Ask a longtime Harbor Inlet resident what's on the other side of the gate and for years the honest answer was: whatever you're driving toward. The guard shack on Harbour Inlet Drive opens straight onto SE 17th Street, and 17th Street has always been the road you use to get somewhere else, the beach, downtown, the airport five miles south. That changed this year, and not because a new restaurant opened. It changed because the property directly across the causeway just asked the city for permission to grow, and what it's asking for tells you more about this stretch of road than any menu could.
What Sits Across the Bridge
Pier Sixty-Six occupies 32 acres of the Intracoastal at 2301 SE 17th Street, close enough to Harbor Inlet's gate that residents watched most of its rebuild happen in real time. The resort reopened in January 2025 after a redevelopment reported at roughly one billion dollars, bringing back a 325-room hotel, a collection of private residences, and the spire-topped tower that has defined this skyline since 1965. Pier Top, the rotating rooftop lounge on the seventeenth floor, had sat stationary since Hurricane Irma damaged it in 2017. It's spinning again now, and the resort's general manager put the reopening in terms that fit a neighborhood, not just a hotel brand: "many locals have some memories here."
That line matters because it frames what came next. In May 2026, Tavistock Development Company, the group behind the resort, filed plans for a Phase II expansion covering roughly eight acres around the property, split between a 1.4-acre parcel on the north side of SE 17th Street and a 6.6-acre parcel to the south. The proposal calls for four towers rising 23 stories, about 270 feet, with a combined 339 residences plus office space, retail, and restaurants. One tower would rise on the north parcel. Three more are planned for the south side.
Why a Billion-Dollar Resort Wants to Cross the Street
Here's the part worth sitting with. Pier Sixty-Six already built everything a guest could want inside its own fence line: twelve dining concepts, a 164-slip superyacht marina, a spa, three pools. A resort that size usually has no reason to look past its own gate. Its whole business model is keeping people inside.
Instead, Phase II asks for something a self-contained resort doesn't need: new pedestrian connections tying the north and south sides of the property together, an expanded waterfront promenade, and a public gathering space built beneath the 17th Street bridge in partnership with the City of Fort Lauderdale and the Florida Department of Transportation. Tavistock also wants to carve out roughly an acre on the south parcel for a new water basin, adding marina access rather than just adding rooms.
None of that reads like a company protecting its footprint. It reads like a company that watched the street around its own gate become worth claiming. When the developer with the deepest pockets on the corridor starts negotiating for sidewalk space and a plaza under a highway overpass, that's a signal the street changed first and the buildings are catching up.
The Stretch Between the Gate and the Bridge
The corridor's older anchors haven't gone anywhere, and that's part of what makes the new additions notable rather than disruptive. Southport Raw Bar, Boatyard, and Gilbert's 17th Street Grill have been serving this stretch for years, alongside 15th Street Fisheries on the Stranahan River, the kind of dockside spot regulars return to specifically because it hasn't changed. These are the places a Harbor Inlet resident already has on speed dial.
What's new is what's filling the space around them. Down the street at 1075 SE 17th, Hula Kai Tiki Bar is opening as a two-story tropical concept from James Flanigan, the operator behind Quarterdeck, with a pan-Asian menu that includes:
- Crispy duck
- Crab Rangoon
- Bang bang shrimp
A few blocks further, Dave's Hot Chicken is bringing an approximately 2,000-square-foot fast-casual location to 1306 SE 17th Street. Neither of these is a resort amenity. Both are street-level businesses betting that people walking this corridor now have somewhere to stop besides the marina gate.
What the Old Version of This Street Actually Was
It helps to be specific about what's being replaced, because the old version of 17th Street wasn't empty. It had Southport, it had Boatyard, it had the Whole Foods at the Federal Highway intersection with its own parking garage. What it didn't have was density, the sense that you could walk from one destination to the next without getting back in the car. A resort that keeps its restaurants inside its own gate doesn't create that. A tiki bar with its own two-story build on the public side of the street does.
Pier Sixty-Six's own marketing describes its location as two miles from the beach, four miles from Port Everglades and Brightline, and five and a half miles from Fort Lauderdale International Airport. Harbor Inlet sits inside that same radius. The distances that make the resort convenient for a guest are the same distances that make the corridor convenient for a resident who already lives a few hundred feet from the gate.
What Changes on an Ordinary Tuesday
The practical shift for someone who already lives behind that guard shack is smaller than a zoning filing but easier to feel. A Tuesday that used to mean driving past 17th Street to get to dinner somewhere else can now mean stopping on 17th Street instead, at Southport for something familiar or at Hula Kai for something new, without crossing the causeway bridge into beach traffic. Pier Top is open again for a drink with a view that didn't exist in this form eighteen months ago. Pelican Landing, a dockside spot at the resort serving conch fritters and cold beer, is set to open in fall 2026 as one more reason to walk toward the water instead of past it.
None of this required Harbor Inlet to change. The gate, the guard house, the roughly one hundred homes along the finger islands, all of it looks the same as it always has. What changed is what's on the other side of that gate, and the clearest evidence isn't the restaurant count. It's that the company with the most reason to keep everyone inside its own property line just asked the city for permission to build a public plaza under a bridge instead.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a specific address inside the gate, Annerley Dal Bianco tracks this corridor block by block, not just the headline projects. Request a private consultation to talk through what the next year of construction on 17th Street actually means for your street.
