Park in the same spot you've used for a decade near 300 John Ringling Boulevard, walk toward where Tommy Bahama has always been, and you'll find butcher paper in the windows instead. A hand-lettered sign underneath announces something else entirely: a seafood shack called Pinchers, aiming for an October opening.
If your mental map of St. Armands Circle still has Tommy Bahama where it's always been, you're not wrong exactly. You're just close to two years out of date. The store moved. So did the building it moved into. So did the business that used to be in that building. The 2024 hurricane season didn't just close storefronts on the Circle. It started a chain reaction that's still working itself out, address by address, almost two years later.
One Building, Three Tenants, Two Years
Here's the sequence, because it matters if you're the kind of person who still gives directions by what used to be somewhere.
Tommy Bahama's original store sat at 300 John Ringling Boulevard, closer to the Gulf than most of the Circle's other retail. Hurricanes Helene and Milton flooded it during the 2024 storm season, same as most of the ground floor commercial spaces on the key. Rather than rebuild in place, Tommy Bahama relocated less than a mile east to 465 John Ringling Boulevard, the building that used to house Shore, the restaurant and retail shop that had also been flooded out. Tommy Bahama held its grand reopening there in September 2025.
That left 300 John Ringling Boulevard sitting empty until this year, when Pinchers, a Gulf Coast seafood chain under Phelan Family Brands, signed a lease on more than 8,000 square feet there. Kevin Rooney, the company's vice president of marketing, told the Business Observer the timeline is tight but doable: "We are shooting to be open in October." Until now, the closest Pinchers locations to St. Armands Circle were in Lakewood Ranch and Venice, roughly 14 and 20 miles away.
Three tenants, one building, and the whole reshuffle traces back to a single storm season. If you're trying to describe the Circle to a friend who hasn't visited since 2023, the Tommy Bahama landmark you'd use to orient them has itself moved.
The Counter With 52 Years of Memory, Under a New Name
Not every change on the Circle is about a chain moving in. Some of it is about who's standing behind a familiar counter.
At 7 N. Boulevard of the Presidents, Jewelry by Cole closed and St. Armands Jewelers opened in its place this year. The shop's namesake, master goldsmith Stephen Cole Powell, began handcrafting fine jewelry back in 1974, more than half a century before new owner Mia Tohar Eylon took over. What's notable is what didn't change: longtime manager Diane DelloRusso stayed on, and so did jeweler Gary Goss, who brings 59 years of experience to the case. Eylon and her family, who came out of clothing retail in the Philadelphia area, are expanding the estate jewelry side of the business while keeping the staff customers already know.
It's a useful distinction to hold onto as you walk the Circle this year. Some storefronts changed hands and changed character. Others changed hands and kept everything that made them work.
The Italian Institution That Reopened Under Its Founder's Name
Le Colonne, the longtime Italian restaurant at 22 S. Boulevard of the Presidents, closed when the 2024 hurricanes hit. Rather than fold, owners Simone Salustri and Amber Mayner launched an Italian food truck, Buonissimo Mobile Italian Kitchen, to keep some version of the business alive while they figured out what came next for the brick and mortar space.
What came next was a rebrand. The restaurant reopened in January 2026 as Nōnnō Umberto, named for Simone's father Umberto Salustri, who had opened the original Le Colonne decades earlier. The soft opening was supposed to be quiet. It wasn't. More than 250 people showed up the first night, and the restaurant served roughly 800 people over the course of its first week, according to co-owner Amber Mayner.
That's the pattern worth noticing across these stories. The Circle isn't simply reopening as it was before the storms. It's being rebuilt by people who chose to change something about the business on the way back, whether that's a new name honoring a founder or new ownership honoring the staff who were already there.
The Circle's Uneven Recovery, By the Numbers
Here's where the surface impression and the underlying reality pull apart. Walk the Circle on a Saturday afternoon this summer and it looks finished. Parking is full, the sidewalk landscaping has been replaced, restaurants are busy. As of mid-January 2026, though, roughly 90 of the Circle's approximately 130 street-level commercial spaces were occupied, which means about 40 storefronts were still boarded or vacant some 15 months after Hurricane Milton made its direct hit.
