The Naples Pier Is Closed Until 2027. Old Naples Didn't Wait Around.

Walk down Broad Avenue South after dinner these days and you'll notice the block ends differently than it used to. There's no silhouette of pilings against the sky, no string of anglers leaning on the rail, no slow crowd drifting toward the water for the last light. Where the Naples Pier used to be, there's a construction fence and a barge working offshore. But the block hasn't gone quiet. It's just moved its evening somewhere else, and the somewhere else says more about how this neighborhood actually works than the pier closure itself does.

The pier came down in stages after Hurricane Ian tore through in September 2022, and the city broke ground on a full rebuild in January 2026. Crews have been at it ever since: pilings pulled from the seafloor in May, a temporary trestle assembled in June so barges could keep working through rough weather, the first concrete pours for the new support beams completed by early July. The project is running around $26 million, and the timeline the city has been working toward points to a reopening sometime in 2027, not this season and not next spring either.

That's a long gap for a landmark that's been the default answer to "where should we watch the sunset" for generations of Old Naples residents. The city knew that, which is why it designated two pedestrian bypasses during construction, one at Broad Avenue South and one at 13th Avenue South, both with beach access and restrooms still open. Functionally, that solves the access problem. It doesn't solve the ritual problem. A beach access point is not a pier. It doesn't give you a place to stand at the end of a walkway and watch the whole horizon come down to a single point. For a year and a half, the neighborhood has had a hole where its most reliable anchor used to be.

The Corner That Filled It

Here's what's actually interesting about that gap: it got filled almost immediately, and not with a stopgap.

On May 15, 2026, the Olde Naples Hotel opened its first building at 200 Broad Street South, on the same two-acre footprint where the original Naples Hotel stood when the city was founded in 1889. Its restaurant, Annie's Bistro, Bar & Bakery, is open to the public, not just hotel guests, and it runs the kind of full-day format that gives a neighborhood somewhere to land at any hour: espresso and pastries in the morning, a full bistro and bar menu by evening. The room itself has murals by local artist Janine Wesselmann, a piano, and a gilded ceiling, which is a strange thing to say about a restaurant a block from the beach, but that's the point. The building's architect, Hart Howerton, designed the whole property around a central courtyard meant to pull activity from Third Street South into the site itself, deliberately setting the structure back from the road to keep the block's older, smaller-scale buildings visible around it.

So the timing lines up almost exactly. The pier construction started ramping up through the spring of 2026. The hotel and its restaurant opened in the middle of that same spring. One historic anchor, built in 1888, went dark for a rebuild. Another, built on the site of its 1889 neighbor, came back to life 137 years later, half a block away.

That's a coincidence of dates, not a plan. But it's worth noticing because of who's actually behind it.

One Family, Two Corners, Two Different Decisions

The Olde Naples Hotel and the historic Olde Naples Building, the vacant structure at the corner of Third Street South and Broad Avenue that the hotel now wraps around on two sides, are owned by the same family: the Camaliers, who have held the corner building for more than 40 years. That matters, because the two properties are on very different tracks right now, and the difference tells you something about how deliberate this stretch of Old Naples actually is.

The hotel restaurant opened on schedule. The corner restaurant did not.

Restaurateur Rick Doody, a seasonal North Naples resident and co-creator of the Bravo Brio Restaurant Group, had been working for months on plans to open JoJo's Bar, a high-end Italian-American steakhouse, in the Olde Naples Building. The 1921 structure had sat vacant for two decades, since Fantozzi's deli and wine shop closed there in 2006. Then, on the same day the hotel opened, Doody got a call from Chris Camalier saying the family wanted to go a different direction.

"I said, 'You've got to be kidding me. We've done so much work on this.'"

Doody still says he wants to open the restaurant and believes he has rights under the lease. As of this reporting, the situation remains unresolved.

Read those two facts side by side and a pattern shows up that a single headline about "Old Naples is booming" would miss entirely. The family fast-tracked the restaurant tied to their new hotel. The family slowed down, or possibly reversed course on, the restaurant proposed for their century-old corner building next door. That's not a landlord filling vacancies as fast as they come. That's a landlord being selective about who gets to anchor this particular two-block stretch, on their own timeline, even when it means walking away from months of someone else's planning work.

For a resident, the practical takeaway isn't which restaurant wins. It's that the pace of change on this stretch of Third Street South isn't the market sorting itself out. It's one ownership group making calls about what belongs on their corner, which means the next thing that opens there will say something specific about what they've decided this block should be.

The One Thing That Didn't Need Any of This

While all of that has been playing out, the Third Street South Farmers Market has kept doing exactly what it's done since 1994: opening every Saturday morning from 7:30 to 11:30, drawing nearly 60 vendors, almost all of them local growers and independent food makers rather than chains. No hotel opening changed its hours. No pier closure moved its footprint. It's the one fixture on this stretch of the neighborhood that was never waiting on anyone's construction timeline or lease negotiation, and it's worth remembering that when everything else on the block feels like it's mid-sentence.

What This Actually Looks Like on a Given Week

If you're building your week around this part of the neighborhood right now, the loop that actually works is straightforward: Saturday morning at the farmers market before the 11:30 close, sunset from one of the two beach access points rather than the pier itself, and if you want a table afterward, Annie's Bistro is the one destination on this stretch that's fully open and taking walk-in traffic. The corner at Third and Broad is worth watching, but not worth planning around yet. Nobody, including the person trying to open a restaurant there, knows exactly when that resolves.

The pier will come back. When it does, the neighborhood will have spent close to two years learning it doesn't actually need a single point at the end of a walkway to hold its evenings together. It has a hotel courtyard built on the exact spot where Naples started, a market that's been quietly running for over 30 years, and a family deciding, corner by corner, what belongs on this block. That's a different kind of stability than a pier ever offered, and it was here the whole time the pier wasn't.

If you're already living this stretch of Old Naples and thinking about what comes next for your own address here, Navarro Group SWFL knows this neighborhood block by block, not just by median price. Find Your Dream Home Today.