David Fry decided to shift gears on the downtown Fort Myers property he owned at 2300 First St. on the southeast corner lot at First and Jackson Street, just next door to the Franklin Arms building and across the street from Izzy’s Fish and Oyster.

Fry had intended to build The Place on First, which would have been 15 luxury residences combined with office space. The concept just wasn’t working, Fry said.

In January, Fry sold the land to a hotel investment group for $2.5 million. FTM Downtown Hotel LLC has yet to announce the construction timetable to build or even the branding of the future hotel. Fry said he retained a 10% ownership stake in the project.

“It had to be a mixed-use building because of the zoning,” Fry said of The Place on First concept. “It wasn’t going to work the way it was. We had envisioned 40,000 square feet of office space. I needed to get half of that filled. The problem with that was the project was heavily reliant on two floors of office space. We were really challenged finding tenants to pay the rent we needed to finance a project like that.

“It wasn’t happening.”

Fry previously worked for WCI Communities for 18 years and spent five years as WCI’s CEO. After Lennar Homes bought WCI in 2016, Fry began doing his own projects.

When the new hotel project gets going, there will be one complication. There’s a fountain that’s in the way of construction on the property. Fry and Fort Myers City Council member Lin Bochette are looking into where to relocate the fountain. That would be paid for with private and not public funding. The fountain was built and placed there in the 1980s, Bochette said.

“It’s not an historic piece,” Bochette said. “That’s the thing there. We’ve talked about where to put it. We talked about putting it at Centennial Park. But there it would become a maintenance issue. We’ve talked about moving it to my church (Thomas Edison Congregational Church, off Llewellyn Drive).

“I’d hate to see the thing lost. That’s all there is to it.”