Green Light for EVO: Construction Documents Now Underway for $50 Million Clearwater Entertainment Destination

The EVO Family Entertainment Center is moving into its next major phase, with the full construction-document effort now advancing for the $50 million entertainment destination planned at the eastern gateway to Cleveland Street.

A new Cleveland Street Alliance video, It’s Time to Roll, chronicles three key City votes that completed the development site—and the major architectural and engineering effort those approvals have now set in motion.

The project required the vacation of Laura Street, Grove Street and the intervening alley to create EVO’s contiguous 400-space parking plan, together with the acquisition of the landlocked parcel within the development site. With those actions now approved, the final site configuration is established and the complete construction-document package is moving forward.

And this is far more than a final set of architectural drawings.

Architects, structural engineers, mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineers, interior designers, cinema specialists, acoustical experts and Dolby’s planning and design teams are now coordinating the thousands of details that will turn the EVO concept into a permit-ready, buildable entertainment center—from the building structure and mechanical systems to auditorium geometry, sightlines, acoustics, screens, projection and the technical requirements of the largest cinema screen on Earth.

In all, approximately $3.7 million in construction-document work is now moving forward.

Leading the architectural and engineering effort is TK Architects, a firm specializing in entertainment architecture. TK is serving as architect of record and bringing architecture, structural engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and plumbing engineering together within its team.

“We’re all getting together now and coordinating this beautiful project,” said Jack Muffoletto, Senior Principal at TK Architects, who is overseeing coordination of the project’s consultants.

The technical challenge is unlike that of a conventional cinema.

EVO Entertainment Clearwater will feature seven auditoriums, each equipped with Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. At the center of the complex will be an auditorium featuring a screen more than 131 feet wide and seven stories tall—the largest cinema screen on Earth.

Muffoletto, whose firm has designed cinema projects around the world, described the Clearwater auditoriums as the closest to perfect he has ever designed.

“We started this project with the auditoriums and kind of worked out from there,” he said. “We’re making the auditoriums exactly to specification first.”

“Not to mention, the biggest screen on Earth is going to be in this facility. Nobody’s ever done this before.”

The final site configuration came together through three City votes.

On September 17, the Clearwater City Council approved the roadway vacations on first reading. Eleven days later, the Clearwater Community Redevelopment Agency approved the sale of the landlocked parcel within the development site. On October 1, the City Council gave final approval to the roadway vacations.

At that final meeting, Councilmember David Allbritton summed up the moment:

“Now, finally, we have momentum. This is what momentum looks like.”

Councilmember Mike Mannino called it “a bit of a turning point in Clearwater’s history,” while Councilmember Ryan Cotton said, “We have the world-class beach and we are going to have a world-class downtown.”

The approximately 83,000-square-foot EVO Family Entertainment Center is planned as a destination combining premium cinema with 16 bowling lanes, more than 100 arcade and redemption games, laser tag, climbing and other attractions, dining and private event and conference spaces.

The project will serve as the entertainment anchor of the Cleveland Street district and a major component of the largest redevelopment underway in downtown Clearwater in more than 50 years.

The approvals are in.

The construction documents are rolling.

It’s time to roll.

The new video is available at clevelandstreetalliance.com.