Walk down Van Wezel Way this October and you'll find a finished gathering space between the Chidsey Library and the Municipal Auditorium, shaded by a large canopy structure, built for concerts and markets and the kind of loitering that makes a park feel used. The Bay Park Conservancy has been calling it the Town Square for two years of planning documents. When it opens, the sign will say something else: The Plaza.
That's not a rebrand for marketing's sake. It's a name Sarasota already gave this ground in 1964, and the story behind it explains more about how The Bay actually gets built than any construction update could.
The Name Nobody Had to Invent
In April 1964, then-mayor Herschel Mayo stood roughly where the new shade structure now sits and dedicated the spot as Plaza de Santo Domingo, honoring Sarasota's sister-city relationship with the Dominican capital. At the time, he called it the very hub of our civic life. Bay Park Conservancy chief operating officer Diana Shaheen brought that history back to city commissioners on May 18, 2026, and the Conservancy chose to keep it simple: the new feature will be called The Plaza, a direct nod to that 60-year-old dedication rather than a fresh name dreamed up for a ribbon cutting.
The Plaza sits at the midpoint of the Promenade, a 1,000-foot, 16-foot-wide walkway lined with 20-foot royal palms that opened in 2025 and now links three landmarks that predate The Bay entirely: the Blue Pagoda, the Chidsey Library, and the Municipal Auditorium. The park isn't inventing a new civic center from scratch. It's stitching a walking path between buildings that were already there and giving the space between them a name Sarasota already had on record.
Two Waterfront Parks, One Easy Mix-Up
If your mental picture of downtown Sarasota's bayfront still includes the shipwreck-themed playground, the splash pad, and O'Leary's Tiki Bar, you're thinking of Bayfront Park, a separate city park at 5 Bayfront Drive near Marina Jack. That park is having its own 2026 construction moment. In May, the Sarasota City Commission approved a contract with Earth Tech Enterprises to demolish and rebuild roughly 1,500 linear feet of the marina's seawall, raising the bulkhead cap to four feet above sea level as part of a citywide resilience push. Earth Tech was the low bidder among eight contractors, and construction runs 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekends.
The Bay is the newer, larger project just to the north, a 53-acre site that runs from roughly Bayfront's edge past the Van Wezel toward Hog Creek. Both parks are doing flood-hardening work on overlapping timelines this year, which is exactly the kind of detail that gets two civic projects tangled together in casual conversation even though they're run by different agencies with different budgets.
What Finishes at The Bay This Year
Inside The Bay itself, Phase 2 carries a $65 million price tag, split between a $48 million city bond backed by tax increment financing and $17 million from grants and private sources. Two pieces of that scope are landing in 2026 alongside The Plaza: the Resilient Shoreline, which converts about a mile of bayfront along the park's western edge into a living shoreline designed to absorb storm surge, and the added green space, walking paths, and stormwater ponds meant to improve water quality flowing into Sarasota Bay.
Not every Phase 2 idea made it to construction. The Sunset Pier, once planned as part of this same phase, is on hold because of cost and timing. It's a reminder that even a fully funded phase gets edited on the way to groundbreaking.
The Restaurant Bay Regulars Have Been Asking About
For years, the single most common complaint about The Bay has been that a park built around sunset views had nowhere to sit down and eat one. That changes with the park's first restaurant, planned for the Canal District at the former U.S. Coast Guard station site, alongside the Sarasota boat canal and within view of the boat basin at Centennial Park.
The Bay Park Conservancy selected Venice Pier Group as the operator, the same family-run company behind Sharky's on the Pier and the adjacent Fins at Sharky's in Venice, along with the concessions at Siesta Beach Pavilion. Sarasota firm Sweet Sparkman Architecture designed the building in a Sarasota Modern style, roughly 5,000 square feet, with fewer than 220 indoor seats and 100 outdoor seats, built on 12-foot pylons for flood resilience. Construction is expected to wrap in fall 2027, with Conservancy leadership pointing to September 2027 as the working target. Two more restaurants are planned for a later phase, sited within an 8-acre parking lot that's being converted largely to green space with graduated elevations for flood protection.
The Number That Explains the Pace
None of this construction is happening in a vacuum. When Bay Park Conservancy leadership briefed the City Commission on May 18, 2026 on the plan to finish the park by 2029, they shared attendance numbers that Mayor Debbie Trice called extraordinary for a municipal park in a city with a population of roughly 58,000. The full build-out is projected at $200 million, funded through a formula that's unusual for a city park: 50 percent philanthropy through the Bay Park Conservancy, 25 percent from the city, and 25 percent from the county, with the public share drawn from property tax revenue generated by rising real estate values inside a downtown tax increment financing district established in fiscal year 2020.
That district was originally projected to generate about $190 million over its 30-year life. By fiscal year 2026, rapid redevelopment at The Quay and in the Rosemary District had nearly doubled those projections. In plain terms, the park is partly funding itself: the more downtown property values rise near The Bay, the more tax revenue flows into the district that pays for the park's next phase.
Why the County Just Got Cautious
That funding loop is also the reason Phase 3, including the second Performing Arts Center and the two additional restaurants, isn't a sure thing yet. On April 21, 2026, Bay Park Conservancy founding CEO A.G. Lafley asked the Sarasota County Commission to release its usual share of TIF funds for the next round of work, this time covering the county's 25 percent commitment toward a related bond for Centennial Park. Instead of committing to the full share, commissioners approved only the first year's debt service payment of $282,000 in the county's fiscal year 2027 budget. Commissioner Teresa Mast, who voted for the smaller commitment, said the project itself wasn't the issue. The timing was.
That timing concern traces back to Tallahassee. As of this spring, no special legislative session had been scheduled to finalize the shape of Florida's property tax reform, and it remained unclear whether a statewide referendum on property tax relief would appear on the November ballot. If it does and voters approve some form of relief, county revenue could take a hit with no clear replacement identified, which would likely push Sarasota County to redirect its share of The Bay's TIF revenue toward its general fund rather than the park's build-out. Conservancy leadership is still aiming to finish the entire 53-acre park by the end of 2029, but that date assumes the funding formula holds through a fall that also happens to include a statewide tax vote.
What This Means for a Fall Walk Through The Bay
Everything landing this year, The Plaza, the Resilient Shoreline, the restaurant's construction progress, is already paid for and moving regardless of what happens in November. What comes after Phase 2 is the part worth watching. If you're the kind of Sarasota resident who tracks The Bay the way others track a favorite sports team's season, this fall gives you two things to watch at once: a finished plaza with a name older than most of the park around it, and a funding question in Tallahassee that will quietly decide how fast the rest of it gets built.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home search in downtown Sarasota or the neighborhoods around it, the team at Stone & Coast Realty Group follows these projects closely and is always glad to talk through what's changing block by block.
