Cambier Park's Playground Is Still Empty. The City Just Picked the Runner-Up to Rebuild It.

If you've walked or driven past Cambier Park anytime in the last year, you've seen it: a fenced-off patch of sand where the climbing structure used to be, a scatter of shade trees with nothing underneath them, a park that still hosts concerts and farmers market Saturdays but has gone quiet where the kids used to be. The playground closed abruptly on October 29, 2025, after the city determined its 1990s wooden structures had rotted past any safety standard worth trusting. Almost a year later, the fence is still up.

What's actually happened in that year is more interesting than a simple repair delay. The city ran a full vendor selection process, got its own advisory board to rank the finalists, and then watched the City Council pick a different design than the one the board recommended. That reversal, more than the closure itself, is the part of this story most residents haven't heard yet, and it's the part that tells you when your kids might actually get their playground back.

A Landmark With a Longer History Than the Fence Suggests

Cambier Park's play area didn't start as the wooden fortress that just came down. The original, known as Candy Cane City, opened in 1948 and became one of Naples' first and most recognizable public playgrounds. A community fundraising effort replaced it in the 1990s with the climb-up, climb-on structure that generations of downtown kids grew up on, the same one whose brick pavers and fence pickets still carry the names of the families who paid for them decades ago. That structure lasted about three decades before the wear became a liability the city couldn't keep patching.

The Board Picked One Design. The Council Picked the Other.

The city opened a formal request for proposals in January 2026, and the bid (numbered 26-002) closed on February 17. An evaluation committee reviewed five submissions and narrowed the field to three finalists: Playmore West, a Fort Myers-based firm; Playcore Wisconsin, doing business as GameTime; and Miracle Recreation Equipment Company. All three presented to the committee on April 7.

Two weeks later, on April 21, the city's Community Services Advisory Board voted, and the vote split. The board's top recommendation went to Playmore West, whose proposal wove a treetop fortress and a Naples pier theme through a design built around ADA accessibility: a tinted rubber path that wheelchairs and walkers could follow to a treehouse entrance, a slide with a level-ground exit, sightlines that let supervising adults see the whole play area at once. Playcore Wisconsin took a unanimous second-place vote, praised for its creativity rather than its accessibility, with signature touches like oversized ant sculptures and a canoe rigged on springs to simulate a river trip. Two board members, Christina Muracco and Brian Smith, dissented from the majority.

Here's the part that hasn't made the rounds among people who just walk past the fence: when the matter reached the City Council on May 20, after a first round of hearings on May 6 from Community Services Director Chad Merritt and Deputy Director Aaron Hopkins, the council didn't ratify the board's top pick. On a motion from Councilman Barton, it selected Playcore Wisconsin's design instead, the one the board had ranked second. The design and construction contract was scheduled to come back for formal award at the council's June 17 meeting.

What isn't in any public record is a clean explanation for the switch. One detail that might matter: when the city polled residents on what they wanted most in the new playground, shade for the equipment and shade for the adults watching it ranked as the top two priorities, and Playmore's proposal reportedly covered only about half to two-thirds of the play area in shade. Whether that gap factored into the council's decision or the two priorities simply diverged for other reasons, the meeting record doesn't spell it out.

What Nobody Has Confirmed Yet

Timelines are where this gets genuinely useful for anyone planning around the park. Playmore West's own proposal estimated an April 2027 completion date, and that estimate assumed its design was the one moving forward. With the council instead awarding the project to Playcore, there's no public completion date on record for the design that actually won. If you're the kind of resident who's been checking the city's project page every few months hoping for a reopening date, the honest answer right now is that one hasn't been published.

Here's how the process has moved so far, month by month:

Nearly a full year passed between the closure and the council's design decision alone. Construction hasn't been dated publicly as of this writing, which is worth knowing before you tell your kids the new playground is coming "soon."

The Rest of the Park Never Stopped

Here's what a lot of the closure conversation misses: Cambier Park's other programming hasn't paused for a single Saturday while the playground fight played out at City Hall. If you live in Old Naples and use the park for anything other than the swing set, your fall calendar looks close to normal.

• The Third Street South Farmers Market runs every Saturday from 7:30 to 11:30 a.m., a few blocks from the park, and this season it's marking 30 years since its 1994 founding with an Arte Viva showcase spotlighting Latin food vendors alongside its usual roster of nearly 60 growers and merchants.
• Art in the Park, the Naples Art Institute's juried outdoor art fair running continuously since 1957, returns to Cambier Park on Saturday, November 28, 2026.
• The Naples Artcrafters Fine Art & Crafts Show sets up monthly on Saturdays from November through April, free to attend, right in the same grounds.
• The bandshell keeps its usual acts: the 19-musician Naples Big Band under director James Castaldi and the roughly 80-member Naples Concert Band, which has been performing in the park since 1972.
• The 5th Avenue South Halloween Spooktacular, the neighborhood's long-running family event held annually on the Saturday closest to Halloween, is scheduled for Cambier Park on October 31, 2026, with Evening on 5th following from 5 to 8 p.m. along the avenue.

None of that required the playground to reopen. The park's identity as a gathering place was never really about the swing set, even if the swing set is what everyone with young kids notices first.

Where the Kids Have Actually Gone

For families who do need somewhere to let toddlers run, the city has pointed to five other public playgrounds while Cambier stays closed, though not all of them are guaranteed to stay open either. Fleischmann Park and Baker Park both have creative playgrounds that remain available now. Charlie C. Anthony, Lowdermilk, and River Park playgrounds are also slated for upgrades that were part of the same April 21 advisory board session, which means some of them may close on a rotating basis in the months ahead. If Cambier's yearlong process is any indication, a City Hall bureaucratic timeline and a family's Saturday morning plans don't always move at the same speed.

The Takeaway for Anyone Who Lives Near the Park

The story here isn't really about a broken playground. It's about how long a straightforward civic replacement can stretch once accessibility, budget, aesthetics, and a council vote all pull in slightly different directions, and how a neighborhood's daily rhythm survives that stretch anyway. The farmers market didn't skip a Saturday. The Big Band didn't cancel a season. The Halloween crowd will still show up on October 31 whether or not there's a slide behind them.

That kind of steadiness, more than any single amenity, is what makes a place like Old Naples worth paying attention to over the long run. Nick Solimene has spent his life in these streets, watching how a neighborhood absorbs a slow city project without losing its character, and that kind of ground-level familiarity is exactly what informs the way he talks with clients about the area, whether they're already living a few blocks from Cambier Park or thinking about it for the first time.

If you want the kind of neighborhood read that goes past the headline stat, reach out to Nick Solimene. Let's Connect.