Whitter Village 10 Years Later

NAME OF FEATURE | THE GLEANER | FRIDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2020 2 WHITTER VILLAGE 10TH ANNIVERSARY Prime Minister Bruce Golding (right) and Minister of Tourism, Edmund Bartlett (second right) greet land developer Joe Whitter (left), while Whitter’s wife, Angella, looks on. Occasion was the official opening of the $2.9- billion complex in the Whitter Shopping Village in Ironshore, Montego Bay, on December 11. Real estate developer Joseph Whitter (second left, front row) signs off on a $1.2-billion contract for the construction of the Whitter Village Centre to be built on lands adjacent to his Pan Caribbean office at Ironshore, Rose Hall, Montego Bay. The signing took place on Monday September 24, 2007. Looking on from left (front) are Gordon Brown, Whitter’s attorney; Mr Whitter’s wife, Angella; Delroy Alcott, managing director of West Indies Home Contractors (WIHCON), and VikramDhiman, of the ICDGroup. From left (back row) areMaurice Stoppi, quantity surveyor; Clifton Yap, architect; Oliver Holmes, financial adviser; Martin Linton, WIHCON’s quantity surveyor; and Martell Lee, engineer. JOE WHITTER’S DREAM The culmination of T HE EXQUISITE shopping ex- perience offered by Whitter Village Shopping Centre is the end product of a dream first conceptualised by the founder of the Whitter Group of companies, the late JosephWhitter. It is a vision that was shared enthusiastically by his wife and current chief executive officer of the group, AngellaWhitter. “Whitter Village came about be- cause we wanted to build some- thing monumental, something special, on this parcel of land that we owned at Ironshore which was going to be at a major intersection with the new highway that was being built,”Mrs Whitter shares the early deliberations about the de- velopment along the North Coast Highway. She notes that the realignment of the main road has changed the entire dynamic of the Ironshore area and created an opportunity that she and her husband capitalised on in the interest of the meaning- ful growth and development of the Ironshore community and the city of Montego Bay. Even though in his 70s at the time, the late real estate developer was keen on the develop- ment dream for Ironshore coming to fruition during his lifetime. Conceptualised from as early and 2003, the dream became a reality after many challenges and obstacles that extended the timeline for com- pletion, but were unable to extin- guish the flame that fired the vision. Whitter Village was completed in 2009 and opened one year later, in 2010. “What we have now is a signifi- cant modern development that is a landmark in Montego Bay and particularly along the ‘elegant cor- ridor’, as the Ironshore-Rose Hall main road has come to be known. It creates a different ambience and diversity in terms of shopping and commercial development,”says Mrs Whitter. Whitter Village serves the mul- tifaceted needs of a growing city that has seen massive hotel devel- opment and many new major resi- dential constructions. “Our original concept was to be able to have a mixed development,