National funeral chain turns St. Pete steakhouse into $6M events space

For decades now, anyone driving down St. Petersburg’s Tyrone Boulevard has passed a familiar sight.

It’s a standalone building at 3500 N. Tyrone Blvd. with plastic cows out front. Generations took pictures with those cows and visited the restaurant that called the space home, Harold Seltzer’s Steakhouse.

Today, Seltzer’s is gone but the distinctive building — and one of the cows out front — remains on the busy commercial thoroughfare.

The new occupant: a funeral company-owned event space named Traditions on Tyrone.

Traditions is owned by Houston-based Dignity Memorial and aims at something different than the company’s core business of funerals.

It’s an events space, for, the company says, “celebrating all of life’s occasions,” with a focus on wedding receptions, bar or bat mitzvahs, proms, business events and all sorts of other parties.

“We don’t do body preparation here,” says Chris Halsey, Tradition on Tyrone’s manager.

“We can do that, if a person wants to bring an urn to have a celebration, like any other centers or hotels. But people are starting to go to event centers or spaces like that versus coming into a funeral home that's very traditional and stuffy and rows of chairs like that.

“It's just a natural progression.”

(According to a 2025 report from the National Funeral Directors Association, 58.3% of people say they have attended a funeral at a non-traditional location.)

“I feel like now,” adds Traditions on Tyrone’s events manager Victoria Colie, “people want a party, they want to have fun, celebrate. They don't want to stand over a table and cry.”

Major rebuild

Dignity bought the former steakhouse property in 2024 for $3.9 million, shortly after Harold Seltzer’s closed down.

The closure came as the chain’s founder and namesake stepped away from the business that, despite several changes over the decades, bore his family’s name and traced its roots to a butcher shop in Montreal.

Halsey says the purchase closed about a month before Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit Florida, causing extensive damage along the Gulf coast.

The building suffered wind and roof damage during Milton and the huge demand for permits that followed as residents looked to rebuild delayed the company’s plans.

“We lost a little time,” Halsey says.

Once able to work on the building, the company undertook a major renovation of the space. The dark of a classic steakhouse has been replaced with a brighter. more welcoming interior.

To accomplish that, the company added windows throughout the building to bring in natural light and added light-colored tile flooring.

There are now neutral colors that work with events like wedding receptions, bridal showers and anniversaries, allowing for flexible tablecloth changes without clashing. (Colie has a warehouse filled with materials available to help customize events.)

Photo by Mark Wemple

Other work included the reconfiguration of the space, including adding walls, to create five different event spaces. In all, if someone rents the entire space it can hold 300 people — 350 if an outdoor bar is included.

And in nod to Seltzer’s, Traditions on Tyrone kept the restaurant’s original bar. While the granite countertops were upgraded and the booths redone, original elements, ike the Tiffany lamps, remain.

Growth plans

In all, Dignity spent almost $2 million on the project, some of it due to the damage from Milton and upgrades needed to the fire system, a company spokesperson says.

The new Traditions on Tyrone held a soft opening June 11 with about 200 attendees and four events are already scheduled.

Halsey says the sales team is meeting with groups, including a local school, and individuals about holding events at the center. There are also plans to host a monthly dinner, as Seltzer’s once did.

The goal, says the spokesperson, is to host 10 events per month with $150,000 in revenue per month in the first year, or $1.8 million. 

Dignity Memorial is the flagship brand of SCI Corp. SCI, which also owns the cremation service company Neptune Society, operates more than 1,487 funeral service locations and 503 cemeteries in 44 states and eight Canadian provinces. According to its first quarter earnings report released in April, revenue grew 2% year over year, to $1.09 billion. 

As for repeating the Traditions on Tyrone model in other places, the spokesperson says the company has 10 special event centers in Florida "and are continually evaluating opportunities to expand our presence."

But whether Dignity does or doesn’t add more event spaces, Colie says given the change in people’s expectations, the work done at the events space is not so dissimilar from the work done at more traditional facilities.

It’s about the celebration, after all.

“I feel like when you talk to people that don't know anything about it, when you explain it as a celebration of life, If it's someone that's passed or someone that's wanting to plan a party for a 16th birthday, it's very similar," she says. "They're trying to celebrate somebody.”