Third And Broad: The One Corner In Olde Naples That Isn't Following The Pattern

Walk Third Street South on any evening this month and you will pass the new Olde Naples Hotel with its lobby lights on, its veranda rocking chairs occupied, and Annie's Bistro pulling in a mixed crowd of hotel guests and neighbors who came for the bar rather than a room. Then you will pass the building next door. Same block. Same corner of Third Street South and Broad Avenue. Dark storefront, no signage, no activity, twenty years running.

That contrast is not a coincidence worth glossing over. It is the most honest snapshot available right now of how Olde Naples actually changes, and it says something the new restaurant openings alone do not: this neighborhood fills in by restoring what was already there, and the one address that keeps almost getting restored keeps falling through at the last step.

What Actually Opened This Year

Olde Naples Hotel opened this May on Third Street South, the arrival of a luxury boutique hotel with 109 rooms welcoming its first guests just steps from Third Street South and one block from the beach. The first building opened to the public May 15 with an initial 50 rooms, and the remaining rooms were slated to come online in phases over the following weeks, putting the full property well into its first operating season by the time most residents are reading this. The site matters as much as the room count. The hotel sits in the Third Street South Historic District, drawing on the city's earliest hospitality legacy while embracing a contemporary boutique format. It was designed by the global firm Hart Howerton and draws from the legacy of the original 1889 Naples Hotel, which stood on this same site.

The restaurant inside it, Annie's Bistro, Bar & Bakery, is built for residents as much as travelers. It's open to locals and guests alike, comprised of three distinct dining experiences: the bistro, the bar, and the bakery. The format evolves throughout the day, with mornings beginning with espresso and house-made pastries and transitioning into a more refined but approachable American menu by evening. That structure gives it a role most hotel restaurants don't bother trying to fill: a place you can walk into for coffee at 8 a.m. and cocktails at 8 p.m. without it feeling like a different building either time.

Details throughout the property lean the same direction. Look down and you'll find custom carpets by Pierre Frey, patterns that add color and character throughout the property, reportedly the only property in the United States to carry pieces from that French textile house. Behind the front desk, a vintage-inspired key-box wall showcases artifacts and memorabilia celebrating Naples's early days, while architectural elements like grand columns, transom windows, and pecky cypress wood reflect classic Old Florida design. None of this reads as generic luxury-hotel styling. It reads as a building that was told, specifically, to reference the site's own history rather than import a look from somewhere else.

The Pattern Underneath The Opening

That's worth sitting with for a second, because it wasn't incidental. The design brief for this specific property, on this specific block, was to reference what stood here before rather than replace it with something generic. The carpets, the key-box wall, the cypress trim: all of it points back to the same 1889 footprint instead of away from it.

One of the people who worked on the hotel put a version of this into words when the property opened. "Old Naples has always had a strong sense of place, and we wanted this hotel to carry that forward in a way that feels natural today," Radler said.

That instinct is useful for a resident to understand, because it sets the bar for whatever comes next on this same block. Whoever finishes this corner isn't just filling square footage. They're filling square footage next to a building that made a public point of honoring what used to be there. If the next tenant doesn't bother, the contrast will be obvious to anyone walking past both storefronts.

The Address That Keeps Almost Happening

Which is what makes the building next door such a strange exception, sitting on the same corner, subject to the same market pressure, and still empty.

Built in 1921, the Olde Naples Building has been vacant for 20 years, notable for having once been home to Naples' first town hall, courthouse, movie theater, playhouse, doctor's office, library, church and real estate office. Fantozzi's of Olde Naples closed in 2006 after operating a popular deli and wine and cheese shop there for 20 years. The building abuts the new Olde Naples Hotel on the corner of Third Street South and Broad Avenue. It is not tucked away. It is the storefront you pass to get to the hotel's lobby entrance.

For a while this year, it looked like the twenty-year vacancy was finally ending. Restaurateur Rick Doody, a seasonal resident of North Naples and co-creator of the Bravo Brio Restaurant Group, planned to open JoJo's Bar, a high-end Italian-American steakhouse, in the corner building the Camalier family has owned for more than 40 years. Since signing the lease in February 2022, the project had to overcome storm surge intrusion from Hurricane Ian and setbacks from the city over outdoor dining and parking permits.

Then, on the same day the hotel next door opened its doors to the public, the deal came apart. On the opening day of Olde Naples Hotel, which wraps around two sides of the Olde Naples Building, Doody was shocked to learn during a phone call that the Camalier family wants to go in a different direction with the restaurant proposed for the corner. Doody's own read on the four-year process was blunt.

"It's just been a mess. It's a long story."

As of late May, the Camaliers and their attorneys had not responded to requests for comment on the situation or the possibility of doing something else with the historic property.

So the corner that should be the easiest win in the neighborhood, a century-old building, a proven restaurateur, a signed lease, sits empty while its brand-new neighbor fills nightly. That's not a story about bad luck. It's a story about what happens when a restoration-minded neighborhood runs into ownership that isn't ready to commit to a direction. Everything else on this block moved forward because someone decided what the building should become and built toward it. This one hasn't, yet.

What's Already Part Of Your Week

Underneath the headline openings, the neighborhood's actual weekly rhythm hasn't needed reinventing, and residents who've been here a while already know it. Newer neighbors are still finding their footing with it:

• Third Street South Farmers Market runs Saturday mornings, 7:30 to 11:30 a.m., a fixture that predates every opening on this list and will outlast most of them.
• Evening on Fifth brings live music up and down the sidewalks of Fifth Avenue South on Thursday evenings, continuing through September 10 this year.
• The quieter end of Third Street South, away from the hotel entrance, still functions as a slower alternative to Fifth Avenue on a busy Friday, with fine dining and bakery options that don't require a reservation made weeks out.

None of this is new information if you've lived here two seasons or more. It's the baseline the new openings are being layered onto, and it's worth naming because the two headline stories, a hotel that opened on schedule and a restaurant deal that fell apart, can make the neighborhood feel like it's in flux when the actual week-to-week texture hasn't moved much at all.

What This Actually Tells You

If you live in Olde Naples, the useful takeaway isn't "go try the new hotel restaurant," though you probably already have. It's that the building next door to it is a live test of whether the neighborhood's restoration pattern holds when ownership hesitates. Keep an eye on that corner. Whatever finally goes into the Olde Naples Building, whether it's a version of JoJo's Bar, something else entirely, or another few years of vacancy, will tell you more about how this neighborhood actually works than any amount of hotel press coverage will.

If you're weighing what a home near this corridor is worth, or wondering how a stalled commercial lease down the block might factor into your own plans, that's a conversation grounded in specifics, not headlines. Coastal Living Naples works this neighborhood block by block. Schedule your free consultation with Angela Graziano to talk through what's actually happening near your address.