Walk to the foot of 12th Avenue South any evening this month and you will see cranes before you see the Gulf. Multiple pieces of heavy equipment work the shoreline where the pier used to start, and if you time it right you can watch a crew driving a new piling into the sand, using high-pressure water to set it before an impact hammer locks it in place. It is loud, it is slow, and if you have lived in Olde Naples for more than a few years, it is easy to assume this is just the pier getting patched back together. It is not. The structure coming out of the ground this summer is a different pier than the one Hurricane Ian tore apart in 2022, and understanding what changed is more interesting than watching the cranes.

Seven months in, and the site has a rhythm

The rebuild broke ground on January 5, 2026, after more than a year of federal review. The US Army Corps of Engineers sent the project to the US Fish and Wildlife Service for final review in August 2025, issued its permit in October, and FEMA obligated funding that December. That is the slow part, and it is over. What has happened since is a sequence of visible milestones:

• March 4, 2026: The city council heard the final design for the landside structures, the buildings and restrooms at the base of the pier.
• April 24, 2026: Crews deployed 59 concrete pilings at Wasmer Reef, expanding an artificial reef first established in 2015, as a mitigation measure tied to the rebuild.
• May 5, 2026: Shoreline Foundation Inc., the contractor on the job, began a month-long diving operation to clear debris from the seafloor, including buried pilings from the 1990s that had to come out before new ones could go in.
• July 9, 2026: The contractor completed its second concrete pour.
• August 4, 2026: A Naples Daily News reporter visited the site and described an active work zone, multiple cranes, and pile driving underway on the west end of what will be the new structure.

The new pier will have 56 of these support sections, called bents, each one made of three pilings topped with a concrete cap. Driving a single bent into place can take up to two days. That math gives you a rough sense of why the timeline runs through 2027, not through this winter.

The pier that reopens will not be the one you remember

This is the part that gets lost in the shorthand of "the pier is closed." The rebuild is not a like-for-like replacement. The city's design reduces the total number of pilings and increases the spacing between them, specifically to lessen the structure's effect on the sand and current along the adjacent beach. The pilings themselves are larger in cross section, the concrete supporting the ipe wood decking has been increased, and the whole structure sits at a raised elevation compared to what came down.

The land-side building at the entrance has changed shape too. Architect Maureen Minker presented the redesign to city council in March, and the plan includes a north restroom that now houses a small beach patrol office with its own dedicated bathroom. During that same meeting, council debated what to do about food. The historic pier has always had a permanent concession stand. The new design does not. Council member Berne Barton pushed the discussion toward a portable cart instead, and that is the direction the city settled on. If you have grabbed a hot dog at the pier for twenty years, that particular ritual is not coming back in its old form.

One more addition, small but telling: the rebuilt pier will include an underwater camera for marine life observation, a first for the structure.

The Naples Pier is anticipated to continue to be a landmark structure with unique architectural features that give an iconic flare with more versatility for visitors and avoid potential conflicts with fishing activity.

That is the city's own framing of the goal, and it captures the tension well. The pier is being asked to look like itself while functioning differently underneath.

What happened to the benches, and where the plaques went

If you had a bench dedicated at the pier, in memory of someone or simply because you liked that particular spot to watch the sun go down, many of those benches did not survive Hurricane Ian. The ones that could be salvaged were removed before construction started and are being stored by the city. If you are a bench owner or a plaque holder wondering what happens next, the city has designated a single point of contact for that question: Roxanne Nieto in the Community Services department. The plaques themselves, mounted on the wall of one of the pier's facility buildings, are staying exactly where they are through construction and are not expected to move once the project wraps.

It is a small detail in a $26.3 million project, but it is the kind of detail that tells you the city understands what this pier means to the people who actually use it, not just the visitors passing through.

Where the sunset crowd went this summer

Pier fishing is not possible while the structure is closed, full stop. If you are used to casting off the end of the pier on a summer evening, your options right now are surf fishing directly from the Gulf beach, which requires a Florida shoreline fishing license, or booking an inshore charter out of the Naples City Dock at Crayton Cove. For a full beach day with amenities intact, Lowdermilk Park a short distance north has become the default. And the sunset itself, the reason most people end up at the pier in the first place, is still there for free. The beach beneath the construction fencing remains open, and the view west over the Gulf has not moved an inch.

What has changed is the shape of the evening. Instead of walking out over the water, residents are watching from the sand, sometimes with a clearer view of the actual construction than they expected, since the fencing keeps people off the structure but not off the beach around it.

The long view

This will be the pier's seventh reconstruction since it was first built in 1888. It came down and went back up after hurricanes in 1910, 1926, 1944, and 1960, was rebuilt again in 2015, took damage from Hurricane Irma two years after that, and now Hurricane Ian in September 2022 destroyed roughly 460 feet of it, including the shelter at the end and more than 30 pilings, sending about 140 feet of the structure to the bottom of the Gulf. Over a million people visit the pier in a typical year, to fish, to walk, to watch dolphins, to be somewhere that feels like the center of the town. The city's own accounting of that history is really an accounting of resilience, and this rebuild continues the pattern.

But it is worth sitting with the fact that continuity and change are both true here at once. The pier reopening sometime around mid-2027 will occupy the same footprint at the same end of 12th Avenue South, and it will also be a structurally different pier than the one generations of residents grew up with. Fewer pilings, wider spacing, a raised deck, a cart instead of a concession stand, a camera under the water that was never there before. If you want to watch the old bones come out and the new ones go in, this summer and fall are your window. Once the decking goes on, the process that has been visible from the beach for the better part of a year disappears behind a finished surface, and the next time most residents think about how this pier is built will be the next time a storm takes it apart.

For now, take the walk. The construction fence is not much of a barrier to a good evening on the sand, and there is something worth seeing in watching a landmark get rebuilt in real time, piling by piling, in front of the town that has never let it stay down for long.

If you already call Olde Naples home and you are the kind of person who tracks a project like this block by block, you probably think about the neighborhood the way I do, one landmark and one detail at a time. Karl Faerber has spent a career paying attention to exactly this kind of local change. Let's Connect if you ever want to talk through what else is shifting along the beach this year.