South Navy Boulevard is plagued by blight. Can cleanups (and citations) help it shine?

Pat Page has spent most of her life in Navy Point. The 76-year-old artist was born there to a military family in the 1940s. She remembers walking to the neighborhood movie theater as a child with her siblings when Navy Point and Warrington were part of a thriving community of homes and businesses in southwest Escambia County.

Page recalled one of the busiest hubs was South Navy Boulevard. The stretch of road that leads to Navy Point and the main gate of Naval Air Station Pensacola was once bustling with shops, medical offices and restaurants like Marchello’s.

The Italian restaurant overlooked Bayou Grande and the bridge to the main gate of the base. For decades, it was the place to be for special occasions or to grab a pizza on a Sunday afternoon before boating to tiny White Island in Pensacola Bay.

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“The best Italian food in Pensacola,” recalled Pat Page. “Everybody had first dates there, prom night, Easter dinners, family dinners. Boaters would come. Actors went there. Steven Seagal, he was there one night when we were just eating dinner and I jumped up and I said, ‘Please shake my hand!’ It really was an amazing place. A lot of people have memories about that restaurant.”

Long closed and boarded up, the old Marchello’s Italian Restaurant is now dilapidated. One of many vacant buildings lining South Navy Boulevard that no longer draws customers, and instead attracts homeless people looking for shelter, vandals and graffiti taggers.

“Marchello’s has slowly been going into decline and is secondarily having some homeless utilizing that site,” said Tim Day, Escambia County’s natural resources management director. “The property owner either needs to go ahead and expend the funds and clean up the property and then fix the structural issues or decide it’s time to go ahead and demolish the structures and clean it up.”

The property is owned by Margaret Ann Marchelos, who has not commented on plans for the property. The case will be up before an Escambia County code enforcement magistrate in December.

“It can’t wait any longer,” explained Day. “We’re not going to tell them which way to go, whether they fix it and rehab the structures, but when you start getting structural issues it is relatively expensive and a big decision to say, ‘Hey, do we keep reinvesting money in this or has the structure passed its usable life.”

Fighting the blight in Warrington

In an effort to clean-up the blight and encourage new growth on South Navy Boulevard, Escambia County commissioner Mike Kohler asked county code enforcement to give homes and businesses along the road extra attention.

He wants owners to clean up trash and overgrowth and bring derelict buildings into compliance.

“Everything along there, code enforcement is trying to cite if they need it because what’s going on is we have homeless moving from place to place, even down to old Marchello’s,” said Kohler, who represents Warrington. “I committed to cleaning this up to try to make it better.”

Tim Day said he is using a “fair amount of resources” to tackle code violators at Kohler’s request, especially on South Navy Boulevard between Gulf Beach Highway and the base.

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County leaders agree the area needs special attention for the sake of the community and the impression it makes on visitors to NAS Pensacola.

“It’s part working on a little beautification and trying to make sure we’re staying within compliance, because it’s the first look at NAS Pensacola and is the entrance that is utilized when veterans are buried at the cemetery," Day said. "We need to be able to show respect for the people that are coming, and this may be a family member’s first look at Pensacola.”

Escambia commissioners agreed to dedicate $550,000 in RESTORE funds to improve lighting along that stretch of Navy Boulevard. They’re also paying for the Florida Department of Transportation to study ways to improve the road.

“We’ll start the process to coordinate with the Florida Department of Transportation to look at possible alternatives to what the road looks like through there,” explained Day. “It could be looking at pulling out quite a bit of the suicide lane and going to a landscaped median and then just have some turn lanes as appropriate.”

Earlier this year, the Escambia Board of County Commissioners overturned a decades-old zoning law that limited how close convenience stories could be located to each other in Warrington.

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The change was made to help the owner of a vacant gas station and convenience store at 100 S. Navy Blvd.

Kohler said the owner, Alicia Evans, told the county she planned to revamp the derelict property and put in a new gas station.

However, the property is still sitting empty and continues to deteriorate.

“We changed it for her and she just kind of disappeared,” Kohler said. “She was committed to bringing it and now they have a mobile coffee shop there in the parking lot. The convenience store building’s dilapidated and (homeless) have broken the glass.”

