"You have to tough it out before you can enjoy it."
That's Terry Persaud, who is building the Sunset Tropical Resort on the old PierSide Grill and Famous Blowfish Bar property, standing a few feet from where the Fort Myers Beach Pier used to sit. He said it at the groundbreaking ceremony in August, with a makeshift bar playing dance music behind him on a lot where Dairy Queen and the Pier Peddler once stood. He was talking about the year of construction ahead. But he could just as easily have been describing this whole fall on the island, because two things are happening on Fort Myers Beach at the same time for the first time since Hurricane Ian, and most residents have only been braced for one of them.
The pier is finally under construction. That part everyone expected eventually. What fewer people have clocked is that the island's event calendar is also fuller this September than it has been in four years, and the free tram that normally soaks up event-weekend traffic isn't running. Construction season and comeback season landed on the same six weeks. Here is what that actually means if you live here.
What's Actually Closed Right Now
The Army Corps of Engineers permit that had been holding up the pier project since last year finally came through in July. Lee County commissioners moved fast after that, awarding the construction contract to RJ Gorman Contracting LLC, a Panama City firm whose $11.7 million bid came in $4.2 million below the next competitor. The groundbreaking followed in August, and the area around the old pier and Lynn Hall Memorial Park is now fenced off for what the county expects will be a one-year build.
That means the Lynn Hall parking lot, one of the largest public lots on the island, is closed until the work finishes. The county is promising 30 percent more spaces when it reopens, and the new pier itself will be considerably larger than what Ian took: 1,000 feet long instead of the original's shorter footprint, and wide enough that Fort Myers Beach realtor Alex King described it as twice as wide as before, crediting the original push for a bigger design to local designer Allen Shanofsky and the group Let's Go FMB. Lee County Commissioner David Mulicka called the pier the Eiffel Tower of Times Square at the ceremony, which sounds like a stretch until you remember how much of the district's identity was built around that one structure.
"I get asked questions every single day about how long until the pier gets rebuilt. Now we have an answer."
That line, from Jacki Liszak, president and CEO of the Fort Myers Beach Chamber of Commerce, is probably the most useful sentence to come out of the groundbreaking for anyone who lives here and has been fielding the same question from visiting friends and family. The answer is roughly a year from this August, which puts completion around late summer 2027.
The Two Weekends That Will Test The Island's Roads
September brings two events back to the island that residents haven't seen in this form in a long time.
ROAR Offshore, the powerboat racing series, returns to Fort Myers Beach September 11 through 13 for the first time since before Hurricane Ian. It's presented by Margaritaville Beach Resort, and the town council approved waiving the island's noise ordinance for the weekend so the races and the concerts around them can run without a curfew fight. Racer Shaun Torrente, the 2025 world champion in powerboat racing's Super Stock class, told WGCU that September is normally the island's slowest month, before northern snowbirds return in October and November, and that bringing the race back now is meant to give local businesses a boost during a stretch that would otherwise be quiet.
A week later, the Island Hopper Songwriter Fest runs September 18 through 27 across Fort Myers Beach and several other island and mainland venues, in its twelfth year. More than 60 BMI award-winning and emerging songwriters are booked across more than 80 performances over the ten days, and the full schedule is posted at IslandHopperFest.com.
Here's the part that ties both weekends together and doesn't show up in the event announcements. The LeeTran Beach Tram, which normally runs free along Estero Boulevard from Bowditch Point Park to the public library, has stopped service until November. That tram is the pressure valve that usually absorbs a chunk of the traffic during big island weekends, since it lets visitors and residents park once and move up and down Estero Boulevard without adding more cars to the road. Without it running, and with the Lynn Hall lot closed for pier construction at the same time ROAR Offshore and Island Hopper Fest bring extra cars to the north end, September is shaping up to be a month where the usual overflow options simply aren't there. If you're used to parking at Lynn Hall and walking to Times Square, this is the month to have a backup plan.
Times Square Is Rebuilding in Pieces, Not All At Once
The commercial heart of the island is inching back, and it's worth understanding the shape that rebuild is actually taking, because it isn't one big project. It's a string of small ones.
The first permanent new building approved for Times Square since Ian is a three-story structure that will house Meli's Ice Cream Shop on the ground floor, replacing the Kilwins location that Ian destroyed, with a one-bedroom residence for property owner Carlos Chavez above it. Town Council approved the project in December 2025 after granting design deviations to fit the building on a lot just under 1,200 square feet. It's a modest building, but it's the first concrete proof that permanent, code-compliant construction can actually happen in that district again, after three years of food trucks and pop-up counters standing in for what used to be there.
A more ambitious proposal is still working through the approval process. Developer Shlomo Melloul has submitted plans for a three-story building at the corner of Times Square facing the pier and Lynn Hall Memorial Park, which would include a rooftop bar, retail space, storage for local street vendor kiosks, a public shade station, and a water station for beachgoers. Melloul told the Fort Myers Beach Observer he's aware of the town's ongoing wave-mitigation study and has agreed to contribute toward a future mitigation wall if the town builds one, which is the kind of detail that signals just how much every new Times Square project now has to account for storm resilience before it accounts for anything else.
The town has also already made one smaller but very visible change. In May 2026, crews installed six new solar-powered, turtle-friendly streetlights throughout Times Square, aimed directly at a complaint residents had been raising in public meetings since Ian: that the district felt unsafe and unwelcoming after dark. It's a small fix next to a pier project or a new building, but it's the kind of change you notice on an evening walk that you wouldn't necessarily read about in a headline.
What This Actually Looks Like If You Walk Estero Boulevard This Month
Put these pieces together and the picture for September and October is clear. The Lynn Hall lot is gone for roughly a year. The free tram that used to help with exactly this kind of parking squeeze isn't running until November. Two of the busiest event weekends the island has had in years are landing back to back in the middle of that gap. And the district everyone is walking through to get to the beach is a mix of active construction fencing, one newly approved building finally moving toward construction, one proposed building still working through Town Council, and six new streetlights that are actually working.
None of that means the island isn't functioning. It means the fall that residents have been picturing since the groundbreaking announcement, quiet progress in the background while everything else stays the same, isn't quite what's arriving. What's arriving instead is a busier calendar and a tighter parking map landing in the same weeks, which is a genuinely different kind of fall than the last three have been.
If you've been waiting for a sign that Fort Myers Beach has turned a corner, this is closer to it than another ribbon cutting would be. Recovery on an island this size rarely looks like one big finish line. It looks like a pier finally under contract, a tram running on a different schedule, and a crawl of new lights making Times Square feel like somewhere people want to be after dark again. Small, overlapping, and a little inconvenient in the short term, which is exactly what Persaud meant standing on that empty lot in August.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home or a rental on the island, or you just want a local read on how these projects are likely to affect property values and insurability over the next year, Text Me Realty tracks these changes closely because we live and work here too. Text Me Today at (239) 686-TEXT.
