Michael Melnick is hanging a new sign this month at 22 N. Boulevard of the Presidents, on the same stretch of St. Armands Circle where his family has sold fine jewelry for more than 50 years. Armel Jewelers, a brand his parents Solomon and Arlene launched in New York in 1937 before finding a storefront under construction on the Circle in the 1960s, is holding its grand reopening in mid-September. Getting there took nearly two years. When Helene and Milton hit in 2024, the shop took on four and a half feet of standing water. "They basically had to tear out everything," Melnick told a reporter this month. The display cases are in now, the pieces are falling into place, and the sign is shining again over Boulevard of the Presidents.
Melnick's story reads like a lot of others on the Circle right now. What it doesn't tell you is that the storefronts came back on a completely different clock than the system meant to keep them dry.
The Comeback You Can Actually Walk Into
If you've been circling back to St. Armands every few months since the storms, the pace of change has been steady enough that it's easy to lose track of who's new and who's returning. Laid out chronologically, the last year looks like this:
- September 2025: Tommy Bahama and Kilwin's Chocolate and Ice Cream Shop both held grand reopenings after storm damage.
- November 2025: Le Shop, a coffee bar and wine market, opened at 28 S. Boulevard of the Presidents.
- January 1, 2026: Acadia Jewels, a Bar Harbor, Maine jeweler, opened its first Florida location in the same building.
- Early January 2026: Nōnnō Umberto, the rebrand of the longtime Le Colonne, reopened as an Italian seafood and steakhouse at 22 S. Boulevard of the Presidents. Co-owner Amber Mayner said the soft opening served more than 250 people the first night and grew to 800 over the first week.
- January 14, 2026: The Sarasota Style, a lifestyle and clothing brand, held its ribbon-cutting at 410 St. Armands Circle.
- April 2026: The building at 28 S. Boulevard of the Presidents reached full occupancy when Chocolate Emporium, a second location for the Anna Maria Island chocolatier, signed the last lease.
- June 2026: St. Armands Jewelers took over the former Jewelry by Cole space at 7 N. Boulevard of the Presidents under new owner Mia Tohar Eylon, and Chocolate Emporium held its soft opening.
- September 2026: Armel Jewelers reopens.
That's a real, documented run of businesses getting back on their feet, and it's the version of the story most people are telling right now. It's also only half the picture. Because while landlords and small business owners were signing leases and hanging signs, the public system responsible for keeping the next storm out of those same storefronts was still working through paperwork.
The Gap Nobody's Reopening Announcement Mentions
As of mid-January 2026, fifteen months after Milton, roughly 90 of the Circle's 130 street-level business spaces were open, according to Your Observer's reporting at the time. That means about 40 spaces were still dark well over a year after the storm, even as the reopening wave above was already underway. St. Armands Residents Association president Chris Goglia described a similar pattern in the residential areas, where roughly a quarter of homes were still for sale, demolished, or sitting vacant a year after Milton.
The retail comeback has narrowed that gap since January, and it will keep narrowing as more leases like Armel's get signed. But the pace of storefronts reopening has consistently run ahead of the pace of the public fix underneath them, and the funding timeline explains why.
The county earmarked $13.5 million for St. Armands flood mitigation in December 2025, paired with $479,000 from the city of Sarasota. That was the plan. The actual budget appropriation that lets the county spend it didn't clear the Sarasota County Commission until August 26, 2026, nearly two years after Milton made landfall, and commissioners approved it without discussion, according to Business Observer's coverage of that meeting. The money is real. Pump station upgrades, tide check valves, underground storage, permeable pavement, and removable flood barriers are all in the scope. What's real too is the timeline: at the second St. Armands visioning session in April 2026, Sarasota County stormwater official Hannay Brechue told attendees that county-funded storm resilience work at St. Armands may not begin until 2029, according to Your Observer.
Read those two dates side by side. The chocolate shop that opened in June and the jeweler reopening this month are both operating under the same drainage system that failed during Helene and Milton, and that system's fix is still three years from breaking ground at the earliest.
Shore Is the One Building Testing What a Real Fix Costs
If you want to see what actually flood-resistant construction looks like on the Circle, watch the corner at 24 and 28 N. Boulevard of the Presidents, where Shore restaurant used to sit before both hurricanes hit it twice. Owner Tom Leonard shut it down and leased his other Circle building to Tommy Bahama instead. In June 2026, the Kauffman Shore Properties partnership, Leonard alongside Mark and Mindy Kauffman, filed a site plan for a three-story mixed-use rebuild on the site, and the project is designed around flood-proof glass on the ground floor, a 20-inch structural slab, and a residential shell on top to sidestep FEMA's 50% rule that would otherwise force the entire structure to be elevated.
It's a serious engineering commitment, and it's also slow. If the city's approval process goes as hoped, Your Observer reported in July, St. Armands "may be re-Shore-d by early 2028." That's a four-year gap between the storm that closed the restaurant and the day it might reopen, for a project designed specifically to survive the next one. Set against the six-to-nine month runway most of the jewelry and chocolate shops needed to reopen, it's the clearest evidence on the Circle right now that resilient construction and quick reopening are two different projects running on two different clocks.
The Fight Over What the Circle Becomes
The debate over how far to take that resilience push is still unsettled, and it played out in public at two visioning sessions the city held at Mote Marine's Keating Marine Education Center this year, the first on February 26 with roughly 160 participants generating 61 ideas, the second on April 13 to present results. When attendees ranked their top three concerns, traffic came out ahead at 27.86%, followed by redevelopment of the commercial district at 24.59%, with flooding and preserving the Circle's boutique character tied at 18.03% each. Comments collected at the tables leaned hard toward preservation: no high-rises, maintain the two-story scale, no residential in the Circle itself.
That sentiment collided directly with a proposal from Sarasota urban planner Philip DiMaria, who argued in a public presentation that the only way to truly flood-proof the Circle is to raise sidewalks 2 to 3 feet and base flood elevations on buildings by 7 to 8 feet, and to free up space for that work by loosening the zoning rule that requires every shop to have on-site parking. His evidence: the city's 521-space parking garage, which opened in 2019, saw occupancy drop from 66% in 2024 to 25% in 2025. Rachel Burns, executive director of the St. Armands Circle Association, pushed back on his read of the parking and zoning picture during the same event. Nobody at either session settled the argument, and the corridor's own public realm upgrades, sidewalks, crosswalks, drainage, remain on hold because of funding constraints.
What This Looks Like If You're Back on the Circle This Fall
None of this means St. Armands feels unfinished when you're actually there. The trolley connecting downtown to the Circle and Lido Beach has carried close to a million rides, according to city commissioner Liz Alpert's count earlier this year, and most of the storefronts you'll pass this month are open, staffed, and doing business. Armel's grand opening this month is worth stopping for if you've missed the jewelry counter that's been part of the Circle since before most current residents moved here. Chocolate Emporium and Le Shop are both worth a look if you haven't been in the building at 28 S. Boulevard of the Presidents since before the storms, since it's now fully leased for the first time since 2024.
What's useful to hold onto is the difference between what you can see and what's still catching up behind it. The Circle's tenant mix has mostly healed. Its flood infrastructure is only now getting its budget approved, with construction still years out by the county's own estimate. Both things are true walking around St. Armands this September, and only one of them shows up on a storefront sign.
If you're watching how a block like St. Armands rebuilds, tenant by tenant and pump station by pump station, and want a read on what that means for property nearby, Adnan Dedic has been tracking the Circle's recovery as closely as its comps. Let's Connect.