Businesses on either side of the abandoned gas station are also closed.

Homeless people often camp outside the empty fast-food restaurant, Checkers, at the intersection of Gulf Beach Highway, South Navy Boulevard and Barrancas Avenue.

Stray cats live in the nearby B & B Auto Service shop on South Navy Boulevard and about a dozen derelict vehicles have sat so long, rusting in the parking lot, that weeds are growing up through some of them.

Escambia County has cases open on those three properties and many others.

Bright Spots on Navy Boulevard

While to some it may look like the area has hit rock bottom, there is new growth.

The busy thoroughfare is good for some of the businesses that are doing well along South Navy Boulevard, including the owners of the mobile coffee shop who rent parking space at the abandoned gas station at 100 S. Navy Blvd.

Andrew and Becca Rule opened “Cool Beans” in April. They recently moved to Pensacola from Seattle and now live and work in Warrington with their growing family.

Andrew Rule serves customers through the drive-through window, often with their sleeping baby strapped to his back, while their young daughter helps with service.

“It’s been really good,” said Rule. “We get a lot of traffic from the base. We get a lot of locals. A lot of people are super excited to see us here because, I mean just look at these buildings, there’s nothing going on, and a lot of customers really voice that concern that they feel like their area is kind of going to pot and people are definitely excited we’re here because of that. I feel like this place just needs somebody to love it a little bit and so that’s what we’re trying to give it.”

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Olive Baptist Church is also showing Warrington some love. The church opened a campus five years ago at the former Warrington Baptist Church off Winthrop Avenue, near South Navy Boulevard.

Pastors partnered with Warrington Baptist Church to create a new church and give the congregation and the ministry new life.

“We’ve just gone to work to minister to the community, provide what you would think churches would, Bible studies and fellowship activities, things like that,” said pastor John Lowe. “The community, they’ve been excited, and we’ve had some folks that actually live on the avenue come and join us and worship with us.”

Among its outreach programs, the church provides a food pantry, mentoring and activities for local youth, and support for families and individuals, especially those in the military.

Lowe said the congregation is growing, with people from the neighborhood and beyond filling the pews.

“We’re truly a multi-ethnic, multi-generational, multi-socioeconomic congregation,” said Lowe. “There’s homelessness. There are people who just need food. There are folks that just need guidance. I think some people are stuck in a cycle that they’re not sure how to get out of. We’ve been blessed to see some of our church members feel called to try and help them break out of that cycle.”

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A new housing development is also coming to the same neighborhood near the church.

Georgia-based builder, Brock Built, plans to build at around 40 townhomes and four single family homes at 205 S. Navy Blvd., near Winthrop and Palmetto avenues. According to the builder, the units will "most likely" be priced to start in the mid- to high-$300,000's, unless they decide to rent them.

The company has projects across the Panhandle, from Panama City to Pensacola. Brock Built is also known for developing areas in western Atlanta that sparked revitalization.

“I mean when I go through the Warrington area, I just see abundant opportunity,” said developer Matt Brock, who grew up visiting Pensacola Beach with his family.

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“We see similar kinds of opportunities in this area to revitalize what is already a great area geographically, vocationally,” he continued. “However you want to call it, you’re just in a good spot. We’ve already seen that putting rooftops in areas like that and new development, new investment, it’s contagious. You get enough rooftops, and the commercial uses will follow.”

The development will be called The Commons at Navy Boulevard and Brock said they hope to break ground as far as site work in the next two to four months.

For residents like Pat Page, these bright spots are welcome news.

She has commemorated in her paintings many of the Navy Point and Warrington area landmarks that are gone but locals cherish, like Marchello’s and Hutson’s Hardware and Surf Shop.

She is ready for the blight to be gone and leave a clean canvas for others to draw out new growth.

“In its heyday, it was absolutely fabulous,” said Page. “You’re going to see change when the citizens want to make it happen. When the west side starts standing up and the people here band together and say we want a cleaner environment. We want a safer environment. We won’t have it until that really happens.”

This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Escambia County works to clean up Navy Blvd leading to NAS Pensacola