Art Center

The Factory St. Pete is an arts and entertainment campus at 2606 Fairfield Avenue S in St. Petersburg's Warehouse Arts District, occupying eight former industrial buildings on 6.5 acres that once housed Madico, a window film manufacturer. Founded by Jordan Behar, Kara Behar, and Liz Dimmit, opened in 2020, the roughly 90,000-square-foot campus was reimagined through an adaptive reuse design by Behar + Peteranecz Architecture for both interiors and exteriors. More than 1,000 feet of frontage along the Pinellas Trail ties the campus directly into the city's cycling and pedestrian network.

The design preserves the bones of the existing structures: concrete floors, exposed steel and ductwork, cinder block walls, and high warehouse volumes. White-box galleries and generous corridors accommodate rotating exhibitions at every scale, while concrete and black-painted steel serve as neutral foils for work in every medium. A landscaped outdoor space, once dedicated as Keep St. Pete Lit's children's reading garden, extends programming outdoors for classes, readings, and small gatherings.

The Fairfield Avenue facade announces the campus's identity with a sweeping abstract mural, its flowing forms and saturated palette continuing from the building face onto the painted ground plane below, turning arrival into an immersive encounter with public art. Within, the multi-building program functions simultaneously as exhibition venue, artist workspace, and community gathering point. Fairgrounds, a 12,000-square-foot immersive art experience, anchors the campus alongside artist studios, a gallery row, and retail tenants including Daddy Kool Records, making The Factory a civic anchor for St. Petersburg's growing creative district.