byline: Jim Morrison

By late spring, surf will be up at Atlantic Park on the former site of The Dome, Virginia Beach‘s distinctive geodesic dome convention center and concert hall that was torn down in 1994.

Atlantic Park, a $350 million mixed-use entertainment venue and surf lagoon project at the Oceanfront, is the highest profile project in the Hampton Roads area, and it’s scheduled to open in May 2025 — partly due to the backing of music and fashion superstar Pharrell Williams, who grew up near the site — but there are other big developments on the horizon.

Atlantic Park shares a theme with other notable projects, including improvements to the Half Moone Cruise Terminal and Norfolk International Airport. They’re designed to raise the region’s international profile and attract new visitors. Meanwhile, improvement plans for other sites — including Fort Monroe in Hampton and MacArthur Center mall and the former Military Circle Mall in Norfolk — continue to run into obstacles.

Atlantic Park, approved in 2019 by Virginia Beach City Council and funded with $153 million in public money, has faced its own challenges — including funding delays — and earlier this year, groundwater containing high levels of iron and arsenic from the project’s lagoon excavation flowed into nearby Lake Holly. Ultimately, the project’s Virginia Beach-based developer, Venture Realty Group, removed the chemicals in March, allowing work to progress.

By May 2025, planners expect it will be time for visitors to get into the water at the 11.5-acre plot between 18th and 20th streets and Pacific and Baltic avenues. The development will feature a 3,500-seat indoor entertainment venue with room for an additional 1,500 people outdoors, as well as retail, restaurants, parking garages, apartments and 10,000 square feet of office space. But the attraction unique to the area will be the 2.67-acre surf lagoon.

Chuck Rigney, who stepped down as Virginia Beach’s director of economic development in late July amid a city investigation into his travel expenses, said earlier in July that Atlantic Park’s first phase — including the lagoon — was scheduled to open in late spring 2025.

“This is as significant a project as it gets, and it’s going to be a catalyst for redevelopment all in that area,” Rigney said, noting that the infrastructure upgrades will create development opportunities in the area. “It’s going to have an effect on a lot more development down there of, hopefully, a signature-type caliber, so we can raise the profile of Virginia Beach into more of an internationally known city.”

By land, air or water

Along Norfolk’s downtown waterfront, another project appealing to tourists is under construction at the city-owned Half Moone Cruise and Celebration Center. To prepare for weekly cruises by the 12-deck Carnival Sunshine ship beginning in February 2025, the terminal is demolishing its small escalator and building a sloped circular ramp to make exiting and boarding more efficient for an estimated 3,000 passengers per cruise. Customs stations are also being improved by introducing mobile kiosks.

Another project scheduled for completion in fall 2025 will be enclosing a terrace to create an air-conditioned seating space for 600 passengers waiting to board.

Nauticus Executive Director Stephen Kirkland, who also manages the cruise terminal, forecasts 300,000 passengers will move through Norfolk annually starting
in 2025. Carnival’s marketing to fill the ship weekly will increase drawing passengers from a wider area. “It’s a game changer for us and for the community,” he says, noting that passengers will fly or drive in a day or so early to be sure to make their cruise.

“That’s a big opportunity for us as a community,” he adds. “These guests really will be coming from much further afield, all across the mid-Atlantic and beyond, and they will, many of them, be staying with us the day before and the day after.”

Cruise passengers flying into Norfolk will also discover new amenities as Norfolk International Airport responds to dramatically increased demand growing by about a half-million passengers annually — from 4.1 million passengers two years ago to a projected 5 million this year.

Norfolk International, notes airport Executive Director and CEO Mark Perryman, hasn’t had major improvements other than upgrading parking structures in more than two decades. “What we’re doing now is modernizing the existing airport,” he says. “We’re redeveloping it in a manner that will re-life the airport for the next 25, 30 years.”

Several reasons are behind the increased demand. During the pandemic, people outside the area discovered the Outer Banks, Virginia Beach and Norfolk beaches when they couldn’t go to other vacation destinations, Perryman notes, and those traditionally drive-to locations became fly-to locations. Additionally, he says, the rebound in business travel also has contributed to higher traffic.

At the airport, an addition of three gates to Concourse A is expected to be finished by November, as well as a new customs and border patrol facility that is likely to attract more international flights. By mid-2025, a new moving walkway connecting parking decks is expected to be operational, and a 165-room Courtyard Marriott with restaurants and a fitness center next to the departures building is due in early 2026. Perryman says those projects combined will cost about $80 million.

Further down the line is a new $400 million departures terminal, likely to break ground in 2026, and a $200 million rental car facility scheduled for a 2025 groundbreaking.

The airport is on a solid financial foundation, Perryman says, with a preliminary estimate of $98 million in total revenue for fiscal 2024, up from $77.7 million in 2023.

No local money subsidizes the airport, although it does receive relatively small grants from the state and federal governments. Also, the Courtyard Marriott’s developers are bringing their own financing, and rental car companies are doing the same for their on-site facilities at the airport.

“We are a growing, thriving airport, and that is good for the Hampton Roads region,” Perryman says. Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, and Norfolk supply most of the airport’s passenger traffic, but Norfolk International’s reach extends halfway up the Interstate 64 corridor to Richmond, west to Suffolk and Isle of Wight, and south to North Carolina.

Meanwhile, on the logistics front, Amazon.com is rolling forward with two large facilities in Virginia Beach, costing approximately $350 million and creating an estimated 1,000 jobs by 2025. A delivery station is expected to be open and in operation later this year in time for holiday deliveries, and a multistory, 650,000-square-foot fulfillment center is set to be open by mid-2025.

