Walk the Promenade along North Tamiami Trail on any weekday morning and you'll notice the seam. Royal palms and canopy trees shade a finished stretch of paver walkway, wide enough for two strollers to pass, running past the Blue Pagoda and Chidsey Library toward the Municipal Auditorium. Keep walking south and the paving stops. Orange construction fencing picks up where the sod ends, wrapping a stretch of shoreline that still looks, from the sidewalk, like a job in progress. That's because it is. The Bay has been open for years now, but "open" and "finished" have never meant the same thing on this 53-acre stretch of downtown bayfront, and the gap between those two words is about to get more interesting, not less.
What Lands This Year, and What's Still a Line Item
The Promenade that already exists, the 1,000-foot walkway connecting the Blue Pagoda, Chidsey Library, and Municipal Auditorium, opened in 2025 as part of what planners call the Cultural District. The park's own materials describe three current projects (the Canal District, the Cultural District, and the Resilient Shoreline) as under design and construction, with a completion target of 2027. The landscape architecture firm behind the design gives two of those pieces a sooner date: a Town Square, a shaded gathering and performance space at the midpoint of the Promenade, and the Resilient Shoreline itself, the mile of western bayfront being rebuilt to absorb storm surge rather than just resist it, are both slated to open before this year is out.
Not everything in Phase 2 is moving at that pace. A Sunset Pier project, originally part of the same phase, is on hold because of cost and timing. That detail matters more than it sounds. It means the fencing you see today isn't a single countdown clock. Some of it comes down this year. Some of it stays up for reasons that have nothing to do with construction schedules and everything to do with what the project can currently afford.
Phase 2 carries a planned cost of $65 million, with $48 million coming from a TIF-backed city bond and the remaining $17 million from grants and private sources. That's the money already committed. The restaurant everyone keeps asking about is a different story.
The Restaurant Nobody's Eaten At Yet
In April, Bay Park Conservancy founding CEO AG Lafley told the Sarasota County Commission that a waterfront restaurant is planned for the former U.S. Coast Guard station site on the south side of the boat basin, and that a partnership has already been struck with Venice Pier Group, the operator behind Sharky's on the Pier and Fins at Sharky's. "We'll be moving into construction next year, and it will open in 2027 right there on the edge of the boat basin," Lafley said. It won't be the operator's first time running a restaurant on public land; the same group previously ran concessions at the county-owned Snook Haven Park.
That 2027 date is worth sitting with. It means the park's first true sit-down dining option, the one the master plan has been promising, hasn't broken ground yet. Everything else people already do at The Bay, they've been doing without it.
The Neighborhood Didn't Wait for the Park to Catch Up
While the park's own food and beverage program stays a line item on a future budget, the blocks around it kept building. In April, Hanami Sushi Cocktails & Grill opened at 1525 Fourth Street, a nearly 7,500-square-foot space inside a 1925 building that once housed The Citrus Exchange, following a renovation that took more than a year and stripped the walls down to the original brick. It sits a few doors from Station 400, Food + Beer, and Vin Cella Wine Cellar, part of a stretch of Fourth Street that's been filling in for years.
Elsewhere in the district, Café Arts opened as an indoor and outdoor coffee shop, and inside Parkside, the food-and-beverage compound anchored by Arts & Central, Origin Pizza brought its fifth Sarasota County location under owner Rami Nehme. The Watershed Hospitality Concepts group, which already runs Cask & Ale, Blasé Martini Bar, 3.14 Pi Pizza, and Pie on Main, added Lefty's Oyster & Seafood Bar in the former Mandeville Beer Garden space. Toasted Mango Café closed its original North Tamiami Trail location and reopened in the Rosemary District after a delay that pushed the move to late spring. None of that construction needed a TIF bond or a county commission vote. It needed a lease.
The same pattern shows up for anyone with a dog. The Canine Club at Gillespie Park gives Rosemary District a fenced off-leash run with separate sides for large and small dogs, and Dog Bar Sarasota built out more than 6,500 square feet of indoor and outdoor play space in the same neighborhood, where a day pass runs $7 and dogs get access to brick-oven pizza and cocktails on the human side of the fence. A few blocks south, the Sarasota Farmers Market has run every Saturday, rain or shine, from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. since 1979, centered at Main Street and Lemon Avenue and spilling out to State Street. None of this waited on a park master plan. It's already the neighborhood's actual infrastructure, built one lease and one fenced yard at a time, running in parallel to whatever's happening behind the orange fencing down at the water.
Who's Paying, and Why the County Just Got Careful
The park's funding model splits three ways: 50 percent philanthropy through the Bay Park Conservancy, 25 percent from the city, and 25 percent from the county, with the public share drawn from property tax revenue generated inside a tax increment financing district established in fiscal year 2020. That district was originally projected to generate about $190 million over its 30-year span. By fiscal year 2026, redevelopment around The Quay and the Rosemary District had pushed actual growth in assessed value well ahead of that projection, nearly doubling it.
That's the good news for the park's finances. The more cautious note came in April, when the county was asked to commit its half of a TIF-backed city bond covering a $16 million borrow for work at Centennial Park. Rather than approve the full multi-year commitment, commissioners voted to include just the first year's debt service payment, $282,000, in the county's fiscal year 2027 budget. Commissioner Teresa Mast called it a good problem to have, but was direct about the reason for the smaller ask: budget timing, not doubt about the project. It's a small vote with a clear signal. The land value keeps climbing faster than expected, but the pace of what gets built on the public side is still a choice made one budget cycle at a time, not a formality.
What That Means for the Rest of This Year
Expect the fencing along the western shoreline to start coming down in sections before December, and expect a shaded Town Square to open somewhere near the middle of the Promenade around the same time. Expect the boat basin restaurant site to stay exactly as it is, a former Coast Guard station waiting on a construction start, through all of 2026 and most of 2027. And expect the Rosemary District itself, the sushi counter on Fourth Street, the pizza inside Parkside, the fenced dog runs, the Saturday market at Main and Lemon, to keep running the way it already does, because none of that was ever waiting on the park to finish.
The people building this project have their own outer marker. A June update on the project put the full buildout at the end of 2029. Until then, the honest answer to "is The Bay done" changes depending on which acre you're standing on and which month you're asking.
If you want to know exactly which section is open before you plan a walk, or which restaurant lease just changed hands two blocks from the water, that's the kind of detail Sheldon, Gettel & Dahl tracks as a matter of course, because it's the same ground we walk.