That gap between how the Circle looks and how fully it's actually filled shows up clearly if you track specific addresses:
| Address | Before 2024 | Status as of August 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 300 John Ringling Blvd | Tommy Bahama | Vacant, Pinchers targeting October opening |
| 465 John Ringling Blvd | Shore restaurant and retail | Tommy Bahama (relocated here, reopened fall 2025) |
| 24 and 28 N. Blvd of the Presidents | Shore's original two-story building | Still vacant, three-story rebuild targeted for 2028 |
| 7 N. Blvd of the Presidents | Jewelry by Cole | St. Armands Jewelers (new ownership, 2026) |
Four addresses, four different recovery speeds, all from the same two storms.
Why Shore Is Taking Four Years to Come Back
The slowest of those four is instructive, because the delay isn't really about storm damage. It's about a federal rule that kicks in once you decide to rebuild bigger instead of just repairing what you had.
Shore owner Tom Leonard wants to redevelop the two vacant buildings at 24 and 28 N. Boulevard of the Presidents into a three story "Shore flagship," combining a restaurant, cafe, and retail store with a third floor that's currently planned as residential space, though Leonard has said openly he'd prefer a boutique hotel if the zoning ever allowed it. That ambition runs straight into FEMA's 50% rule: if repairs or improvements to a building in a flood zone cost 50% or more of its pre-damage market value, the entire structure has to be brought up to current flood-resistant construction standards, essentially treated as new construction rather than a renovation.
The project went through a pre-application conference with the city's Development Review Committee in December 2025 and returned for another review in mid-July 2026, with plans that reportedly include flood-proof glass at street level, a detail Leonard says would make it one of the first buildings on the Circle built that way. If the approval process moves the way Leonard hopes, the Circle could see Shore's return by early 2028, according to the Observer's reporting. That's roughly a four-year gap between closure and reopening for a business that, by choosing to rebuild larger rather than simply reopen, triggered a much more demanding set of requirements than the businesses that reopened in months instead of years.
The Infrastructure Under Your Feet Is Changing Too
None of this reshuffling happens in isolation from what's going on underground. In December 2025, Sarasota County commissioners allocated $13.5 million in federal disaster recovery funding specifically for St. Armands drainage improvements, pairing it with close to $500,000 in city funding. That sits inside a larger $57 million county-wide effort called the Resilient SRQ Infrastructure Program, funded through a HUD Community Development Block Grant tied to hurricanes Debby, Helene, and Milton.
The specifics matter if you're a business owner or a resident who parks on the Circle regularly: individual flood barriers for business doors, underground storage capacity, pavement designed to let water pass through it, tide check valves, and new pump stations. The goal is straightforward. St. Armands flooded not just from storm surge but from rainfall that had nowhere to drain, closing the Circle's streets entirely during past storms. The infrastructure work being funded now is meant to keep that from happening again, which is also part of why some businesses are betting on a fast reopening this hurricane season while others, like Shore, are betting on a slower rebuild that assumes the next storm could be just as bad.
The Calendar Didn't Skip a Beat
Through all of this turnover, the Circle's public calendar has stayed remarkably steady. The Circle's fall Art Festival and Craft Marketplace is scheduled for September 19, bringing artists working in sculpture, painting, glass, and jewelry into the park and along South Boulevard of the Presidents. Fright Night, the St. Armands Circle Association's Halloween event, marks its 17th year this fall. Exotic Cars on the Circle continues as a free event drawing car enthusiasts to the same park where the art festivals set up.
That continuity is worth sitting with. The storefronts have turned over in ways that would confuse anyone who's been away for a year or two. The community rhythm built around the Circle Park hasn't.
What This Means If You Live Nearby
The honest read on St. Armands Circle right now isn't recovery in the simple sense of things going back to how they were. It's reshuffling. Businesses that could repair quickly reopened within months. Businesses that decided to expand or rebuild bigger, like Shore, are working through a federal rule that could keep them closed for years longer than the storm damage alone would explain. And staff who've spent decades on the Circle, like Diane DelloRusso and Gary Goss at the jewelry counter, are still there even when the name on the door has changed.
If you're heading to the Circle this fall expecting the same map you had in 2023, give yourself a few extra minutes. The address you remember might belong to someone new.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property near St. Armands or Lido Key, whether you're watching the neighborhood shift as a resident or thinking about buying or selling nearby, Greco Real Estate has spent years tracking exactly this kind of on-the-ground change across Sarasota's barrier islands. Book an appointment when you're ready to talk specifics.
