"I used to have dark hair when I joined the board," Maurice Gutierrez said in February, standing near the ribbon he had waited more than twenty years to see cut. He has chaired the Bayshore Gateway Triangle Community Redevelopment Agency advisory board for most of that time, and on February 26, 2026, Collier County finally opened the pedestrian connector that the Bayshore-Gateway master plan first sketched in 2000.
Here is why that matters to people who live behind the Isles gate rather than on Bayshore Drive. The Isles of Collier Preserve was designed as a closed system. Eight miles of trails and blueways, more than half of 2,400 acres held as lakes and preserve, two kayak launches, a clubhouse and the Overlook Bar & Grill sitting on the Cypress Waterway. Every route inside it returns you to where you started. That is the point of the place, and it is a good point. But it means residents have spent years walking loops that end at their own front door, then getting into a car to go anywhere else. The boardwalk gives the Isles trail network something it has never had: a terminus. You can now leave on foot or by bike and arrive somewhere.
What the county actually built
This is not a paved shoulder with a sign on it. The connector runs about half a mile in three distinct stretches, and it is worth knowing the shape before you set out:
- A 15-foot-wide hardscaped promenade, 400 feet long, lighted, with benches, running east from Bayshore Drive. The brick is laid in a pattern the designer at Stantec described as small oak leaves dropped from a cupped hand and left to overlap where they fell.
- A 1,350-foot elevated boardwalk over native wetlands and uplands, with an observation deck facing the water.
- A landing on Sugden Regional Park's Lake Avalon path, near the park's west loop parking area.
The whole thing cost roughly $3 million, built on a 17-acre parcel the CRA had bought years earlier for nearly $5.4 million, with ongoing maintenance funded through the Bayshore Beautification MSTU. Naples Botanical Garden supplied about a thousand trees, shrubs and groundcovers, including Simpson stopper, Spanish stopper and white stopper, and sent staff across multiple teams to plant them in January. Satinleaf trees line the allée. There is a historical wrinkle in that: the site between Lunar Street and Jeepers Drive was the Garden's original location in the late 1990s, abandoned when Harvey Kapnick Jr. funded the 170 acres where it sits today. A remnant row of palms along Bayshore Drive is still there. The Garden planted the property it walked away from.
The far end is a lake, not a trailhead
Most Isles residents have driven past the Avalon Drive entrance without stopping. Sugden Regional Park wraps around 60-acre Lake Avalon and holds one of the only freshwater beaches in Collier County, which is a strange thing to have ignored for years while living ten minutes from it.
The park runs a paved fitness trail the full way around the lake, a fishing pier, an amphitheater, a butterfly garden, picnic pavilions and the Collier County Sailing Center, which teaches sailing and waterskiing year-round, including classes built for people with disabilities. Equipment rentals cover sailboats, kayaks, canoes and paddleboards. Gates open at 8 a.m. and close at dusk, so a September walk out and back is a morning plan, not an after-dinner one.
For anyone who has looked at the Isles kayak launches and wondered what else is paddleable within a few minutes of Tamiami Trail East, the Gulf Coast Sailing Club runs monthly Sugden Sundays on the Lake Avalon beach, open to the public and pitched specifically at people considering sailing rather than people who already sail. Registration closes five days out. The club also books members into open sailing sessions through the county center, and pairs anyone not yet checked out as a Sugden skipper with an approved one at no extra charge.
"We've been looking forward to this for many, many years because of access to Sugden Park."
That was Rick Dobson, a twenty-year member of the Windstar Bike Club, at the ribbon cutting. His club rides out of Windstar, across the street. The cycling and running groups were the first to redraw their routes: the Bayshore run club that meets at Ankrolab Brewing at 6 p.m. on Wednesdays plans varied distances through the neighborhood, and increasing traffic on Bayshore Drive had been squeezing their options.
Bayshore Drive stopped being a place you drive through
The second-order effect is the one the CRA was actually after. When the walk ends at Sugden, the walk back begins on Bayshore Drive, and Bayshore Drive now has enough on it to justify the return trip.
Rebecca Maddox spent thirteen years running Three60 Market before leasing the space in 2025 to Barry and Carolyn Larkin, who reopened it as Seventh South Waterfront, carrying over what they built at Seventh South Craft Food + Drink in Old Naples. Maddox stayed in the corridor with Celebration Park and Rebecca's, and Celebration Park came through a $1 million refresh with five chef-driven food trucks, a liquor bar and more seating. Around them: Bayshore Bodega and Bean To Cup Coffee Lounge for the morning end of a walk, The MED, The Real Macaw, Taqueria San Julian, I Love Curry, Ankrolab Brewing for beer, cider and food, and Fernweh Ice Cream for house-made frozen treats. The Gardenia House, the boutique hotel and apartment building where Bayshore Bodega sits, hosts a Sunday farmers market. Its owner, Diane Sullivan, calls it a gathering place, and the Sunday timing pairs neatly with a morning out to the lake and back.
One of the corridor's longtime restaurant owners put the shift plainly to Naples Illustrated this spring, describing a street that now fills with strollers and with people walking dogs at night. Gutierrez walked the boardwalk himself the day after the ribbon cutting, then kept going onto Bayshore to look at the newer cafés, which is roughly the itinerary this piece is recommending.
The Garden is the other anchor, and its calendar just turned
Naples Botanical Garden sits at 4820 Bayshore Drive, a few steps from where the promenade meets Bayshore. Through the end of September it is open Wednesdays through Mondays rather than daily, so a Tuesday plan needs a different destination. From October the calendar thickens considerably:
| What | When |
|---|---|
| Music in the Garden series | Has run October through June |
| Día de los Muertos celebration | Has landed on the first weekend of November |
| Johnsonville Night Lights in the Garden | November 27, 2026 through January 3, 2027, closed December 24, 25 and 31 |
| Sunset Wednesdays, Garden open late with Fogg Café specials | Winter into spring |
Night Lights is the one that changes traffic patterns on Bayshore Drive for five weeks, and it is also the one where walking beats parking. The Garden draws north of 260,000 visitors a year, and a December evening is when you feel all of them at once.
The two lots nobody is talking about yet
Now the part that will change this route again. With the promenade and boardwalk finished, two county-owned parcels on opposite sides of the project, one about 1.5 acres and one just under four, are expected to be offered for sale. As of the February opening the county had not yet sought bids but expected to within months, so this is worth watching now rather than next season. Opera Naples has expressed interest in the larger parcel for an opera house, though bidding will be open to anyone.
CRA project manager Tami Scott has been candid that the walkway was the first move in soliciting arts-minded developers, with an ambition running from artist cottages and studios up to larger regional institutions. Read that alongside the boardwalk and the intent becomes clear: the county spent $3 million to make roughly five and a half acres of adjacent dirt attractive to a cultural tenant. Whatever lands on those parcels will sit at the exact point where an Isles resident's walk crosses Bayshore Drive.
That is the argument for treating this as neighborhood news rather than county news. The Isles was built to face inward, toward the Cypress Waterway and the preserve, and it does that beautifully. What changed in February is that the community acquired a front door onto a corridor that is still being written. The kayaks and the eight miles of interior trail are unchanged. The map around them is not.
If you own here and you have been quietly tracking what all of this does to a particular street, a particular water view, or the timing of a move you have been considering, Linda Kennedy follows this corner of Naples closely and is glad to talk it through with no agenda attached. Let's Connect.
