Walk into Cambier Park this month and the first thing you'll notice is the fence. Where the castle-and-boat playground structure used to sit near 8th Street South, there's now a construction perimeter and a patch of cleared ground. Anyone who showed up expecting to let their kids loose on the old climbing structure this fall has likely already found out the hard way that it's gone. The demolition wrapped up last November, and the sections that passed safety inspection reopened once the teardown finished, but the playground itself hasn't been rebuilt yet.
What's easy to miss, standing at that fence line, is how little else in the park has changed. The Olde Naples routine that runs through Cambier Park, the Saturday concerts, the tennis courts, the recurring art fair, hasn't paused for a single weekend. The playground is one corner of a 12.84-acre park named for William Cambier, the town engineer who helped shape Naples in the 1920s. The other 90 percent of it is running on the same calendar it always has.
A Corner, Not the Park
The confusion is understandable. A demolished play structure behind orange fencing reads as "the park is under construction," full stop. But the city's own playground project page makes clear this is a narrowly scoped capital project, not a park-wide renovation. It traces back to a 2022 capital improvements presentation that flagged the aging playground for replacement, a plan that then got pushed back twice, first by Hurricane Ian recovery, then again by Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. By the time the city was ready to move, three years had passed.
The procurement itself has been methodical almost to a fault. The formal bid closed February 17, 2026. An evaluation committee reviewed five proposals in early March from Bliss Products and Services, Miracle Recreation Equipment Company, Playcore Wisconsin (doing business as GameTime), Playmore West, and Vetor Contracting Services. Three finalists presented to the committee in April, then to City Council twice more in May, with Community Services Director Chad Merritt and Deputy Director Aaron Hopkins walking through the options each time. On May 20, council settled on Playcore Wisconsin's design, and the construction contract itself was queued for the June 17 council meeting.
That's just under six months from demolition to a selected design, which is not unusual for municipal playground replacements, but it does mean the fenced corner of Cambier Park is likely to stay fenced through the fall while the design moves into construction documents and permitting. The early renderings shown to council last November leaned toward natural play elements and a treehouse motif, a departure from the old wooden castle-and-boat structure some longtime residents still call "Candy Cane City." The city has said it will remove the donor bricks and fence pickets purchased during the original playground's fundraising campaign before construction starts, but only once the area is no longer in use, a small detail that tells you how much the city is trying to preserve continuity even while replacing the equipment.
What Never Stopped
None of that touches the part of Cambier Park that actually defines a season here. The band shell, the tennis courts, and the open lawn along 8th Avenue South have kept their normal programming the entire time.
The Naples Concert Band has performed at the Cambier Park band shell since 1972 and still draws a crowd with its free Saturday concerts. The Naples Big Band, a 19-piece group under the direction of trumpet and flugelhorn player James Castaldi, plays the same band shell on its own rotation, with intermission donations going toward the group's High School Music Education Program Award fund. And the Naples Jazz Society, founded in 1995, keeps its Dixieland-era programming going at the park as well, focused specifically on the American jazz styles that developed between 1890 and 1940.
None of these groups relocated when the playground came down. None of them needed to. The band shell sits on the opposite side of the park from the construction fence, and the concerts have continued through the same demolition and procurement timeline that's kept the playground closed.
The same goes for the Naples Art Institute's Art in the Park fair, a juried outdoor show that's been running at Cambier Park since 1957 and is generally considered the first event of its kind in the city. The fair isn't a onetime fall event either. It has confirmed dates on the Institute's calendar for November 28, 2026, February 6, 2027, and April 10, 2027, all at Cambier Park, all unaffected by the playground work happening a few hundred feet away.
A few more things a resident can count on this season, all running on their usual schedule inside or immediately adjacent to the park:
- The Arthur L. Allen Tennis Center's clay courts, which require resident or non-resident membership to play and remain part of the Cambier Park complex alongside the Norris Community Center.
- The Norris Community Center itself, open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m.
- The Third Street South Farmers Market, a Saturday morning fixture from 7:30 to 11:30 a.m. just blocks from the park.
- Cambier Park's general hours, which remain 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, unchanged by the construction on one corner of the grounds.
Taken together, that's a fuller list of what's actually running this fall than what's actually paused. The disruption is confined to a play structure that families with young kids will feel the most, and even that disruption has an endpoint attached to it now that a design vendor has been chosen.
Why This Matters More Than It Looks
There's a pattern in how Naples handles its public infrastructure after a run of hurricanes, and Cambier Park is a clean example of it. A project that was already moving slowly got pushed further behind by storms that had nothing to do with playground equipment, and then the city rebuilt its timeline in public, meeting by meeting, vendor by vendor. That's a slower process to watch than a single ribbon-cutting, but it's also a more honest one. Anyone checking the city's project page can see exactly which vendor was chosen and when the next contract vote is scheduled, rather than guessing from a fence line.
For a neighborhood where daily life often revolves around walking to the same handful of places, that distinction matters. A resident who plans a Saturday around the farmers market, an evening around a band shell concert, or a weekend around Art in the Park hasn't lost anything this year. The one thing that's paused is the playground, and even that has a selected design and a construction contract moving through council as of this summer. The rest of Cambier Park, the part that actually fills a calendar, kept its schedule the whole time.
If Cambier Park's concerts, courts, and Saturday market are part of why the walk from your door to 8th Avenue South matters to you, James Bates and the Bates | Ives team would welcome the chance to talk about what else is happening on that same stretch of Olde Naples. Request a private consultation whenever the conversation makes sense.
