Walk Lido Beach this weekend and it looks the way it has looked most of this year: flat, wide, uninterrupted sand running from the Pavilion down toward Ted Sperling Park. Walk it a week from now and there will be equipment parked on it.
That is not a metaphor. The City of Sarasota has confirmed that equipment began staging on the beach as early as September 14, with the actual dune construction starting September 21. Between now and then sits one more ordinary weekend, and it happens to be a good one: the fourth annual St. Armands Circle Art Festival with Craft Marketplace takes over the Circle Saturday and Sunday. The timing is a coincidence of two unrelated calendars, but if you live here, it is worth noticing anyway.
The Weekend Before the Equipment Arrives
The festival runs Saturday, September 19, and Sunday, September 20, both days 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., set up in and around St. Armands Circle Park at 1 St. Armands Circle. It is produced by Howard Alan Events, which the event's own listing describes as the nation's largest art festival producer, and it is free to attend. Expect the usual mix for an HAE show: painters, sculptors, jewelers, and glassworkers with booths lining the park walkways, alongside a craft marketplace layered into the same footprint.
None of that is unusual for St. Armands in September. What is unusual is what happens two days later, a few minutes away by car. If you have a routine that includes a Saturday walk on Lido Beach followed by lunch on the Circle, this weekend is the version of that routine you have had all year. Next weekend, part of it changes.
What Actually Starts Monday
The dune project is the city's first, meaning Lido Beach has never had a formal dune system before this. Crews will build roughly 1.2 miles of new dunes using about 3,000 cubic yards of sand, stretching from North Lido Park south to Ted Sperling Park. The resulting dune line will run about 2.5 feet high and 30 feet wide with a gradual taper down to the beach, not a wall so much as a long, low rise you will need to walk around rather than over.
Once the sand is shaped, crews plant it with dune sunflower, railroad vine, and sea oats, native species chosen because their root systems hold sand in place during storms. Sea turtle nesting season runs through the end of October, so monitoring continues as the work proceeds. The city has said the project will not affect public access to the beach, and Sarasota City Engineer Sage Kamiya has been direct about what the dunes are actually for.
"They add a level of resiliency for the entire beach itself. It's also storm protection for the beach as well as for the property."
The project is expected to take about 60 days, putting completion somewhere around late November, which lines up with a broader pattern along this stretch of coast: this dune work follows directly behind the beach renourishment that wrapped earlier in 2026, an effort that dredged roughly 311,000 cubic yards of sand from New Pass and pumped it onto Lido's southern half. That renourishment was funded almost entirely through federal disaster relief tied to Hurricane Ian and, later, Helene and Milton, and it happens on a five-year cycle with the Army Corps of Engineers. The last one was 2021. The next is expected around 2031.
The Part That Takes Two More Years
Here is the detail that separates a resident's understanding of this project from a visitor's: the sand and the plants are the fast part. The access points are not.
Three beach walkovers along this stretch are being removed and rebuilt as part of a related, separate contract, and none of them will be finished until mid-2027, well after the dunes themselves are done and grown in. The three:
- The walkover at Lido Beach Pavilion
- The walkover at the north end of the Pavilion parking lot
- The North Lido Beach access point at the curve of John Ringling and Benjamin Franklin boulevards
That project carries its own price tag, roughly $840,000, with about $770,000 of that going to construction. So the practical picture for the next year and a half looks like this: a finished, planted dune line by late fall 2026, and the same three walkovers residents have used for years still mid-rebuild well into 2027. If your regular beach access happens to be one of these three, plan on using it in something close to its current form for a while yet, even after the dunes themselves are long finished.
Everything Else Already Came Back
None of this is happening in isolation. The dune project is landing on top of a year that has already brought several of Lido Key's fixtures back online, and if you have not been down to the beach club or the Circle recently, the list is worth knowing.
The Lido Key Tiki Bar, the open-air spot behind the Ritz-Carlton Members Beach Club at 1234 Benjamin Franklin Drive, quietly reopened to the public back in April after an 18-month rebuild following storm damage from the 2024 hurricane season. The bar held a proper celebration of that milestone on June 20, with about 200 people gathering on the sand for a fire dancer, a steel pan player, an on-site cigar roller, and dancers from GRAE Productions, all watching the sunset from the same spot regulars have gathered at for decades. The tiki hut itself would have turned 70 next year had it not been torn apart by the storms, and the rebuild kept its classic thatched-roof look while adding a few new signature drinks, including a gin-based Lido Bloom with passion fruit and prosecco. It is open daily from 11 a.m. to sunset.
Over on the Circle, the Italian restaurant longtime residents knew as Le Colonne reopened in January under a new name, Nōnnō Umberto, at 22 S. Boulevard of the Presidents. The rebrand honors Umberto Salustri, the original founder and father of current co-owner Simone Salustri, who ran an Italian food truck called Buonissimo Mobile Italian Kitchen with his wife and business partner Amber Mayner during the two years the storefront sat closed after Helene and Milton. The soft opening the first week of January served roughly 250 people the first night, growing to about 800 over the course of that first week, a sign of how much the neighborhood had been waiting on that particular reopening.
What This Means for the Next Sixty Days
Put together, the picture for the rest of September and into November is fairly specific. The beach stays open the whole time, per the city, but the flat, unobstructed version you have been walking on since spring has a shelf life of about five more days. After that, expect equipment, staged sand piles, and marked crossings through the work zones, with the dune line and its plantings finished sometime around late November. The walkovers most people actually use to get down to the sand are on their own, slower timeline that runs through mid-2027, so do not expect those to look different anytime soon even after the dunes are done. And the businesses that make a beach day worth the walk, the tiki bar and Nōnnō Umberto among them, are already back and running on their normal hours.
If you are heading to the art festival this weekend, enjoy the beach on the way there or back. It is the last stretch of days this fall that Lido looks exactly like it has all year.
If you have questions about how any of this touches a specific address on Lido Key or St. Armands, from flood zone lines to what a rebuild timeline like Shore's or the Tiki Bar's tends to mean for insurance and permitting, Angela Adams has been tracking this stretch of the coast closely and is glad to talk it through.
