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.
Today Naples is one of the most polished resort cities on the Gulf — the paradise its founders advertised — but underneath the galleries and the golf is a genuine Old-Florida story: a winter colony a Louisville newspaperman named after an Italian bay, a pier that hurricanes keep testing and the town keeps rebuilding, and an Everglades frontier that gave the world the swamp buggy. Our Naples designs gather that identity into wearable form — the pier, the alligator, the 1886 founding, the Paradise Coast. From a newspaperman's American Bay of Naples to the pier that storms could never keep down — wear a little of the Old-Florida Paradise Coast.
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).
