Walk the Promenade along North Tamiami Trail on any weekday evening and you'll pass a fenced construction zone between the Van Wezel and the Chidsey Library, right at the midpoint of the walkway. Park officials have already given that space a name: The Plaza. Most people walking past, dog leash in hand or heading to a Sunset Boardwalk chair, will assume it's a new name for a new thing. It isn't. It's an old name, coming back.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should, and it's the reason this fall's opening at The Bay is worth paying attention to even if you've already logged a dozen visits there this year.
A plaza that predates the park by 58 years
In April 1964, then-Sarasota mayor Herschel Mayo stood on this same patch of ground and dedicated it Plaza de Santo Domingo, honoring the city's sister-city relationship with Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic. Mayo called it, at the time, the hub of the city's civic life. Then the land spent the next several decades as parking.
When The Bay Park Conservancy reveals the completed Town Square feature along Van Wezel Way this October, between the auditorium and the newly restored Chidsey Library, it won't be introducing a brand name. Diana Shaheen, COO of The Bay, told city commissioners this spring that in recognition of Mayo's 1964 dedication, the space will simply be called The Plaza. Sixty-two years after a mayor called it the hub of civic life, the city is trying to make that literally true again.
That's a different kind of project than most people assume The Bay is running. It isn't inventing a gathering space from nothing. It's restoring one that already had a name, a purpose, and a mayor's blessing before it became a surface lot.
What actually finishes, and when
The Bay's remaining buildout is being tracked in phases with real completion targets, not vague timelines:
| Feature | Target completion |
|---|---|
| The Plaza / Town Square, Van Wezel Way | October 2026 |
| Municipal Auditorium renovation, resilient shoreline | February 2027 |
| Centennial Park expansion | July 2027 |
| Waterfront restaurant, south boat basin | September 2027 |
The restaurant slot is already spoken for. Venice Pier Group, the operator behind Sharky's On The Pier and Fins at Sharky's in Venice, has a partnership in place to build and run a restaurant on the former U.S. Coast Guard station site at the edge of the boat basin. Construction hasn't started. The site at the edge of the boat basin sits empty right now, with groundbreaking expected next year. But the deal is done, which tells you something about how this project gets built: agreements first, concrete later, in an order that would feel backward almost anywhere else.
The programming didn't wait for the phases to finish
While all of that construction sits behind fencing, the finished ten acres from Phase 1 have been running a full weekly calendar for going on four years. None of it requires the Plaza to open first:
- Sundays at The Bay brings live local acts, recent bookings have included Speak Easy and Mwiza, to the Oval stage most weekends
- Cinema at The Bay runs free outdoor movie nights, past titles have ranged from The Blind Side to family fare like The Secret Life of Pets 2
- Dance at The Bay hosts Zumba sessions led by Yaël Campbell
- The Nest Café serves coffee and food daily along the water, open for breakfast through casual lunch
- Kayak and paddleboard rentals launch from the park most days weather allows
- Ibis Playground and the shallow bay-edge area stay busy with families in the after-school and weekend hours
- Astronomy nights and a Florida Arbor Day microforest event have both run on Common Ground at The Bay this year
This is the part of The Bay that already functions as it was designed to, regardless of what's happening on the other side of the fence.
The number that makes the fence line make sense
As of mid-May 2026, The Bay's people counters had logged 1.15 million visits since the park's first ten-acre phase opened in October 2022. Sarasota Mayor Debbie Trice called that an extraordinary figure for a city with a population of roughly 58,000. Run the arithmetic and it works out to about 20 visits for every person living within city limits, over a span of three and a half years, at a park that still isn't half finished.
That last part is worth sitting with. The Bay's current footprint of just over ten completed acres from Phase 1 is drawing visit counts most cities would be thrilled to see from a fully built-out regional park. Out of 53 total planned acres, more than half still sits under construction or on the drawing board between Phase 2's final pieces this fall and Phase 3's work at Centennial Park. The math on visits per acre only gets more interesting as the rest of the park comes online.
None of that growth is being paid for out of a resident's pocket at the register. The funding model splits the roughly $200 million project between philanthropy through the Conservancy and a tax increment financing district drawn from the rising assessed value of downtown property since 2019. County commissioners noted this spring that redevelopment at the Quay and in the Rosemary District has already pushed revenue projections for that TIF district to nearly double the original estimate made when it was created in 2020. The park is, in a very literal sense, being paid for by the growth happening around it.
What this fall actually changes for someone who already lives here
If you already treat The Bay as a regular stop, this fall's opening won't hand you a new amenity so much as a finished center of gravity. Right now, the Promenade functions as a walkway between the Blue Pagoda, the Chidsey Library, and the Municipal Auditorium. Once The Plaza opens in October, that same 1,000-foot stretch, lined with 20-foot Royal Palms, gets a destination at its midpoint instead of just a path through. That's the difference between a corridor and a square, and it's the difference Mayo's 1964 dedication was describing before the land ever became a parking lot.
The Chidsey Library itself picked up a 2026 AIA Florida Design Honor Award for its rehabilitation this year, which is a smaller signal of the same pattern: the buildings framing this stretch of bayfront are being restored to what they were meant to be, not replaced with something unrecognizable.
None of this requires waiting until October to notice. The fenced-off construction zone with a name already attached to it is visible right now to anyone walking the Promenade on a Tuesday evening. Most of the city just hasn't connected that name to a mayor's speech from 1964 yet.
If you're weighing what a stretch of downtown bayfront with this kind of civic investment and usage means for property values nearby, or you're simply curious what your own home downtown might be worth as The Bay's buildout continues, Shane Lewis can walk you through it. Start with a free instant home valuation and get a clear, no-pressure read on where things stand.
