For almost two years, the walk down Pine Avenue has ended the same way: at a chain-link fence, with the pilings of the old walkway sticking up out of Tampa Bay like something half-finished. If you live on this end of the island, you know the spot. You've probably stood at that fence more than once, coffee in hand, waiting for the fence to come down.
It's finally about to. City officials are targeting a November reopening for the Anna Maria City Pier, a structure that's been part of daily life here since 1911. But the version coming back isn't a simple restoration. The building at the end has a new name, a new ownership group, and one long-time tenant that isn't returning at all. If you're planning your first walk back out to the T-end, it helps to know what you're actually walking into.
What Broke, and Why It Took Two Years to Fix
The pier has been rebuilt before. Hurricane Irma tore through it in 2017, and the city replaced the damaged sections, reopening in 2020. This time was worse. Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit in the fall of 2024 and took out an estimated 400 to 500 feet of the walkway connecting the shore to the T-end buildings. Dean Jones, the city's public works manager, described finding pieces of the structure a quarter to a third of a mile away. "There were pillars that had been pulled out. The seabed was just sucked out, and there was debris everywhere," he told SNN in August.
The rebuild has been deliberately overbuilt. Holmes Beach city commissioner Carol Whitmore said the new pilings have been driven roughly 50 feet deeper than the ones used in the 2020 reconstruction. "The one is going to stay," she told MySuncoast. Whether that holds through the next storm season is something no one can promise, but the engineering decision tells you the city isn't planning to do this a third time.
The walkway itself was largely finished by early summer. What's held up the full reopening is the T-end buildings, which sat with no power, water, or utilities for most of the closure and needed a separate remediation project before anyone could move back in. That work pushed the timeline from the "late summer" estimates you may have read earlier this year to the November date officials are now using.
The Name on the Door Changed. Seymour Remains
The restaurant returning to the pier isn't the same business that closed in 2024, at least not on paper. The City Pier Grill and Bait Shop is being replaced by a new concept called PIERadise, and the city commission approved a five-year lease for it in June. But the person quoted most often in coverage of the reopening, Brian Seymour, is the same person who ran the grill before the storms. "We're gonna be opening PIERadise out there on the pier," he told MySuncoast when the lease was announced.
What's changed is who Seymour is in business with. His original partners in the pier grill, Victor Mattay and Nick Graham, have moved on. In their place are Ben Sato and Jason Sato, and their names will be familiar if you spend any time on Pine Avenue. Jason co-owns Sato Real Estate. Ben owns gRub Tropical BBQ, also on Pine Avenue, and has a second project already lined up: a restaurant called Mingo's, planned for 2027 in the former Wells Fargo bank building in Holmes Beach, a space being redeveloped by Jake Spooner. Seymour himself still owns the Anna Maria General Store on Pine Avenue, a short walk from the pier.
That overlap matters if you're trying to understand how this end of the island is rebuilding. It isn't a national operator or an outside investment group taking over prime waterfront real estate. It's three people who already run businesses within a few blocks of each other, expanding their footprint into the pier and into Holmes Beach at the same time. If you've wondered why the same faces keep showing up behind the counter at different addresses on this stretch of the island, this is a fairly direct answer.
The new lease also comes with real numbers attached. GSM Partners, the entity operating PIERadise, will pay $12,000 a month in base rent plus utilities and taxes, with annual increases tied to the Consumer Price Index and capped at 3 percent. That's a different arrangement than the one Seymour described publicly in 2025, when he told commissioners he'd been paying $400 per square foot for the pier space and had lost an average of 104 days a year to weather closures in his first four years there, on top of losing the entire fifth year to hurricane damage. Whatever the new terms look like in practice, they were negotiated by someone who has already lived through what it costs to run a business on a structure that sits directly over open water.
What's Not Coming Back
One tenant won't be returning at all. Mote Marine Laboratory had operated an outreach center in the larger of the two T-end buildings, the space PIERadise is now taking over. The city commission voted in January to end that lease. It's a quiet change, and probably not one that affects your Saturday morning walk much, but it does mean the T-end shifts fully toward food, drink, and fishing rather than splitting space with a marine science outreach program. If you'd gotten used to popping into the Mote center after a walk to the end, that stop is gone.
What is staying: the bait and tackle counter, family-friendly grill service, and the open public seating at the T-end. Mayor Mark Short has said that seating, aside from the PIERadise bar seats, will remain available to anyone walking out to the end, customer or not, a detail worth knowing if your routine has always been to walk to the end and just look at the water rather than order food. That public access will eventually extend to Gulf Islands Ferry passengers too, once ferry service to the City Pier resumes, which the city expects sometime in 2027 or 2028.
What the Closure Actually Cost the Block
If you needed proof that this pier is more than a photo backdrop, you only had to talk to the businesses near it over the past two years. Morgan Bryant, who owns Cool Beans A.M.I. directly across from the pier entrance, has felt the absence of both the ferry traffic and the daily foot traffic the pier used to generate. "It's like the heartbeat of our community," she told SNN of the pier this August.
A few doors down, Taylor DeLuca, who manages Two Scoops Ice Cream, described to SNN what a normal day used to look like before the storms hit: "Everyone comes down Pine Avenue and comes and gets ice cream and walks the city pier." That sentence is basically a description of an entire category of daily life on this end of the island, one that's been missing since October 2024. Both business owners have said the slowdown has been noticeable, not catastrophic, but real.
What November Actually Means
When the fence finally comes down, what you'll be walking into is a rebuilt structure engineered to survive harder storms, run by a small, overlapping group of Pine Avenue business owners who are also opening a second restaurant in Holmes Beach next year. The marine science center is gone. The bait shop, the fishing, the sunrise coffee walk to the end, and the free public bay views are staying. Seymour told MySuncoast the new layout will let PIERadise "separate the bar area from the kitchen and provide more options for our guests," which sounds like a modest operational upgrade but should mean shorter waits and more actual seating once the crowds test it out.
If you've missed the walk, you'll get it back close to how you remember it, run by people who never really left the neighborhood.
If watching Pine Avenue rebuild has you thinking more seriously about property on this end of the island, whether that's a home you already own or one you've been eyeing from a distance, Andrea Miller has spent years watching these blocks change house by house and lease by lease. Reach out to book an appointment when you're ready to talk through what any of it means for you.
