The Bay Feels Finished. It Isn't Even Half Built.

Ask anyone who walks their dog along the boardwalk at sunset, and they will tell you The Bay is Sarasota's park now. It has the ibis playground, the mangrove kayak launch, the sunset boardwalk, and this summer it had World Cup watch parties that drew crowds normally reserved for a Sarasota Paradise gameday. By the time the Bay Park Conservancy reported to the City Commission in May that the park had logged 1.15 million visits since its October 2022 opening, in a city of roughly 58,000 people, the number sounded like proof of a finished project doing exactly what it was built to do.

It isn't finished. Phase 2, the $65 million buildout of the park's shoreline and cultural district, is only now wrapping up. Phase 3 planning just started this year. The Bay Park Conservancy's own timeline puts full completion at the end of 2029, three years from now, on a 53-acre site that today has delivered maybe half its acreage and none of its restaurants. The gap between how used the park already feels and how unfinished it actually is turns out to be the most useful thing a Sarasota resident can understand about it this fall, because two very different things are about to happen on the same stretch of waterfront: one long-promised piece opens in a matter of weeks, and another piece everyone keeps asking about is still more than a year out.

What Actually Opens This October

The centerpiece arriving this fall doesn't have a flashy new name. It has an old one. The shaded gathering space going in along Van Wezel Way, between the Chidsey Library and the Municipal Auditorium, will be called simply The Plaza when it opens in October. That plain name is a callback: in April 1964, then-mayor Herschel Mayo dedicated that same patch of ground as Plaza de Santo Domingo, recognizing Sarasota's sister-city relationship with the Dominican Republic capital, and described it at the time as the hub of the city's civic life. Bay Park Conservancy chief operating officer Diana Shaheen brought that history back to the City Commission this year when explaining the naming choice, effectively restoring a designation most current residents have never heard, on a site most of them assumed was just a parking median until recently.

Practically, The Plaza means a shaded structure built for events, rentals, and informal gathering, sitting at the midpoint of the Promenade that opened in 2025 and already connects the Blue Pagoda, the Chidsey Library, and the Municipal Auditorium. Alongside it, the Resilient Shoreline project is converting roughly a mile of bayfront on the park's western edge into rain gardens and natural filtration built to handle stormwater before it reaches Sarasota Bay, a response in part to how much better that stretch held up during the string of storms that hit the region in 2024 compared to the older, hardened waterfront running from the Van Wezel to the 10th Street canal.

The Restaurant Is Real. The Timeline Isn't Short.

If you have wondered why a park with this much foot traffic still runs on food trucks and a concessions pavilion, the answer is that the actual restaurant is still under design. The Bay Park Conservancy has selected Venice Pier Group, the family operation behind Sharky's on the Pier and its more upscale sibling Fins at Sharky's, to run the park's first sit-down restaurant at the site of the former U.S. Coast Guard station on the edge of the boat basin. Mike Pachota founded Sharky's in 1987 after converting a run-down beach concession stand at the base of the Venice Fishing Pier into a 78-seat restaurant that has since become a Venice landmark, and the same family has been running The Bay's concession stands since the park opened, which is part of why the Conservancy went with them.

The building itself is being designed by the Sarasota firm Sweet Sparkman, built on 12-foot pylons for flood resilience, with roughly 5,000 square feet under roof, fewer than 220 indoor seats and 100 outdoor seats. AG Lafley, the Conservancy's founding CEO, has compared the eventual scale to Longboat Key's Dry Dock Waterfront Grill. Construction is expected to run through 2027, with an opening targeted for that fall, over a year from now. Two more restaurants are planned for Phase 3, with locations still being finalized within the eight acres of parking lot that will eventually convert to green space with elevated grading for flood protection. None of that is close. If you are picturing a waterfront dinner reservation at The Bay this year or even next spring, that reservation does not exist yet.

Here is roughly how the next several years line up, based on the timelines the Conservancy and the city have laid out publicly:

The Money Is Still Catching Up to the Momentum

The park's popularity has outpaced its funding in one specific way worth understanding if you follow local budget news. On August 6, the Gulf Coast Community Foundation announced a new $2 million challenge match to help finish the park, seeded by a $1 million foundation grant that anonymous donors then matched. Gifts made through June 30, 2027 get matched dollar for dollar, with a goal of raising $4 million toward completing and sustaining the park. That campaign exists because the usual funding formula, split roughly 50 percent philanthropy through the Conservancy and 50 percent public dollars split between city and county tax increment financing, has hit a slower patch on the public side. Sarasota County commissioners this year declined to commit to their full share of a bond needed for Phase 3 work at Centennial Park, instead approving just the first year's debt service payment of $282,000 for the coming fiscal year, a cautious step rather than a full commitment, according to Conservancy leadership.

None of this threatens what opens this fall. The Plaza and the Resilient Shoreline are fully funded and already under construction. It does mean the timeline for the restaurants beyond the first one, and for the boat launch and parking improvements planned for Phase 3, depends partly on how that funding picture resolves over the next year.

Residents Are Already Treating an Unfinished Park Like a Finished One

The clearest evidence that the gap between perception and completion doesn't matter much to daily life showed up this summer. The Bay partnered with Sarasota Paradise, the city's USL League One soccer club, on a free World Cup watch party series that ran from a June 14 kickoff festival through the tournament final on July 19. That opening event, according to Sarasota Paradise's own recap, was the largest gathering the young club had hosted outside of its own game days, drawing enough of a crowd for a 3v3 community tournament with 200 participants, autograph sessions, and a Q&A with assistant coach Trevor Sinclair, a former England international, alongside head coach Mika Elovaara. Sinclair told a local TV crew that the Sarasota weather beat what he was used to in Manchester, which is the kind of quote that only works because people actually showed up to hear it.

That is the real takeaway for anyone who already treats The Bay as part of their week. The park does not need three restaurants and a finished Phase 3 to function as the place where Sarasota gathers. It has already been doing that for two years on a fraction of its eventual footprint. What changes this fall is that one more piece of that footprint, with a genuinely old name attached to it, finally opens for good.

If you're weighing whether Sarasota's downtown waterfront is heading in a direction that fits how you want to live, keeping an eye on what actually opens here, not just what gets announced, is a useful habit. Adnan Dedic works this market every day and is always glad to talk through what a given stretch of Sarasota, from The Bay to the barrier islands, looks like up close. Let's Connect.