Two Mailboxes Are All That's Left at the Foot of the Blue Heron Bridge
Drive off Singer Island toward the mainland today and you'll pass a cleared lot on Lake Drive where three houses stood until this spring. One neighbor watching the demolition wrote that by the time the crews finished, the only things still standing were two mailboxes, planted in the dirt in front of where a building numbered 2405 used to be. For anyone living at 2700 North Ocean, that lot sits at the eastern foot of the bridge you cross every time you leave the island, and what eventually replaces it has been the subject of public argument since a New York developer filed plans for it back in February.
The Continuum Company, led by CEO Ian Bruce Eichner and designed by the Miami architecture firm Arquitectonica, wants to build a project called Singer Island Gateway at 2525 Lake Drive. The plans call for 298 residences, a restaurant, retail space, roughly 25,000 square feet of public open space fronting Blue Heron Boulevard, and a marina, spread across close to 3.07 acres the company has spent months assembling from six of the seven parcels it needs. The building has already changed shape once before a single public hearing was held. The earliest site plans described a 28-story tower. By early summer, every subsequent account of the project, from local television coverage to the developer's own filings, put it at 25 stories instead.
Susan Bryan started the petition against the project, and her own words complicate the story most outlets have told. She's said flatly that she and other opponents "realize that something has to be built on the lot" and that "it's not practical to expect the county to just leave the lot vacant." Her objection is narrower than a blanket rejection of the tower. It's the marina. "The docks would intrude into the recreational space that everyone is enjoying and has enjoyed for many years," she's said, and she believes the pilings and larger boat traffic could stir up sediment and damage seagrass a few hundred feet from the Phil Foster Park snorkel trail.
Continuum's own site plan acknowledges the sensitivity. The tower is pushed toward the public open space at the north end of the parcel, farther from the dive site under the bridge, and the company has pledged that the marina itself will benefit the diving community by improving access to the reef. Whether that pledge satisfies the people who actually use the water there is the real question hanging over the project, more than its height ever was.
To back its case, Continuum commissioned an environmental report from an FAU professor emeritus of geosciences. Based on what the report itself called a "cursory biotic survey," the study concluded that shadows from the roughly 300-foot building would have little or no effect on marine vegetation, and that the floating docks would not disturb what it described as low-productivity seafloor beside the property. The report also states that construction would not require dredging or filling in the lagoon. Consultants separately project the finished building would add about $4.5 million in property taxes to Riviera Beach's rolls in its first year on the books, plus roughly $6.1 million in building permit and impact fees, against an estimated $330 million in hard construction costs.
The people who actually dive the bridge describe something less settled. Dive instructor Jeff Nelson brings visitors to the snorkel trail every day and says Continuum reached out early on asking for his input, but the conversations "never produced real answers." Krista Parker, a NAUI divemaster who travels from the Tampa Bay area several times a year specifically to dive Blue Heron Bridge, has said the conditions underwater can shift so much between visits just two months apart that a marina and its boat traffic could make the east side unrecognizable, maybe even undiveable. Wildlife photographer Jim Abernathy, who has spent years documenting what lives under the bridge, calls it a gem the area is fortunate to have and says it can't be replaced once it's gone.
By mid-July, the Change.org petition opposing Singer Island Gateway had passed 15,000 signatures. By late August it had climbed past 28,000, nearly doubling in about six weeks even as the project sat in procedural limbo. A few hundred feet from the site, the Blue Heron Bridge Hotel and Dive Club has put up its own sign opposing the development, a small business making its position visible to every car that crosses the bridge.
Before anything changes on that lot, Singer Island Gateway needs sign-off from three separate bodies:
The project has already slipped past one version of its own timeline. An April hearing before the Planning and Zoning Board was pushed to May and then never happened. By mid-July, Mayor Douglas Lawson confirmed publicly that the plan still hadn't been formally presented to the board at all. "Once we see it, then we'll be able to actually have the conversation with the residents, hear the concerns, and talk about what's the right development for any location," he said. As of this writing, no hearing date has been set.
The strip of road at the foot of the bridge has been rebuilt before. One Riviera Beach resident, writing in response to early coverage of the project, recalled that a Days Inn once occupied the ground where the Ritz-Carlton now stands, and that an older motel and bar stood where the Amrit is today. Whatever gets built on the cleared Lake Drive lot will be the latest chapter in a gateway to Singer Island that has already been redeveloped more than once, with taller buildings replacing lower ones each time.
For now, the lot stays cleared, the mailboxes stay planted, and the fight over the water beneath the bridge continues well ahead of any formal vote.
Kathy Lewellen keeps a close eye on every filing that touches Singer Island's gateway corridor, including this one, and is happy to walk 2700 North Ocean owners through what a Planning and Zoning Board hearing on Singer Island Gateway would actually mean once one gets scheduled.
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