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The button fort lauderdale6/14/2023 “They’re providing jobs for people in the neighborhood. “ doing an amazing job highlighting Black-owned brands,” Bodie says. Named after his mother and featuring her Bahamian-Jamaican recipes, the restaurant serves brown stew chicken, chicken wings, oxtail and goat curry. The family element of Harvey’s project appealed to Matari Bodie, who’s adding a second location of his Miami Gardens restaurant Lorna’s Caribbean & American Grill. His daughter Jolyn, who lives in Sistrunk, will manage Victory’s day-to-day operations. His son Victor Jr., a chef-in-training at Florida Atlantic University, will handle the building’s catering when he graduates in late 2022. Victory Building also will be a family-run outfit. Harvey, for his part, says locals are clamoring for food and drink. “We need a movie theater to go to with the grandchildren and a place to go to socialize and listen to singers.” “Do we not have enough shops that sell alcohol?” Chadwick wrote of her neighborhood, which she says consists mainly of elderly and disabled residents. But not everyone agrees: In a letter to city commissioners last March Tara Chadwick, president of the Home Beautiful Park Civic Association, balked at the Victory Building, arguing that a neighborhood distillery “is not going to be good for us.” Harvey says the neighborhoods north and south of Sistrunk, such as Dorsey-Riverbend, fully support the lifestyle complex. The vodka is already carried in 44 states and markets from Total Wine to Trader Joe’s. The new four-story Victory Building on Sistrunk Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale will pour Victor George Vodka, owner Victor Harvey’s premium spirits brand. Harvey, whose stills currently operate in New Port Richey, will be relocated when the distillery opens. There is also a rye whiskey called Pullman Porters, named after freed slaves hired by railroad companies to work on sleeper cars following the American Civil War. Now that land will be transformed into a 24-space parking lot serving the Victory Building.Īlong with bottling Victor George Vodka, Harvey’s 1,500-square-foot distillery will feature an American oak barrel-aged bourbon called Fort Mose (pronounced Mo-Zay), named after the first free Black town in the United States two miles north of St. “He got other opportunities come up, and that’s what it was,” Harvey says. That celebrity-fueled project, first proposed in 2019 on empty land Harvey owns across the street, never happened after Flo Rida pulled out as its “brand ambassador.” Nor should it be confused with “My House” rapper Flo Rida’s distillery partnership with Harvey that wound up falling apart during the pandemic, he says. The Old Sistrunk Distillery is not to be confused with Sistrunk Marketplace, an unrelated but no less ambitious food hall and distillery a half-mile east of Harvey’s planned complex. “But when we get these types of buildings done, they start to think, ‘Hey, these are nice over here, let’s move back.’ Sistrunk has an identity going back to the 1930s and 1940s. “There are people who grew up in Sistrunk and left the area for somewhere nicer, like Plantation or Davie,” says Harvey, a former Miami rapper-turned-hotel entrepreneur. Like new developments next-door in FAT Village, his food-and-drink hub can drive young people to the boulevard. Harvey describes the Sistrunk area as a neighborhood rich with Black history but still modernizing. “We’re offering a more upscale dining and drinking experience with a focus on hiring within Sistrunk, while exposing people to Black-owned brands and businesses.” “It’s been a long time coming with this pandemic craziness, but we finally got there,” Harvey, of Fort Lauderdale, says of Victory Building. His new Victory Building will be a family-run operation, and intends to employ 150 people from the surrounding Sistrunk neighborhood. Fort Lauderdale developer Victor Harvey in front of the empty plot of land on Sistrunk Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale.
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