A Car Wash Where the Go-Karts Were: Gate Pays $2.1 Million for a Corner of the Old Adventure Landing Lot

Jacksonville-based Gate Petroleum paid $2.1 million on July 24 for a 1.3-acre piece of the former Adventure Landing property at 2780 State Road 16, and the company has confirmed it plans to build a Gate Express Car Wash on it. That answers part of the question St. Augustine families have been asking since the go-karts stopped running in April: what actually goes in there, next door to the St. Augustine Premium Outlets, on one of the busiest stretches of road in the county. A Gate spokesperson said there is no construction timeline yet.

The car wash accounts for less than a fifth of the site. The full 7.1 acres sold April 2 for $3.6 million to a consortium of Alabama and Georgia real estate firms, including M&D Property LLC, IE Property Group LLC and Jones Properties SA LLC. Gate is the first identified end user for what the owners have proposed as a five-outparcel commercial strip.

The math on that corner

Split out the two transactions and the value of a hard corner on SR 16 becomes obvious. Gate paid roughly three times the per-acre price the consortium paid for the whole park three months earlier.

Sale	Price	Per acre
April 2, whole 7.1 acres	$3.6M	about $507,000
July 24, 1.3 acres	$2.1M	about $1.6M

The four remaining outparcels have no announced tenants.

What the county is reviewing

St. Johns County has a commercial application and site plan in hand that would demolish the park and replace it with the five outparcels, improved shared access, a reworked parking layout, utilities and upgraded stormwater management. Jacksonville-based Foresite Group is the civil engineer. The county's Development Review Committee took the commercial application up at the start of July, and no further progress has been recorded since.

One thing worth knowing before you plan a trip to the Permit Center: the DRC is not a public hearing. The county says the meetings, held Wednesday mornings at 9 a.m. at 4040 Lewis Speedway, are open to the public but informational in purpose, with no public comment portion. Agendas are posted ahead of each meeting on the county's development review page, which is the fastest way to see when this file moves again.

This is also not the first attempt at clearing the site. On Oct. 1, 2025, the St. Johns River Water Management District reviewed an application to demolish the park for commercial redevelopment. That one closed without a permit ever being issued.

Thirty-one years of birthday parties

Adventure Landing closed permanently on April 12 after 31 years on SR 16. Operator NRP Lease Holdings LLC announced it in a social media post on April 7, saying the lease was not being renewed and thanking customers for the birthdays, family nights and first dates the park had hosted. Ticket holders were told to redeem tokens, vouchers and gift certificates before the doors shut.

It was the last Adventure Landing left in Northeast Florida. The Jacksonville Beach flagship with Shipwreck Island Water Park closed Oct. 15, 2025, and that site is being converted into a 427-unit apartment complex. A Westside location on Blanding Boulevard closed back in 2021.

For now the park buildings are still standing. No demolition permit has been issued, and neither Gate nor the property owners have said when equipment will arrive. The next signal will be a DRC agenda listing, or a demolition filing at the county Permit Center, whichever comes first.

More on projects reshaping the SR 16 corridor is at St. Augustine Community Website, and you can read more development stories on our business & development and coming soon pages.

Did your kids grow up on those go-karts? Tell us what you'd rather see on the other four pads and join the conversation in our Community Forum.