Every night a show lets out at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, the crowd crosses the same stretch of open asphalt that has served as parking since long before The Bay existed as a park. Bay Park Conservancy staff have a blunter name for that patch of pavement: the biggest source of runoff pollution on the entire 53-acre site, since nothing on it catches stormwater before it reaches Sarasota Bay. This October, while The Bay marks its fourth anniversary with a month of free programming, that same parking lot is in the middle of disappearing.
That is the detail worth knowing if you already treat The Bay as part of your week rather than somewhere you research before a visit. The anniversary calendar gets the headlines. The construction underneath it is the actual news.
Four Years, Still Not Finished
The Bay opened along Sarasota Bay in the fall of 2022 with a promise its founders kept repeating: One Park for All, free and open to everyone. By mid-May 2026, the park's people counters had logged 1.15 million visits. Heading into this fall's anniversary month, Bay Park Conservancy put the running total above 1.2 million, which means close to 50,000 additional visits landed in under five months, well outside peak season. For a park serving a city of roughly 58,000 residents, that pace is what Mayor Debbie Trice pointed to when she called the count extraordinary.
The park still is not half built. Founding CEO AG Lafley has described planning each new phase as building a layer cake, one layer at a time, and that framing explains why a park already logging over a million visits a year still feels like a work site in places. Phase 2 wrapped its Promenade along North Tamiami Trail in 2025. Phase 3, covering the boat basin, a possible performing arts center, and the last stretch of shoreline, is still in design.
What the Anniversary Actually Celebrates
The fourth anniversary runs October 1 through November 1 under the name "One Park FOUR All," with more than 70 free events. Six signature dates anchor the month:
- Salsa & Sunsets Community Celebration, Oct. 7 — live music and a dance floor to open the month.
- The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Oct. 9 — an outdoor screening under the stars.
- Park-toberfest, Oct. 11 — live oompah-style music, cornhole, and the return of the chicken dance.
- Boo! at The Bay Family Halloween, Oct. 17 — costumes, trick-or-treating, and a family movie.
- Taste of The Bay, Oct. 25 — dishes from locally owned restaurants, curated by Sarasota-Manatee Originals.
- Best of The Bay Music Fest, Nov. 1 — an all-day close to the month with regional talent.
The calendar runs deeper than those six dates. Hispanic Heritage Month programming is already underway, including Pura Vida Weekend on September 26 and 27, a mix of movement, mindfulness, and cultural activities for adults and kids. Between now and November 1, the fuller schedule adds movie nights, yoga sessions, guided kayak tours, and dance classes, most of them free and none of them requiring a reservation you have to plan around weeks in advance.
The Ground Is Literally Rising Under the Celebration
A five-month, $10 million project handled by contractor Jon F. Swift began this spring near the Van Wezel and along the Centennial Park shoreline. Its job is to raise that low, flood-exposed stretch of ground nine feet above sea level using oolite, a quarried coral stone trucked in from south Florida, then use the new elevation to build a rain garden designed to filter the parking lot's runoff before it ever reaches the bay. Oolite blocks double as new seating along the water. A row of palms planted as a windbreak lines the walkway that will circle the garden.
If the five-month timeline announced this spring holds, most of that work wraps right around the same weeks the anniversary calendar runs, which means the finished rain garden and the finished Salsa & Sunsets dance floor could realistically debut within days of each other.
This is a separate, smaller project from the bigger swap Bay Park Conservancy disclosed the same month: eventually the entire 700-space, eight-acre Van Wezel lot gets replaced by a one-acre parking garage, freeing the rest of the ground for green space tied to a possible future performing arts center. That larger trade is still years off. What is actually finishing this fall is the immediate fix, the one aimed at what Bay Park Conservancy COO Diana Shaheen has called the Number One polluter on the site.
A 62-Year-Old Name Comes Back This Month
The Cultural District's new gathering space, the stretch of ground between the Municipal Auditorium and the Art Center along Van Wezel Way, also opens this October. Bay Park Conservancy is naming it simply The Plaza, and the choice is not new. In April 1964, then-mayor Herschel Mayo dedicated that same ground as Plaza de Santo Domingo, honoring Sarasota's sister city in the Dominican Republic. At the dedication, Mayo called it "the very hub of our civic life."
Reviving that name is a small signal with a bigger meaning. This is not a brand-new amenity built from an empty lot. It is a return of civic function to ground the city already understood as a gathering place six decades before parking took it over.
How to Actually Get There This Month
Construction on the Town Square runs through October and affects pedestrian routes between the newer parking lot on North Tamiami Trail and everything west of Van Wezel Way, including the park itself, the Van Wezel, and Holley Hall. A few things make it easier:
- Walking and biking: Van Wezel Way and the multi-use path in front of the Blue Pagoda and Municipal Auditorium along US-41 stay open north to south through the construction.
- Parking: free lots remain open along Boulevard of the Arts and in front of the Van Wezel, Municipal Auditorium, and Blue Pagoda. Short-term drop-off sits at 1055 Boulevard of the Arts, and overflow street parking spills into the Rosemary District just east of North Tamiami Trail.
- Transit and micromobility: Sarasota Breeze Transit stops sit on Boulevard of the Arts and North Tamiami Trail, and Veo scooters and bikes corral along Boulevard of the Arts for anyone coming from downtown on two wheels.
- One thing to avoid: parking spots marked for Sarasota Orchestra events are off limits even when the rest of the lot looks open, and it is worth building in a few extra minutes for the detoured pedestrian route while the Town Square construction wraps.
What This Fall Actually Marks
Go for Park-toberfest or Taste of The Bay if that is what draws you out. But the more useful thing to notice, if you already live near enough to treat this park as part of your routine, is that the version of The Bay you got used to over four years is mid-change. The parking lot that has always been the price of admission is turning into the thing meant to protect the water it used to pollute. The Plaza reclaiming its 1964 name suggests Sarasota is not building a new park so much as finishing one that started decades before anyone broke ground on Phase 1.
A city that keeps rebuilding its public spaces without erasing what came before them is worth paying attention to, whether you are counting visits to a park or thinking further out about where you want to plant roots. Start your Florida lifestyle search. Contact The Paxton Group.
