The Naples Pier: One Hundred Thirty-Five Years on the Gulf
Near Naples, Florida
The Naples Pier is the oldest continuously used structure in the city, and its history is a compressed version of Naples itself. Walter Haldeman and Captain James Canty built the original pier in eighteen eighty-eight, extending six hundred feet into the Gulf of Mexico. Its first purpose was practical: supply boats tied up to it to deliver goods and passengers in the absence of any road.
Almost immediately it became social as well, a gathering place for the small seasonal community that used Naples as a winter retreat. A post office was added to the pier structure. In nineteen twenty-two, a fire started by a discarded cigarette burned most of it to the waterline.
The pier was rebuilt in nineteen twenty-four, extended to one thousand feet, and given the double-deck construction with wings that have characterized it since. Hurricane Donna made landfall near Naples on September eleventh, nineteen sixty, driving Category Four winds across the pier, and the structure collapsed entirely. Two local philanthropists, Lester and Dorothy Norris, donated nearly one hundred thirty thousand dollars to fund the rebuilding, and the pier was restored to its present form.
Every significant hurricane since has spared the pier major damage. Today more than one million visitors come to the Naples Pier each year. No fishing license is required to cast from it, which matters to the many people who come not for history but for redfish and grouper at sunset.
The pier is also where Neapolitans and their guests have, for more than a century, gathered to watch the sun descend into the Gulf, a ritual that requires no ticket and no reservation and has not changed in essence since the first summer the wooden planks were laid.
