Saturday mornings in Port Royal still start the same way they have for three decades: a bike ride or a short drive up Gordon Drive, past the seawalls and the hedges, toward the smell of paella and fresh empanadas drifting off Third Street South. That part hasn't changed. What has changed is what happens if you keep going north past the market, toward the water.
The Naples Pier is still standing behind a construction fence, and it's going to stay that way longer than a lot of the chatter around town suggests.
The market turns 30, and it still won't take a chain store
The Third Street South Farmers Market is marking its 30th season in 2026. It started small in 1994 and has grown into a Saturday fixture with close to 60 vendors, all local, all independent, set up behind Tommy Bahama in the Neapolitan lot and spilling onto Third Street South itself during the winter months. The rule has held since the beginning: no national chains, no franchises, just growers and small food businesses selling directly to the people who live nearby.
Walk the market on any given Saturday between 7:30 and 11:30 a.m. and you'll find Casa De Loro doing a brisk trade in Argentinian empanadas, Fire & Rice building paella pans to order, Anita's Guacamole running fresh batches, and Bella's Cakes handling the coffee-and-pastry crowd. Dominga's Flowers keeps a stall of fresh cut arrangements going. Care2Grow sells mushrooms grown locally. This past winter season, the market folded in Arte Viva, the countywide celebration of Latin food and culture, marking participating vendors with an Arte Viva sign alongside the 30-year milestone.
The city's own parks and recreation calendar lists a rotating lineup of live music through the market's morning hours, from Dixieland and swing sets to other local acts, depending on the weekend. None of this is new in spirit. The market has always been a Saturday institution for Port Royal and the rest of Old Naples. What's worth noting this year is the anniversary itself: 30 years without a chain store setting foot in that lot is not a small thing in a city that has changed as much as Naples has since 1994.
The visible progress at the pier is real, but it's not what it looks like
Here's where the Saturday routine actually shifts. The Naples Pier has been closed since Hurricane Ian tore through the structure on September 28, 2022, and while a small 100-foot section reopened that November, the full rebuild has been a multi-year process of permitting, funding, and design work before a single piling went back in the water.
That changed at the start of this year. The City of Naples held a groundbreaking ceremony on January 5, 2026, and demolition of the damaged structure began almost immediately. Since then, the project's own page has documented steady, visible progress:
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| Jan 5, 2026 | Groundbreaking ceremony; demolition begins |
| Apr 24, 2026 | 59 concrete pilings deployed at Wasmer Reef, expanding an artificial reef site first established in 2015 |
| May 5, 2026 | Divers begin a month-long effort to clear buried debris, including pilings left over from the 1990s |
| Jun 17, 2026 | Crews begin installing the trestle, a bridge-like walkway on the pier's south side that lets work continue even when barges have to pull offshore for weather |
| Jun 26, 2026 | First concrete pour completed for the pier's support bents, about 20 yards of concrete into rebar and plywood molds |
| Jul 9, 2026 | Second concrete pour completed |
That is genuine forward motion, and it's easy to look at a summer full of concrete pours and assume the pier is close to reopening. It isn't. The finished structure needs to stretch 1,000 feet with a 12-foot hardwood walking surface and two separate superstructures carrying the pier's signature Polynesian roofline, one at the midpoint and one at the end. Two bents poured by early July is a start, not a finish line.
The city's engineering team has said construction runs roughly 18 months from the start of actual work. Count that forward from January 2026 and you land somewhere in the second half of 2027, not later this year as some of the earlier, more optimistic posts around town implied. The $26.3 million project is funded through a mix of sources: FEMA has committed roughly $11.4 million, with the rest coming from state grants, city bonds, county tourist development tax dollars, and public donations. That's a lot of moving pieces for a timeline to hold exactly on schedule, and the city has been candid that big infrastructure projects can slip.
What actually changes on the walk
For anyone doing the familiar loop from Port Royal up to the pier and back, here's the practical part. Access to the pier itself, its stairs, restrooms, and showers, along with 12th Avenue South west of Gulf Shore Boulevard South, is closed for the duration of construction. The parking lot at that corner is mostly off limits too. Only the western third remains open to the public; the eastern two-thirds is fenced for staging and equipment.
The city has kept two pedestrian bypasses open the entire time: one at Broad Avenue South and one at 13th Avenue South. Both have restrooms, and both get you onto the beach without needing the pier's own access point. If your usual Saturday walk from Port Royal used to end at the pier, it now ends at one of those two beach accesses instead, a few blocks off the original route but still an easy walk from the market.
None of this touches the sand itself or the sunset. The wide public beach at the base of the pier is open exactly as it always was, and Naples still faces due west onto the Gulf, so the evening view hasn't lost anything. What's gone, for now, is the ability to walk out over the water on the pier itself, and that piece of the routine is genuinely a 2027 conversation, not a fall 2026 one.
Same market, different walk
Put the two threads together and the picture is pretty clear. The farmers market side of the Saturday routine hasn't budged in 30 years: same vendors, same independent character, same 7:30 start time. The pier side of the routine has been rebuilt from the ground up, literally, and the construction milestones logged this year are proof of steady work rather than an imminent reopening. If you've been telling yourself the pier will be back by next winter season, the concrete pours say otherwise. Plan around Broad Avenue South or 13th Avenue South for a while longer.
Whether you're a longtime Port Royal resident tracking the pier's progress out of habit, or you're weighing what a neighborhood like this actually feels like day to day before making a decision of your own, Armand Alikaj is easy to reach for a straight answer, in English, Spanish, or Italian. Call or text anytime.
