For close to a decade, the block bounded by Third Street South, Broad Avenue, and Gordon Drive was a construction site behind a plywood wall. This summer it is a hotel courtyard with a working bakery, a rooftop pool, and a half-finished corner where a much-anticipated steakhouse was supposed to open and now might not. If you live within walking distance of Third and Broad, the shape of your evening walk has changed more in the last sixty days than it has in the last ten years.
The change has a date. The first building of the Olde Naples Hotel and its Annie's Bistro, Bar & Bakery opened to the public May 15, with the balance of the 109-room property phasing in through the summer. The redevelopment sits on the former site of The Plaza on Third Street, a shopping center that bordered Third Street South, Broad Avenue and Gordon Drive a couple of blocks from the Gulf. The new hotel, designed by Hart Howerton for the Delray Beach-based Opal Collection, replaces that plaza with something structurally different: a mid-block main entrance on Broad Avenue, a landscaped courtyard cutting through to Third, and ground-floor retail bays wrapping the street edge.
What's usable on the block right now
Because the project is opening in phases, it helps to be specific about what a resident can actually walk into this month versus what is still fenced off.
- Annie's Bistro, Bar & Bakery. Open. Immediately east of the lobby, Annie's offers an expansive 222-seat local dining spot that already has been busy and well-received for breakfast, lunch, dinner and cocktails, with an early start of espresso and house-made pastries moving into a more refined but approachable American menu by evening.
- The rooftop pool. Open for hotel guests, not for the public.
- The lobby retail behind the front desk. Open, accessible from steps at Broad and Gordon Drive.
- The courtyard "living room" and the Third Street retail entrance. Not yet. An unfinished entrance off Third Street will provide public access to more retail and the courtyard, which also will lead to Annie's on the right once construction is completed.
- The spa and the balance of the 109 rooms. The courtyard is coming soon and the spa will be opening later this summer, and the full 109-room launch is planned this summer.
- The corner at Third and Broad. Still empty. See below.
The single most useful piece of that list for a resident is Annie's. Third Street South has never had a serious bakery-plus-bar-plus-restaurant that runs one continuous service from espresso in the morning through cocktails at night. Tony's Off Third handles the morning coffee-and-pastry ritual. Campiello and Sea Salt and Ridgway Bar & Grill handle the evening. Annie's is trying to be the connective tissue between those parts of the day, and with 222 seats and a lobby address it has the room to do it. The murals inside are by local artist Janine Wesselmann, which is worth noting only because it is the sort of detail that tells you the operator understood which touches the neighborhood would actually register.
The corner that didn't open
Anyone who has watched the fence come down expected the corner of Third Street South and Broad Avenue to be a restaurant. It was supposed to be JoJo's Bar, a high-end Italian-American steakhouse from Rick Doody, co-creator of the Bravo Brio Restaurant Group. Two weeks before the hotel's soft opening, that plan came apart.
On the opening day of Olde Naples Hotel, which wraps around two sides of the Olde Naples Building, restaurateur Rick Doody was shocked to learn during a telephone call with Chris Camalier that the Camalier family — owners of both the hotel and restaurant properties — wants to go in a different direction with the restaurant proposed on the corner of Third Street South and Broad Avenue in downtown Naples. Doody had signed the lease four years earlier. The lease agreement was always contingent on obtaining patio seating because he doesn't think the restaurant can compete in Naples without it, and he believes his lease has a one-year grace period from the time City Council approved the outdoor dining in December.
His read of the situation, in his own words: "We think we have rights under this lease and we're going to certainly enforce our rights. It's not my style to be in legal battles, but I think we still want to open a restaurant down there."
For a resident, the practical read is this. The corner building the Camaliers have owned for more than forty years sits inside the same block as the new hotel, and whether it opens as JoJo's, as something else, or as nothing for another season will meaningfully shape how the block feels at dinner. The hotel and Annie's on their own are enough to bring activity back to Broad Avenue. A dark corner at Third and Broad is enough to keep it feeling half-finished. Both outcomes are on the table right now.
What the rest of the summer actually looks like
The hotel news has absorbed most of the neighborhood conversation, but the rhythms that make Third Street South worth walking to in July are the same ones that have always been there, and a few of them are easier to catch when the season crowds are gone.
The Saturday market moves for the summer. The summer farmers market runs weekly in the Neapolitan parking lot behind Tommy Bahama restaurant, which for anyone who has only done the market in season is a different experience than the covered on-street version. Smaller footprint, shorter lines, mostly locals. The city calendar has it running Saturdays 7:30 to 11:30 a.m.
Evening music continues on Third through the low season. The Club Room at Campiello at 1177 Third Street South is running live-music evenings with no cover, and the original Tommy Bahama at the corner still has nightly music on its upstairs bar, later on Fridays and Saturdays. Neither of these is a discovery. What is worth noting is that a resident who spends July on Third Street can now do a full evening on this block without ever crossing Fifth: coffee and a pastry at Annie's in the morning, market on Saturday, dinner at Campiello or Sea Salt, a drink at Annie's bar or the Club Room after. That sequence did not exist on this block a year ago.
Two other pieces of context worth carrying with you as you use the block this summer. The first is that the Camalier decision on the corner will play out in public over the next few months, and whichever way it lands, it will be the biggest single variable in how Third Street South's south end feels heading into season. The second is that the beach anchor at the end of the block is itself under construction. The Naples Pier is closed for a rebuild that began in earnest this year, with an $23.5 million construction contract and an expected build time of about 18 months once work commences, meaning a new pier could open by mid-2027. That timeline matters for how you think about Third Street this summer and next: the block is gaining a hotel and a bakery just as the pier at its western terminus is off-limits. The walk to the water is still short. The reward at the end of it is temporarily a construction viewing platform rather than a fishing pier.
None of this is the version of Old Naples that gets photographed for the visitor guides. It is the version that residents actually inhabit in July, when the corner you have watched for a decade finally has a working restaurant behind glass doors and the corner ten feet away is still a question mark. Worth walking the block this month to see for yourself which parts are yours to use now, and which are still promises.
If you are thinking through what any of this means for a property you own on or near Third Street South, or you are trying to read the block from out of state, Eileen Komanecky tracks this micro-market week by week. Let's Connect.
