Walk to the foot of 12th Avenue South this week and the fence is still there, the barges are still parked offshore, and the old boardwalk you used to cross barefoot on the way to a sunset is still gone. What's changed since spring is underneath the water, not over it. Crews have poured concrete twice since late June, and that quiet fact is worth more to a Naples resident's summer planning than most of what's been written about this project so far.
Two Concrete Pours Since Late June
The rebuild has moved past demolition and into the part where the new pier actually starts to exist. On June 17, Shoreline Foundation Inc, the Broward County firm doing the construction, began assembling and installing a trestle, a bridge-like temporary walkway built along the south side of the old pier footprint. That trestle lets crews keep working from land even when the Gulf gets choppy enough to send the offshore barges looking for shelter.
Nine days later, on June 26, the crew completed its first concrete pour for the bents, the beams that cap each cluster of pilings and hold the deck up. That first pour placed roughly 20 yards of concrete into rebar and plywood molds. A second pour followed on July 9. Two pours in two weeks is a pace, and it's the first real evidence since the January groundbreaking that the structural skeleton of the pier is being built rather than planned.
Before any of that could happen, the seafloor itself had to be cleared. On May 5, Shoreline Foundation began a month-long diving initiative to remove old debris, including pilings that had been buried since the 1990s, so the new foundations would have clean ground to sit on. That work traces back to April 24, when 59 concrete pilings were deployed at Wasmer Reef, an artificial reef the city first established in 2015. Some of the old pier's demolished concrete is headed the same direction, which means the pier that used to hold your fishing line is, in part, becoming fish habitat a few miles offshore.
The Date You've Been Repeating Is Wrong
Here's the part most coverage of this project has left out. Back in December 2024, when the City Council amended its engineering contract with Turrell, Hall & Associates to add construction inspection services, that amendment also updated the project's stated completion deadline to November 15, 2026, according to reporting from Florida Construction News. That number has circulated ever since as the date to circle.
But that deadline was set more than a year before a single shovel touched the ground. The groundbreaking didn't happen until January 5, 2026, and the city's own project page describes the construction window as approximately 18 months from that start. Do that math and you land in the summer of 2027, not the fall of 2026. Reporting on the project as recently as this June has already adjusted course, now pointing to a reopening somewhere around the middle of 2027 rather than the November 2026 figure that got baked into early coverage. If you've been telling houseguests the pier reopens later this year, it's worth updating the story you're telling.
The funding side of the project moved just as slowly, then all at once. Naples secured a Federal Emergency Management Agency grant of $11,401,144.20 in December 2025, part of roughly $12.66 million in federal funding layered with state grants, $11 million in city bonds, $2 million in county tourist development tax revenue, the city's beach fund, and public donations that include gifts through the Collier Community Foundation, according to Gulfshore Business. When the FEMA money finally cleared, Mayor Teresa Heitmann framed it in terms Naples residents would recognize:
"This is truly a wonderful Christmas gift for our residents and for everyone who treasures the Naples Pier."
That December obligation is also why groundbreaking didn't happen until January. Every step, from FDEP's final construction authorization in November 2024 to the FEMA funding release a year later, had to clear before Shoreline Foundation could start.
Where Your Beach Walk Actually Goes Now
If your usual route ran through the pier's parking lot, part of it still works. The lot at 12th Avenue South and Gulf Shore Boulevard South keeps its western third open to the public, while the eastern two-thirds stay closed for construction staging. For everything else, the city has routed foot traffic to two pedestrian bypasses that stay open for the full length of the project.
| Bypass Point | What You'll Find | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Broad Avenue South beach end | Pedestrian beach access, restrooms | Open throughout construction |
| 13th Avenue South beach end | Pedestrian beach access, restrooms | Open throughout construction |
The sand itself never closed. Only the pier structure and its immediate stairs, showers, and restrooms are fenced off. The wide public beach at the foot of 12th Avenue South is still there for swimming, shelling, and the sunset that made this stretch of coastline famous long before the pier had a name.
The Old Pier Didn't Disappear, It Went Fishing
One detail worth knowing if you're a diver or an angler: the demolition material isn't headed to a landfill. Somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the old concrete is being recycled into highway material, and the rest, including those 59 pilings sent to Wasmer Reef in April, is becoming artificial reef structure. The same reef that's been growing since 2015 now has a fresh batch of Naples Pier concrete sitting on it, which means the fish that used to gather under the pilings you walked over have a new address a short boat ride offshore.
What You Actually Get When This Is Done
The new pier won't just be a repaired version of the old one. According to the design the City Council reviewed on March 4, 2026, the rebuilt structure will stand about three feet higher than before, with pilings 18 inches in diameter instead of the old 14-inch pilings, built to hold up better against the next storm.
A few other changes worth knowing before you plan your first walk out on the new deck:
- An underwater camera near the pier's end will let visitors watch marine life without a mask or a boat.
- The north-side restroom is being redesigned to include a small beach patrol office with its own dedicated bathroom, plus a separate family restroom.
- The south-side women's restroom gets an added shade structure and outdoor benches.
- There will be no permanent restaurant this time. FEMA guidelines prohibit permanent structures built over water, which ruled out anything resembling the old Cosmos at the Pier concession. Council member John Krol asked whether a dedicated area could be created for a mobile food truck, but City Manager Gary Young said there wasn't room for one. The fallback, which Mayor Heitmann called "a great compromise," is a portable cart at the pier entrance.
If You Want Your Bench Back
Many of the pier's memorial benches, the ones with small plaques for people who loved this place, were damaged by Hurricane Ian. The salvageable ones were removed before construction began and are being stored by the city. If you're a plaque owner and want to reclaim a bench, or just have questions about the program, the contact is Roxanne Nieto in the city's Community Services department. The plaques themselves, mounted on the wall of one of the pier's facility buildings, are staying put through construction and aren't expected to move once the new pier opens.
That detail says something about this project that the concrete pours and funding tables don't quite capture. A pier first built in 1888, already knocked down and rebuilt after hurricanes in 1910, 1926, 1944, 1960, and now Hurricane Ian, with the current job standing as its seventh reconstruction, isn't really about the structure. It's about the fact that whatever comes back sometime in 2027, or whenever the last pour actually happens, the same names will be on the wall and the same sunset will be waiting at the end of the walk.
For now, that walk just ends a little sooner, at a fence a few hundred feet past the beach access on Broad Avenue South or 13th Avenue South.
If you're watching Naples change in real time and want a market read that's as current as the pier's construction log, the team at MJ Team tracks this city block by block. Start Your Luxury Home Journey with MJ Team whenever you're ready to talk about what's happening in the neighborhoods around it.
