FLORIDA SITE FIGHT: MORE WAL-MARTS FOR ORLANDO

New Wal-Mart coming to major intersection [Orlando Sentinel]

Attention, Wal-Mart shoppers: The retail giant is coming to the corner of U.S. Highway 17-92 and State Road 436, replacing an old Service Merchandise.

Wal-Mart officials are meeting this week with Casselberry city commissioners to go over plans.

At 149,000 square feet, the store will be one of the retail chain’s smaller Supercenters.

It will have a grocery store and small garden center, but no Tire & Lube Express. It will have a pharmacy, but customers won’t be able to drop off prescriptions at a drive-through.

City commissioners want the Supercenter to look nicer than Wal-Mart’s traditional blue-and-red buildings, noting how close the store will be to its new downtown.

Wal-Mart officials agree that the store should have attractive architectural touches, said Quenta Vettel, a senior manager of public affairs who will meet with city commissioners this week. An engineer and attorney also will attend the meetings.

“We’re really looking at the community,” Vettel said. “It’s not what people think of as the old Wal-Mart.”

The store likely would employ about 300 people, Vettel said.

The chain has no plans to shut down its Casselberry store on S.R. 436 or any other stores nearby, Vettel said.

Zoo is in bloom

In conjunction with last week’s opening of its Porcupines of the Plant Kingdom display, the Central Florida Zoo announced it has been listed as a botanical garden by the American Public Gardens Association and the American Horticultural Society.

The result is an informal name change: It’s now the Central Florida Zoo and Botanical Gardens.

The gardens are interspersed throughout the zoo and include more than 800 plant species, many of them native plants of Florida.

Porcupines of the Plant Kingdom is the newest exhibit in the zoo’s botanical collection. It has been built adjacent to the African crested porcupine exhibit and will highlight similar defense mechanisms from the plant and animal kingdoms.

The plants exhibited will feature a variety of thorns, spines and prickles they use to protect themselves. New sculptures by zoo landscape artist Eric McCarty feature three larger-than-life porcupines.

Church sells office building

A 3,500-square-foot office building at 1939 Boothe Circle in Longwood was sold recently for $675,000. Sanlando United Methodist Church of Longwood sold the building to Sai Shradha Inc. of Winter Springs. The owner’s plans are to renovate the building and move a mortgage company into it.

Child’s play for architects

Burke, Hogue & Mills Associates Inc. of Lake Mary has completed design of a children’s museum in Naples.

The Children’s Museum of Naples will have 26,000 square feet. The focal point is a two-story banyan tree with a treehouse.

Burke, Hogue & Mills has designed the project with the goal of reaching a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design silver certification.

The museum is scheduled to open in 2008.

Kitchen has grand opening

There was a ribbon-cutting earlier this month for My Girlfriend’s Kitchen, a meal-assembly business, at 197 E. Mitchell Hammock Road in Oviedo. The business opened in March.