St Petersburg Distillery unveils vision for creators’ district

At bustling makers’ markets around the Tampa Bay area, local creatives sell handcrafted wares, homebaked goods, original artwork, and authentic street food. A new monthly market in St. Pete adds something extra to the mix – craft cocktails and a behind-the-scenes look at the spirits-making process from grain to glass. Welcome to St. Petersburg Distillery’s Makers & Shakers Night Market.

Operated by Tampa Bay Markets, Makers & Shakers brings a rotating group of 40 vendors to the distillery’s outdoor event space on the second Thursday of each month. Handmade jewelry, folk art, paintings, clothing, and artisan foods are on display. There are food trucks, a DJ, and a shipping container bar serving craft cocktails. 

Inside the renovated former warehouse turned distillery, guided tours showcase the state-of-the-art craft distilling operation on the first floor and the second floor’s stately speakeasy tasting room.

The monthly makers’ market is just the start of things to come at the family-owned distillery off 31st Street South. Its owners, the Iafrate family, plan to transform 28 acres of adjacent, largely vacant industrial property bounded by 28th and 31st streets into a new urban neighborhood, a walkable, mixed-use district of makers and creatives who crave the live-work-play lifestyle. 

Sitting at the upstairs speakeasy’s empty bar on a day the distillery is closed, CEO Evan Brownstein and Chief Development Officer Matt Armstrong say they see the district gradually emerging as an easy-to-reach destination and a gateway to the neighboring Warehouse Arts District. Visitors will be able to bike or walk there along the adjacent Pinellas Trail, arrive by car from nearby Interstate 275, or take public transit. New streets running through the district will reconnect the road network, making it easier to walk, bike, or scoot over from the other arts districts in the city’s urban core. 

Shaped by the community

The community will have a significant voice in shaping the new creative district.  

“The Iafrate family does not want a top-down design process led by an out-of-town architecture firm being paid millions of dollars,” Brownstein says. “They want to do things differently. In the world we live in today, the best things are crowdsourced; they’re collaborative. They’re not top-down. They’re made when communities of people come together and create. St. Petersburg is a community of creators and makers, whether they’re craftsmen, chefs, artists, or musicians. It’s a makers’ and creators’ community. What the Iafrates want to do is have that community tell us what they want to make here, what they want to create here. Rather than tell everybody, ‘this is what we’re doing here,’ we want to do something that’s from the ground up, from the community, from the people who live here, create here, and make here. This is going to be a neighborhood. And we don’t want this to be a slice of suburbia, or something that could be in Dallas or Houston. We want something uniquely St. Pete that’s made by the makers of St. Pete.”

In November, four design charrette events unveiled the vision for the district and offered the public their first swing at sharing ideas for how the neighborhood should develop. That public outreach will continue in 2026. Armstrong says this planning process is unique because the Iafrate family plans to maintain ownership of the property in perpetuity. That gives time to get it right, instead of a deadline to get it built.

Armstrong says the project will evolve over time, but the core vision will stay the same.

“The nature of making things is really important,” he says. “That area was industrial land where people made things since the Seaboard Railroad came through and founded the town. It’s historically been a place for makers and will continue to be a place for makers involved in creating, crafting, producing, and selling. It will also be a place for the people who come to St. Pete because it’s a community that has a small city feel with big city things to do. They want authenticity. They want to be able to walk to where they’re going, to have that option. They want to buy local.”

To create a true community, there also has to be residential in the mix.

“People will live here,” Armstrong says. That gives a place a soul, because you know people who are here around the clock are invested in the place.”

Showcasing a hidden gem

The weathered industrial property eyed for new life as a creative district was the site of the headquarters and processing facility for the Iafrate family’s concrete and construction materials recycling business, Angelo’s Recycled Materials. 

In early 1960s Detroit, Italian immigrant and autoworker Angelo Iafrate bought a secondhand dump truck and started a materials recycling business as a side job, according to a 2013 Tampa Bay Times story. He built a successful business with 500 employees that he eventually sold in 1997 to retire to Florida,  the Times report says. Relocating to Florida, Angelo Iafrate had a change of plans. Instead of retiring, he launched a new business that his son, Dominic Iafrate Sr., and grandsons moved south to help him run in 2005, the Times says. 

Dominic Iafrate Sr. and his sons, Dominic Jr. and Stephen, co-founded the St. Petersburg Distillery in 2014. For the next decade, the distillery maintained a fairly low public profile and focused on producing small-batch craft spirits with fresh ingredients like grains from a north Florida farm. 

In recent years, the distillery has become a more visible presence in the community.

“We’re a startup with a 10-year history,” Brownstein says. “We want to move from being a hidden gem to a shining gem.”

In 2023, its outdoor event space, “The Garden,” opened, part of a planned multi-phase expansion on the property. In 2024, the Iafrate family sold off Angelo’s Recycled Materials, freeing up the 28-acre site for reimagining and redevelopment.

From June to October 2025, the distillery hosted an exclusive dinner series led by chef David Reyes. In summer 2025, it started offering guided distillery tours that end with sampling spirits in the upstairs speakeasy tasting room. So far, that second-floor space is only open to tour groups. That changes in 2026, when it opens to the general public, Brownstein says. He says, in early 2026, they will also introduce “a reimagined breakfast, lunch, dinner, brunch, all-day dining program featuring local culinary creators.” 

Building community, showcasing artists

The proposed creative district builds on a track record of community engagement and collaboration with local artists. 

The neighboring Pinellas Trail has provided a community project to take on. The distillery has grown a partnership with MAR (Mindful Action for Regeneration), a community nonprofit that plants trees along the trail. Since MAR is also responsible for watering and maintaining those trees, the distillery supplies water from its on-site well, provides a trailside storage container for equipment, and pitches in on volunteer days. Through that partnership, the distillery also hosted a 35th anniversary of the Pinellas Trail celebration that local nonprofits organized in early December.

The distillery has a track record of collaborating with local artists and showcasing their work. Murals by local artists Chad Mize and Reid Jenkins, and neighboring Gibbs High School’s mural club, adorn the outside walls and a first-floor hallway. A few years back, neighboring Gibbs’ mural club and their art teacher, Brian McAllister, painted “Raising Local Spirits,” which depicts an underwater scene of a diver in an old-fashioned hard-hat suit retrieving barrels of alcohol from a sunken ship as hammerhead sharks swim above him.

In the distillery’s production hall, a glass sculpture by Nikola Morse is the St. Pete artist’s twist on the classic spirit safe, a device that originated in Scotland in the 19th century to monitor and control production of Scotch whisky for tax collection purposes and ensure taxes are paid. Two outstretched arms grasping hands connect the upper and lower spheres of Morse’s sculpture, symbolizing the connection between grass artistry and craft spirits artistry. 

For a stretch of 2023, Mize, a well-known local artist and muralist, ran an arts venue called “Space” in an old PSTA bus depot building off 28th Street on the east end of the 28-acre property.

Put it all together, and Brownstein says the distillery is already cultivating a community of creatives and laying a foundation for the future creative district. 

“It is the Spirit of St Pete, as well as the spirit of St Pete,” he says, referencing the distillery’s slogan, “and it is already bringing people together and connecting people, exemplifying the vision we have for the whole neighborhood in the future.”

For more information, go to St. Petersburg Distillery