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.
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.
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).
