Downtown Palm Beach Gardens Archives

Life Time’s opening day pitch: ‘Disney of a healthy way of life’

Life Time Athletic Country Club leads one local fitness studio to fold but others don’t fear the industry giant.

The founder, chairman and CEO of Life Time Group Holdings sat in the first-floor bar at the Aug. 11 opening of his 160th club and explained how Life Time stands so far above the crowded fitness marketplace that it doesn’t have to worry about competition.

“Our goal is to create an incredibly exclusive experience but offer it inclusively to all kinds of people,” Bahram Akradi said at the Life Time Athletic Country Club in Downtown Palm Beach Gardens. “To do that you have to create a place that has a magnetism. … It has to be a completely elegant, Four Seasons-like experience every single day.”

He urges his employees to think of it like Disney.

“There were amusement parks before Disney showed up,” he said. Disney “came to Orlando but they built magic. They didn’t build an amusement park. They created extraordinary what was ordinary in other places. And Life Time is Disney of a healthy way of life.”

Why is there an above-ground pipeline blocking traffic near the new FPL building?

FPL is paying to connect a water main under the railroad tracks and Alternate A1A without disrupting traffic through horizontal directional drilling.

Motorists using the Kyoto Gardens Drive shortcut between Military Trail and Alternate A1A got another lane closure — and quite a sight — the past few weeks.

A giant black pipeline, like an uncoiled snake, hovered above the road on steel-borne rollers for a fifth of a mile as crews in orange and green vests danced around it, positioning sections of pipe with buckets attached to shiny yellow Deere and Komatsu excavators.

Top 200 Taxpayers: Why a vacant lot is worth more than The Breakers

Palm Beach Gardens has 16 of the 200 most valuable properties in Palm Beach County, with Gardens Mall ranked second, behind only the Boca Town Center Mall.

In the rarefied air of the 200 largest taxable properties in Palm Beach County sits an empty lot.

Ah, but what an empty lot.

Hedge fund manager Ken Griffin’s vacant 12 oceanfront acres on Palm Beach make up the third-most valuable property in Palm Beach County, valued for tax purposes at $223 million.

That’s a higher taxable value than The Breakers hotel, JFK Medical Center and Florida Power & Light Co.’s Juno Beach headquarters.

The only individual properties with higher values? The Boca Raton and Palm Beach Gardens malls.

No more Cheesecake? Gardens council to vote Thursday

Shopcore Properties proposes tearing down Cheesecake Factory, adding hotel, apartment building at Downtown Palm Beach Gardens.

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Plans to remake Downtown Palm Beach Gardens, including the demolition of The Cheesecake Factory restaurant to make way for a 280-unit apartment building, go before the city council Thursday.