s bed and agreed not to touch the phone again. The playlist continued to pipe in tunes. “It proceeded to a playlist that was as if she was having a conversation with us,’’ Meridith said. “It was mind-blowing.”
She wrote down all the songs as they played, and later published them to a “Schuy is the Limit” Facebook page, which Meridith started during her time in Colombia to keep the hundreds of Schuyler’s friends from around the world updated.
The Facebook page proved to be a wonderful source for the family, as prayers and well wishes poured in.
Some wrote that Meridith’s updates were so filled with a positive joy, that it transformed their lives. One mother wrote that her son had been suicidal, but after following the daily posts had told his mother he loved her for the first time in years.
Meridith and Amalita were talking on the phone regularly, about getting Schuyler out of Colombia and to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, where they would eventually meet.
The second night in the ICU, before one of her many surgeries early on, the two mothers talked about positive colors, and how they can affect mood. Independently, they had both imagined Schuyler in a room awash with the healing colors of purple and green. “I thought, well, that’s interesting,’’ Meridith said.
The next morning, at 6 a.m., the doctors and nurses show up, wearing purple scrubs. Meridith found the head nurse, and wanted to give her a hug to thank her. The nurse’s name was Violet.
After the surgery, a new nurse had rotated in. Her name was written on the whiteboard in Schuyler’s room — it was Hazel, which is, of course, a shade of green. And, everywhere Meridith looked that day, people seemed to be wearing purple and green.
“There were a lot of things like that happening,’’ she remembers. “Things like that were smattered throughout the whole process.”
Over the next couple of weeks, as Schuyler recovered, there were more miracles.
The girl that was never supposed to be able to smell again complained about a particular aroma from the essential oil that was being diffused near her.
The girl that was never supposed to see again, whose optic nerves had been smashed by a direct hit from a boulder, tapped the correct number of fingers when the doctors asked how many fingers they were holding up.
The room erupted in cheers.
Once they were able to get her back to the U.S., doctors in Miami worked on putting Schuyler back together again. In March, Meridith posted on Facebook:
“Dear sweet Schuy is going to continue her titanium transformation beginning at about 6 am tomorrow morning. She will have a rod placed in her right thigh then screws and wires in her left ankle, shin and knee cap. The miracles of modern science!”
While Schuyler may need an additional surgery to repair her right eyelid later this spring, she has not required any other surgeries, remarkable considering that the boulder had made a direct hit on her head.
Amalita is Catholic, so she has read all about miracles. But, this was the first time, she says, that she had been a part of one.
“I tell everybody that you hear about these many miracles in Biblical times, and about angels and the Pope and so many religious stories, but before my eyes, I can testify that this is a miracle,’’ she says.
She is witness to it every week. She had a pool, so Amalita volunteered to learn aquatherapy. On Thursdays, Meridith drives Schuyler to Tarpon Springs for treatment. Amalita marvels at the progress she gets to see.
“It’s a beautiful, flowing story, and Schuyler is getting better when the odds were that she wasn’t supposed to.”
It has been almost a year since the accident, and the road to recovery is still a long one for Schuyler. But, she isn’t angry, she never asks why this had to happen to her, and she remains undaunted.
“She is championing her way through this,’’ Meridith says. “Neither she nor I have any doubt that within another year, she will be walking.”
The mother has been transformed, too.
Before the accident, things hadn’t been easy for Meridith. There were bad relationships, failed businesses, financial strife.
At times, life had proven difficult.
Before she got off that plane in Colombia, though, everything had come together. She looked at her past, and how it had shaped her for this moment. She was determined to will Schuyler to live, until she could arrive at her side. Once there, in concert with all of the wonderful medical advances employed by the doctors and nurses, she draped her daughter in love, and powered her to recovery, until she could bring her home, and take care of her.
Everything that Schuyler wanted to be before the accident, Meridith will make sure she still becomes.
“I am in awe of the beauty of this mom and her daughter,’’ says Amalita. “What Meridith has done, her positivity, it defies belief. Schuyler would not have survived without her.”
Schuyler has plans to start a travel website, based on the travel blog she kept before the accident. It will highlight user-generated trips made by the more curious travelers, who eschew the typical Top 10 places to visit in a city.
“If you’re ever in Montana, for example, go see the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas,’’ Meridith says.
The website will keep Schuyler engaged, as she is currently brainstorming ideas. “By the time Schuyler is up and running, she’ll be able to use her own passport and will have plenty of ideas for places to visit,’’ Meridith says.
Forrest was one of Schuyler’s closest friends at Yale, and he says he still sees the same joy and enthusiasm in her face he did before the accident. Her says her personality is the same and that he has little doubt that whatever she chooses to do, the best is still ahead for her.
“I don’t see this being a defining story for Schuyler, which is weird to say,” Forrest says. “I honestly think this is something where, she’ll be doing something else amazing and she’ll say, ‘Oh by the way, a couple of years ago I was in this horrible accident, but right now I’m doing this incredible thing.’”
In October, Elkins IronWing, who helped teach Schuyler jazz, ballet, modern and even hip-hop dance (“She loved them all,’’ Meridith says) for more than a dozen years at NTDT, held a large Dance-a-Thon fund raiser for her.
Hundreds showed up, and dozens of local businesses chipped in to pull it off. Dyane was not surprised about the large turnout.
“She was a light that everyone was drawn to,’’ Elkins IronWing says. “I always tell people, if you met her for five minutes, you would remember her for the rest of your life.”
When Dyane saw Schuyler for the first time after the accident, she was overcome with emotion. Her voice chokes up even now recalling the moment, how she so badly just wanted to run to her former pupil and kiss the familiar dimples on her cheeks.
“From the time the accident happened until that moment, she was on the front of my brain,’’ Dyane says. “I just wanted to see her, feel her and kiss her to let her know that everything would be okay.”
The women of Threads of Peru didn’t get the chance to host Schuyler, but her story moved them to make 10,000 of the very same bracelets with the exact pattern Schuyler was wearing that day on the water. She still wears that bracelet today.
Dyane sells them at her dance studio, for $10, with all proceeds going to the cost of Schuyler’s medical care and therapy.
Schuyler has a long way to go to “complete” recovery, or as close as anyone can get to that after a boulder lands on their head. But she’ll get there. She promises.
“I’m just a positive person,” she says.
To follow Schuyler and Meridith on Facebook and learn more about her amazing recovery, search Schuy is the Limit. To purchase a bracelet at the New Tampa Dance Theatre (10701 Cross Creek Blvd), visit Monday-Thursday 4 p.m.-8 p.m., or 9 a.m.-1 p.m. on Saturday.
A new luxury apartment community has broken ground on Highwoods Preserve Pkwy. across from the Muvico Starlight 20 movie theaters, and could be a boon for those seeking corporate lodging in the future.
