Before the golf courses and the galleries, there was a newspaperman and a pier. In 1886 a Louisville newspaper publisher bought 3,712 acres of Gulf-edge wilderness, named it after a bay in Italy, and sold it to Northern families as paradise. In 1888 he built a pier into the Gulf of Mexico — a dock that storms have taken down and the town has rebuilt time and again. That's the Old-Florida story underneath the Paradise Coast: the winter colony, the pier, the swamp buggy, and Fifth Avenue South — and this page tells it.
The pier came first. Construction began in June 1888 — a six-hundred-foot freight-and-passenger dock that was, for years, the only practical way into town, with the post office itself sitting out on the pier after 1889. For decades Naples stayed a small, isolated winter colony reachable mainly by steamboat, supported by fishing and a little farming. Then in 1927 the Seaboard Air Line railroad arrived — the Orange Blossom Special pulling into the new Naples Depot on January 7 — and in 1928 the Tamiami Trail finally linked Naples to Miami and Tampa. The isolation that had defined the place was over.
Why People Visit Naples Florida
- Tour Historic Palm Cottage (1895), the oldest house in Naples and home of the Naples Historical Society.
- Visit the Naples Depot Museum, the restored 1927 Seaboard Air Line railroad station.
- Stroll Fifth Avenue South, the revitalized historic main street of galleries, courtyards, and palm-lined blocks.
- Walk the Naples Botanical Garden's themed landscapes and wetland boardwalks.
- See the historic Naples Pier site at the foot of 12th Avenue South, where the 1888 landmark is being rebuilt once more following Hurricane Ian (its latest reconstruction is underway).
