Walk down 12th Avenue South today and you'll hit a chain-link fence a full block before you reach the sand. Beyond it: a trestle bridge stretching out over the water, a barge or two anchored offshore, and the skeletal outline of new pilings where the old pier used to run. If you've lived in Old Naples for any length of time, you already know why. What you might not know is which number actually tells you when this ends, and it isn't the one the city keeps repeating.
Hurricane Ian tore through here on September 28, 2022, and took roughly 460 feet of the Naples Pier with it, including the 140 feet at the far end that simply dropped into the Gulf, shelter and all. The pier sat closed, then partially reopened, then closed again while the city spent three years lining up funding and design approvals. Demolition of what remained started in early January 2026, and full reconstruction has been underway since. That's the part everyone already knows. Here's the part worth actually tracking.
What's Standing at the Foot of 12th Avenue South Right Now
As of this writing, we're roughly eight months into a project the city itself has said will take fourteen to eighteen months to finish, which points toward a target reopening sometime around July 2027. But projects like this don't move on a straight line, and the city's own construction log is more useful than the headline timeline if you want to know what's actually happening.
On June 17, crews from Shoreline Foundation Inc. began assembling a trestle, a bridge-like walkway on the south side of the pier that lets work continue even when rough weather forces the offshore barges to pull back. Nine days later, on June 26, the crew completed the first concrete pour for what engineers call a bent, a crossbeam that caps a set of three pilings and locks them together. That first pour used about 20 yards of concrete. A second pour followed on July 9.
Here's the number that puts those two pours in context: the entire project will require roughly 602 yards of concrete before it's done. Two pours in, at that pace, is a small fraction of the total.
Why the Concrete Truck Matters More Than the Calendar
This is the piece most coverage skips. The 18-month estimate is a planning figure, built before anyone knew exactly how fast crews could move once pilings were in the water and weather cooperated. The pour log is the opposite: it's a running, dated record of actual progress that the city updates itself, and it's the closest thing to a live odometer this project has.
If you want a realistic sense of whether Old Naples gets its pier back by next summer or later, don't check a calendar. Check how many pours show up in that log between now and the holidays. A project that needs 602 yards and has logged two modest pours in its first eight months has a lot of concrete left to place. Watching that number tick up, or stall, will tell you more than any press release.
Getting to the Sand This Season
None of this touches the beach itself. The sand, the water, and the sunset are all still fully open, and the city has kept two specific access points running for anyone rerouted around the construction zone.
- Broad Avenue South beach end stays open for the duration of the project, with restrooms available.
- 13th Avenue South beach end is the second open access point, also with restrooms.
- Parking at the pier lot itself is reduced but not gone: the western third of the lot at 12th Avenue South and Gulf Shore Boulevard South remains public, while the eastern two-thirds is fenced off for construction staging.
If your usual route to the water has been the pier entrance, one of those two side streets is your workaround until the fence comes down.
The Concession Isn't Coming Back
Here's a change that's easy to miss until you're standing there wanting a cold drink. The old concession structure at the pier, home to Cosmos at the Pier, isn't part of the rebuild. FEMA's reimbursement terms ruled out restoring a permanent restaurant or concession stand as part of storm-damage repair funding, and Naples City Council spent part of its March 2026 meeting weighing the alternatives. A mobile food truck was floated and rejected for lack of space. What's left in the approved design is a portable cart, nothing more.
That's a small daily-life detail with a real effect: the reflexive stop for a drink or a snack at the end of a pier walk won't exist in the way it used to, even once the structure reopens. Bring your own water if the beach walk is part of your routine.
What the City Is Keeping
Not everything is changing. Many of the pier's benches were damaged in the storm, but the salvageable ones were removed before construction started and are being stored by the city rather than discarded. If you or your family sponsored one of the memorial benches with a plaque, the city has asked residents to reach out to Roxanne Nieto in the Community Services department to arrange pickup or ask questions. The plaques themselves, mounted on the wall of one of the pier's facility buildings, are staying put throughout construction and aren't expected to move once the project wraps.
The new design also adds an underwater camera for viewing marine life near the pilings, along with a small police and beach patrol office near the entrance, according to the plans Naples City Council approved this spring. The pier's elevation is being raised by at least three feet, and engineers widened the spacing between pilings specifically to reduce the new structure's effect on the surrounding shoreline. None of this is cosmetic. This is the sixth or seventh time in the pier's history that Naples has rebuilt it after a storm, going back to hurricanes in 1910, 1926, 1944, and 1960, plus a 2015 reconstruction that Hurricane Irma damaged again just two years later. The city is building this one to outlast the pattern.
What This Actually Means for a Walk Down 12th
The pier has been a fixture of this stretch of coast since 1888, and it's been rebuilt often enough that Old Naples residents have some collective memory of what a closure feels like. This one has just run longer, cost more, and required more federal coordination than any version before it. The beach hasn't gone anywhere. The sunset hasn't moved. But if you're the kind of person who tracks these things the way you'd track a home renovation next door, the pour log is where the real story is, not the 2027 target date everyone keeps repeating.
If you're new to this part of town, or you've lived here for years and just want to talk through what's changing along this stretch of the coast, the team at Jessica Stoots Zazo knows Old Naples block by block, including the parts still behind a construction fence. Contact us any time you'd like a local's read on what's happening here.
