Walk the Promenade along North Tamiami Trail on any evening this month and you will pass construction fencing between the Municipal Auditorium and the Chidsey Library, marking the site of the park's new Town Square. Most people walking past assume it is just another amenity going up. It is actually the payoff for four years of work that almost nobody watched.
The Bay, Sarasota's 53-acre waterfront park along the bay, has logged 1.15 million visits since it opened in fall 2022, according to the park's own visitor counters as of mid-May 2026. Sarasota Mayor Debbie Trice has called that figure extraordinary for a city of roughly 58,000 residents. But the number that matters more to anyone who actually uses the park isn't how many people showed up. It's what order the Bay Park Conservancy built things in to make sure the park would still be standing for them.
The Order Nobody Advertises
Ask AG Lafley, the Conservancy's founding CEO, how a park gets built and he won't start with the playground or the boardwalk. He starts with stormwater. Before any bench or pergola goes in, the plan calls for purifying stormwater as it moves through the site by dredging ponds and bayous and clearing invasive plants, then adding natural filtration for stormwater management, then restoring and sustaining the shoreline's resilience to high water.
"Then, and only then, do we look at park design amenities and features," Lafley has said of the build sequence.
That is not a marketing line. It is the reason the west end of the park, the section built first, held up during the trio of storms that hit the region in 2024, while the older, man-made waterfront running from the Van Wezel north to the 10th Street canal took real damage. Same bay, same storms, different build order. The beachfront section absorbed water the way it was engineered to. The stretch built decades earlier, before anyone was designing for resilience, did not.
That's the trade the Conservancy made on purpose. The park isn't finished being built in the order that protects it. It's finished building the parts that protect it, and now it's moving into the parts you'll actually photograph.
What Opens This October
The Town Square feature is scheduled to open along Van Wezel Way this October, and it will carry a name with more history behind it than most people passing through will realize. In April 1964, then-Mayor Herschel Mayo dedicated that same stretch of ground as Plaza de Santo Domingo, honoring Sarasota's sister-city relationship with Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Mayo called it "the very hub of our civic life" at the time. The new feature will simply be called The Plaza, a direct callback to that dedication rather than a new brand name layered on top of it.
The centerpiece is a large shade structure built for event and gathering programming, sitting at the midpoint of the Promenade that opened in 2025. That Promenade is worth knowing about even if you've already walked it: it's a 1,000-foot, 16-foot-wide walkway flanked by 20-foot royal palms and canopy trees, and it physically connects three Sarasota landmarks that used to feel disconnected from each other: the Blue Pagoda, the Chidsey Library, and the Municipal Auditorium. The Plaza sits right in the middle of that connection, which is why the Conservancy is treating it as the park's new civic center rather than just another lawn.
Here's the rough sequence for what follows, based on the Conservancy's own phase concepts:
| Approximate Completion | Feature |
|---|---|
| October 2026 | Town Square / The Plaza, Van Wezel Way |
| February 2027 | Municipal Auditorium renovation, resilient shoreline |
| July 2027 | Centennial Park expansion |
| Fall 2027 | First waterfront restaurant |
Notice what's missing from that list. A firm home for the Sarasota Performing Arts Center, long discussed as the park's eventual anchor, still doesn't have a confirmed site. Lafley has said there are three to four acres north of the Municipal Auditorium that could work in several configurations, but nothing is locked in. The park keeps building the pieces it can fund and engineer with certainty first, and the spectacle piece stays a placeholder until the money and the design catch up.
The Boat Ramp Upgrade You'll Actually Feel
If you trailer a boat out of the Sarasota area on weekends, you already know the Centennial Park lot fills before most people finish their coffee. Phase 3 is aimed squarely at that friction point. The plan includes:
- A fourth boat ramp, increasing launch capacity by 33 percent
- A 50 percent increase in trailer parking capacity
- Floating day docks installed on the northeast side of the basin
- Rehabilitation of the north and east seawalls
- Restroom rehabilitation at the boat launch area
None of that will show up on a postcard. All of it will show up the next time you try to launch a boat on a Saturday morning and don't have to circle for twenty minutes looking for a trailer spot.
The Restaurant That's Already Two Years Out
The first of three planned restaurants inside the park won't open until fall 2027, but the pieces are already in motion. It's set for the former U.S. Coast Guard station site at the southwestern tip of the boat launch basin, designed by the Sarasota firm Sweet Sparkman Architecture in what's being called Sarasota Modern style, and built atop 12-foot pylons for flood resilience, a design choice that fits the same build logic as everything else in the park. The space will run about 5,000 square feet under roof, with fewer than 220 indoor seats and 100 outdoor seats.
The operator is Venice Pier Group, the family-owned company behind Fins at Sharky's and Sharky's on the Pier in Venice, along with the concessions at Siesta Beach Pavilion. They're not new to this park, either. Venice Pier Group already runs The Nest Café inside The Bay, the counter-service spot known for its Southwest Breakfast Sandwich and for pouring drinks at park events like the Sunday steel-drum sunset series. The 2027 restaurant is that same operator scaling up from café to full waterfront dining, on a site they've effectively been auditioning for since the park opened.
Why Some of This Could Still Slow Down
The Bay's $200 million total build is funded through a specific formula: half from private philanthropy through the Bay Park Conservancy, a quarter from the city, and a quarter from the county, with the public share coming from a tax increment financing district tied to the rise in assessed value of residential property in the downtown area since 2019. That district was established in fiscal year 2020 and was originally projected to generate about $190 million over its 30-year span. By fiscal year 2026, rapid redevelopment around The Quay and the Rosemary District had pushed actual collections toward nearly double that original estimate. The mechanism is working better than planned.
That success hasn't translated into faster county commitments, though. When the Bay Park Conservancy asked the County Commission in April 2026 to fund its full 50 percent share of a $16 million bond backing Centennial Park improvements, the commission instead approved only the first year's debt service payment of $282,000 in the county's fiscal year 2027 budget. Commissioner Teresa Mast called it "a nice problem to have" but said the timing made her hesitant to commit further right now. The hesitation traces back to a state property tax reform question still unresolved in Tallahassee. If that reform passes and shifts revenue away from local TIF districts, the county could redirect its share of Bay funding to its general fund instead of the park.
In other words, the same build-the-foundation-first instinct that shapes the physical park also shapes how the county is willing to spend on it. Nobody wants to over-commit to Phase 3 spectacle before the funding underneath it proves as resilient as the shoreline it's paying for.
What This Means for Your Next Visit
The park's anniversary season, when Park-toberfest, Boo! at The Bay, and the Taste of The Bay food festival have historically filled the October calendar, returns this fall layered right on top of the actual ribbon cutting for The Plaza. If you've been meaning to bring out-of-town guests or just haven't walked the Promenade since it connected the Blue Pagoda to the library, this is the month the park's four years of unglamorous groundwork finally becomes something you can stand in.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property near the bayfront, or you're simply curious how a project like this tends to shape a neighborhood over time, the team at Jane Ebury Sinclair follows these civic projects as closely as the market itself. Schedule a free consultation and we'll walk you through what's actually changing on the ground, not just what's on the press release.
