Taylor DeLuca has been staring at the same empty pilings for two years. Her family has run Two Scoops Ice Cream and the two Two Sides of Nature shops in Bayview Plaza for three decades, close enough to the Anna Maria City Pier that foot traffic from the pier used to show up in her daily receipts. When Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit in 2024, her stores took three feet of water and a total loss in one location. She rebuilt. She's still waiting on the other half of her business plan to come back: the people walking off the pier with an hour to kill and a taste for ice cream.
A few doors down, Cool Beans owner Morgan Bryant has watched the same stretch of Pine Avenue sit empty. "For two years, we looked out at this empty space that used to be filled with people all the time," she said. Her read on what's coming isn't really about wood and concrete. "It's just going to be really exciting when it reopens again."
Here's what neither of them is quite saying, and what most of the chatter on the island hasn't caught up to yet: the pier reopening this fall is not one event. It's three, on three different clocks, and only one of them is locked in.
Six Storms In, This Isn't New. But This Rebuild Is Different.
The original City Pier went up in 1911, built by the Anna Maria Beach Company to bring steamship passengers over from Tampa and St. Petersburg before there were bridges to the mainland. Since then it's needed major repair or full reconstruction in 1921, 1935, 1974, 1988, and again after Hurricane Irma in 2017, when it was demolished and rebuilt before reopening in 2020. What's underway now, after Helene and Milton tore out the walkway in 2024, is the sixth rebuild in the pier's history.
Public works manager Dean Jones put it plainly to a local news crew this spring: "It's the crown jewel of Manatee County, in my opinion. People come from all over the world to see this pier." Mayor Mark Short has called it the county's number one tourist draw and said the city has no option but to rebuild it, storm after storm.
What separates this version from 2020's is what's underneath it.
| Pre-2024 pier (rebuilt after Irma, reopened 2020) | Pier under construction now | |
|---|---|---|
| Piling material | Standard wood | Reinforced concrete |
| Piling depth | Shallower, not driven to hardpan | Driven to hardpan, roughly 40 feet below the deck |
| Deck surface | Traditional decking | 800 feet of concrete slab, epoxied and rebar-tied, topped with Kebony, a Norwegian hardened wood built to run cooler underfoot |
| Construction contract | N/A | $4.6 million bid awarded to Tampa Bay Marine, Inc., with total project cost approaching $8 million |
Holmes Beach city commissioner Carol Whitmore, comparing the two rebuilds, said the new pilings "gone a lot deeper" than what held up the previous version, adding, "the one is going to stay." Jones described the engineering behind that confidence: the deck slabs lock together as one continuous unit rather than a series of independent spans, so the whole structure is meant to move together in a storm instead of failing piece by piece.
Three Timelines, Not One
Here's the part that gets flattened every time this story gets repeated on the island: "reopening this fall" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it covers three separate things that are not on the same schedule.
The walkway itself has stayed roughly on track all year. A Sarasota Magazine report from October 2025 had the pier "substantially complete" by April 2026. That slipped to a general fall 2026 target by the end of December. By late August 2026, the most recent coverage still says "this fall" without narrowing to a month, which tells you the walkway work is close but not finished, not that anyone's moved the goalposts on purpose.
The restaurant space is a separate build with its own deadline. In June, city commissioners approved a new five-year lease with GSM Partners to bring back a waterfront restaurant under the "Pieradise" name, in an expanded footprint that used to house Mote Marine's aquarium space. Mote is not returning to the pier. A city official was direct about the timing pressure in that same meeting: "We want to make sure this gets up and running by November so anything that can help us facilitate that from a prioritization standpoint would be important."
The rest of the building at the T-end, everything beyond the restaurant's footprint, is on a third and much looser timeline. Mayor Short told a reporter in December that repairs to those remaining structures "are in the plans. We'll be doing those a little later." As of a March 2026 commission meeting, the city was still weighing what to do with the old Mote Marine space beyond the restaurant lease, including a proposal to replace some enclosed walls with hurricane-rated sliding doors, with no final decision made.
"We want to make sure this gets up and running by November so anything that can help us facilitate that from a prioritization standpoint would be important."
So the honest version of "reopening this fall" looks like this: you'll likely be able to walk the pier before you can order a meal at the end of it, and some of what used to fill out the T-end building may not be finished, or decided, for a while past that.
What Comes Back Isn't What Left
The Mote Marine departure is the detail that changes how the reopening should be read. This isn't a restoration project putting the old pier back exactly as it stood before Milton. It's a rebuild that's also a reset of who occupies the space. GSM Partners is stepping into a larger footprint than the restaurant held before the storms, with a five-year lease (plus a five-year option) at $12,000 in monthly base rent. Brian Seymour of GSM described plans for a bigger operation with separated bar and kitchen areas, daily live music, and bait and tackle service for anglers, calling it "a better overall food and beverage option and experience than what we offered with only a small space before the hurricanes."
Whatever eventually fills the rest of the old Mote building is still an open question at the city level. If you're picturing the exact pier you remember from 2023, walkway, restaurant, aquarium space all reopening together on one date, that's not the version coming back this fall.
Who Actually Needed the Pier, and Who Didn't
Two years without a pier didn't hit every business on the north end the same way. A few worth knowing by name if you're walking Pine Avenue this fall:
- Two Scoops Ice Cream and Two Sides of Nature in Bayview Plaza, run by the DeLuca family for three decades, took direct storm damage and have been rebuilding while waiting on pier foot traffic to return to pre-2024 levels.
- Cool Beans, owned by Morgan Bryant, sits close enough to the pier's entrance that owner has described it as sharing a heartbeat with the structure itself.
- Beach Bums Island Attitude, which rents bikes, golf carts, kayaks, and paddleboards, reported doing fine through the closure. Staffer Alex Lucero noted business held up even without the pier drawing its usual crowd, since visitors still wanted a way to get around the island.
That contrast matters. The pier's return will matter enormously to some storefronts and barely register for others, depending on whether their customer base was ever tied to foot traffic off the T-end in the first place.
What This Means for Your Next Walk Down Pine Avenue
If you live here, the practical version of all this is simple. Expect the walkway to open sometime this fall, likely before the restaurant does. Expect Pieradise to target a November opening under its new operator, in a bigger space than the old restaurant held. Expect the far end of the building, the old Mote Marine footprint, to stay a work in progress for a while past that, with the city still deciding what goes there. And expect Bayview Plaza's ice cream and coffee shops to notice the difference in foot traffic before most of the rest of the island does.
The pier coming back is real news. Just don't plan your first dinner at the end of it around the same date you plan your first walk out to see it.
If you're already watching this stretch of the island the way Alexis and the team at Luxury Coastal Living Group do, one storefront and one lease at a time, and you ever want that same read applied to a property decision on Anna Maria Island, Longboat Key, or anywhere else in the barrier islands, Work with Us.