Real estate taxes on the facility will pay off the city’s investment of $22.5 million for a new road accommodating the two warehouses within 20 years, according to Rigney.

“Amazon, in the competitive world of home delivery, is trying to get the time that you buy a product to the time it gets onto your doorstep really shrunken down to within a two-hour time frame, so they need to be in closer proximity to major urban areas,” Rigney said in early July.

He noted there is an adjacent site that could accommodate 450,000 square feet of development. “If that was to come in,” he added, “it would represent another significant capital investment, real estate taxes and jobs, as well.”

Not quite there yet

Not all area projects are moving forward smoothly. In March, Norfolk Mayor Kenneth Alexander announced a redevelopment idea for the long-ailing MacArthur Center that would include a 400-room hotel, more than 500,000 square feet of high-rise apartments and a 2.5-acre pedestrian promenade with more than 172,000 square feet of retail space. But that vision is still more wish than reality.

Sean Washington, Norfolk’s economic development director, says no developer has been identified for the project, nor is there a financing plan. The city is investigating whether it makes economic sense.

“This is going to be a very large public-private partnership,” Washington says. “And so, with all the other major projects we have going on at the municipality, we really want to get a better understanding of what would we be able to properly invest back in the site, which we know is obviously high priority.”

The city, Washington adds, wants a better understanding of how to maximize tax generation and examine what economic development and financial tools it can use. A developer would not have a proposal until sometime in 2025, he says, and the project would be completed in phases, with the first construction phase lasting two to three years.

The overarching goal is to create an attraction, much like MacArthur was when it opened in 1999. “We really want this to be this premier mixed-use destination, not just for our city but also for the region,” Washington says.

Another Norfolk project that experienced false starts also faces an uncertain future. The former Military Circle Mall was purchased by the Norfolk Economic Development Authority for $13.4 million in 2020. Following decades in decline, the 97-acre shopping center closed completely in 2023 after 53 years in operation.

In 2021, the city issued a request for proposals to redevelop the mall site and received three proposals that officials gave further consideration — including some big names like Pharrell Williams, Virginia Beach hotel developer Bruce Thompson and NFL Hall of Famer and developer Emmitt Smith. Among the plans were new arenas, hotels, office space, residential buildings and retail.

Going back to 2016, when the city adopted its long-term Vision 2100 master plan, Military Circle was a preferable location for redevelopment because it is among the highest elevation properties available in Norfolk — a significant advantage with so much land threatened by storm-surge flooding and sea-level rise.

Although the city began informal talks with Williams and Venture Realty Group about their “Wellness Loop” proposal in 2022, no formal announcement or contract materialized, and in late 2023, the plans to build an arena-anchored development at Military Circle were dead.

Nonetheless, the city has demolished some of the property’s buildings, although clearing the rest of the mall is in limbo, Washington says, because a Ross Dress
for Less store remains on-site and has lease options that run through 2036. Demolition cannot proceed without their consent, but the city is in discussions with Ross, he says.

“There have been some conversations that we potentially look for a new home for Ross that’s kind of relatively close [to Military Circle],” Washington says. “They absolutely love it there.”

Also, the city launched a market analysis and feasibility study this year to examine the possibility of a mixed-use family sports complex at Military Circle, along with housing, retail and lodging space. Sentara Health’s insurance office is already in the former JCPenney space. 

On the move

Two other major downtown Norfolk projects are moving into design phases. The much-discussed renovation of Chrysler Hall has $1.5 million allocated for design costs during the next year, according to City Manager Pat Roberts, while the city’s capital improvements plan lists as high priorities a proposed $82 million allocation in 2027-28 for project construction.

Nearby, $4.5 million is earmarked each year in 2025 and 2026 to pay for the design of a “significant” renovation of Scope Arena. The capital budget allocates $54 million beginning in 2027 for renovations, labeling that project a “medium” priority.

Another major regional project facing marketplace uncertainty is the redevelopment of Fort Monroe 13 years after the Army closed the 565-acre property and turned it over to a state authority. A master plan completed in 2013 called for preserving the site’s history and envisioned a phased development with residential, retail, restaurants, a hotel and enhanced public spaces.

Smithfield-based Pack Brothers Hospitality had plans to invest $45 million to build a marina, renovate two historic buildings into conference space and a restaurant and hotel over the water, but those plans were shelved in January due to rising costs, the developers said.

“One of the biggest challenges for developers coming to Fort Monroe is there are a lot of historic preservation requirements that developers have to meet,” says John Hutcheson, the Fort Monroe Authority’s deputy executive director in charge of real estate. “Sometimes that increases cost, [and] sometimes it adds time to the permitting process. Specifically, to the Pack Brothers marina development, they got caught up in a combination of the cost inflation post-pandemic and the increase in interest rates for construction financing. Those two things combined to make the project not viable in the current market.”

Hutcheson says the project could become viable at some point and that the authority might make another request for proposals. For now, the authority is pursuing utility upgrades necessary because the Army’s old water and electrical systems do not fit with current utilities.

Those include two sites where Richmond’s Echelon Resources has options to transform historic buildings into apartments. Echelon has begun the design and permitting phases for two other sites that do not require utility upgrades and will house 75 to 80 apartments, says Hutcheson.

Developing the property is complicated, he notes. Its history goes back to Indigenous people, making it a part of American history, not just military history. The Old Point Comfort site also has historic significance as the place where enslaved Africans first landed in America in 1619. The authority planned to take bids in September to construct the African Landing Memorial plaza. 

“I think that will be the thing that carries Fort Monroe to achieve its rightful place among the most historic sites in our country,” Hutcheson says. “That’s what we’re all working for. That’s what all keeps us focused. It’s a big real estate project, but it’s equally as big a historic project.”