Walk the water side of Gulf Shore Boulevard North most mornings this year and you will hit a stretch wrapped in orange construction fencing. Walk the same route three years ago and you hit fencing too, just a few hundred feet to the south. It is tempting to assume this is one long project that never really ended. It is not. What you are looking at now is Phase 2 of a seawall repair the City of Naples spent the better part of a decade deciding it was even responsible for.
That distinction matters if you use this promenade the way most Park Shore residents do, as a daily route rather than a scenic backdrop. The pace of this work, the size of each segment, and the reason it moves in pieces instead of all at once trace back to a legal question nobody could answer for years: who actually owns the wall holding back Venetian Bay.
A Wall Nobody Would Claim
The seawall running along Gulf Shore Boulevard North stretches roughly 3,200 feet, from the turnaround at the north end of the boulevard down to Venetian Bay Yacht Club South. For decades it sat there quietly deteriorating, and after Hurricane Irma it deteriorated faster. In May 2018, board members from the Gulf Shore Association of Condominiums, the group representing the condo associations along this stretch, went to a Naples City Council meeting and asked a basic question: whose job is it to fix this.
Nobody had a clean answer. The seawall sat within a right-of-way originally dedicated by plat to Collier County and later to the City, and for years it was genuinely unclear whether the City or a private party held the maintenance obligation. That ambiguity took three years of litigation to resolve. On May 21, 2021, the Circuit Court of the 20th Judicial Circuit ruled that the City of Naples owns the seawall and bears the responsibility to maintain it. The City accepted that responsibility the following month.
Once the ownership question was settled, the City still had to figure out how to pay for a repair covering more than half a mile of shoreline. Rather than commit to the entire stretch at once, the City Council chose to fund and permit it piece by piece, starting with the section engineers judged most at risk.
What Phase One Actually Bought
That first section ran roughly 700 feet, beginning at the south end of the Quadrille Condominium and ending at the north property line of the Tropics condominium. In the fall of 2022, City Council approved just over $2 million to rebuild it. Work began on January 11, 2023, with crews tearing out the old parking lot and curbing.
The scope went well beyond patching concrete. The new seawall was built six inches higher than the original to add a buffer against rising water. The sidewalk and curbing were replaced, the parking lot was repaved, and the landscaping along the route was restored. By the time the Gulf Shore Association of Condominiums announced Phase 2 was moving forward on February 25, 2026, it referred to Phase 1 as recently completed.
That is a three-year span for 700 feet of shoreline. Residents who lived through it were not shy about why the wait mattered. Speaking to a local television station back in 2021, Pete Lawyer, president of the Venetian Bay Yacht Club Condominium Association, put the safety stakes plainly.
"There are tripping hazards all over the place."
The math on what remains is worth sitting with before you assume the next phase will move faster.
| Segment | Length | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Phase 1: south end of the Quadrille Condominium to the north property line of the Tropics condominium | Approximately 700 feet | Construction began January 11, 2023; completed ahead of the City's Phase 2 announcement in February 2026 |
| Phase 2: the next segment now moving forward | A portion of the remaining stretch | Approved to proceed as of February 2026; specific boundaries and construction start not yet announced |
| Remaining wall north toward Venetian Bay Yacht Club South | Balance of roughly 2,500 feet | Awaiting future design, permitting and funding |
Council authorized the City's engineering team back in 2021 to develop design, cost, and permitting not just for Phase 1 but for the remaining approximately 2,500 feet. That figure is the real headline here. If Phase 2 and every phase after it follows the same one-segment-at-a-time pace as Phase 1, this is not a project that wraps up next season. It is a project that will define construction along this boulevard for years.
Why Phase Two Is Moving Now
The February 2026 update, written by GSAC board member Stan Karpf, confirmed the City is moving forward with the next segment using the same template as before: seawall, sidewalk, curbing, parking lot, and landscaping all rebuilt together rather than patched separately. That bundling is deliberate. Tearing up the parking lot once to replace the wall, the walkway, and the drainage beneath it in a single pass is more disruptive in the short term but avoids reopening the same stretch of sidewalk two or three more times over the next decade.
What the update did not include was a start date or the exact boundaries of the next segment. Given how Phase 1 unfolded, from council funding approval to shovels in the ground to completion, expect months between the announcement and visible work, and expect the completed segment to run somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 feet rather than the full remaining stretch at once.
The Other Cranes on the Same Boulevard
The City's seawall work is not the only construction changing the feel of a walk along Gulf Shore Boulevard North this year. Two private projects from developer Kolter Urban are underway on the same road. At 3300 Gulf Shore, crews began raising the seawall along the bayfront to current code in the opening weeks of 2026, a phase expected to take about two months, ahead of roughly 400 helical pilings scheduled to start around May 1. Overall construction on that eight-story, 51-residence building is projected to run 20 to 24 months, with completion anticipated in late 2027.
A few blocks away, Kolter Urban is also building Olana, a 12-unit project at 1121 Gulf Shore Boulevard North. Neither project is connected to the City's seawall repair, but both mean equipment, staging, and temporary fencing on the same corridor residents use for the public promenade. If your walk this year feels busier with cranes and barricades than in past seasons, it is not one project, it is three running in parallel on the same half-mile of road.
What This Means for Your Next Walk
None of this should read as a warning to avoid the boulevard. It is a reason to plan around it. Based on how Phase 1 played out, expect the City to fence off one segment at a time rather than close the entire promenade, and expect the affected stretch to be walkable again within roughly a year of ground being broken, even if the announcement-to-groundbreaking gap runs longer. The private construction at 3300 Gulf Shore and Olana follows its own separate schedule and will likely overlap with whatever segment of the City's Phase 2 gets underway next.
The upside sits on the other side of the disruption. Every finished segment leaves the neighborhood with a seawall built six inches higher than what it replaced, new sidewalk and curbing, a repaved lot, and restored landscaping, all engineered with future storm surge and sea level in mind rather than the standards of the 1970s and 80s originals. That is a meaningfully different piece of shoreline infrastructure than what existed here five years ago, built one deliberate stretch at a time because the City chose durability over speed.
If you live along this corridor and want to understand how these projects, current and planned, intersect with property values or long-term ownership decisions in Park Shore, the team at Lickley Group follows this stretch of Gulf Shore Boulevard closely and can walk you through what a well-informed, unhurried conversation about the neighborhood actually looks like.
