Order a coffee at Anglin's Beach Café some Saturday morning and you'll notice the contradiction before you sit down. The café is open, busy even, tables spilling toward the boardwalk. Twenty feet past the last table, a chain link fence wraps the entrance to Anglin's Pier itself, closed to the public since a chunk of it gave way into the Atlantic in November 2022. The café never stopped serving. The pier it sits beside hasn't reopened in nearly four years.
For anyone in Bermuda Riviera who treats that stretch of beach as the natural endpoint of a walk or a bike ride, this isn't new information. What's new is the paperwork. The Town of Lauderdale-By-The-Sea has now published its most specific rebuild timeline yet, and it's worth understanding not because the pier is finally coming back, but because the timeline itself explains why "just fix it" has failed for nine straight years.
Nine Years, Four Deadlines
The pier's owner, Fisherman's Pier Inc., has been chasing a moving repair date since Hurricane Irma first tore into the structure in 2017. Here's how that chase has actually gone.
| Year | What the timeline said | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 2017 | Hurricane Irma damages the pier | No permit filed for repairs |
| 2019 | Repairs due to be complete by March | Deadline missed, fines begin at $250 a day |
| 2022 | Repairs ongoing under permit | Hurricane Nicole collapses roughly 80 feet of the structure in November |
| 2024 | Owners' attorney tells the town commission construction "should begin" by summer 2026 | Redesign submitted for federal and state review |
| 2026 | Town's published timeline: a federal permit expires March 14, a new one is anticipated in April, bidding opens in May, construction targeted for July | All of those target dates have now passed, and the town's public page has no confirmation yet that ground was broken on schedule |
That last row is the one that matters right now. It's also the one that should be read with some skepticism, because every prior row on this table represents a date that also once looked firm.
Why the Town Can Fine, But Can't Build
The mechanism behind the delay is simpler than the timeline makes it look. Anglin's is one of the few privately owned fishing piers in Florida, which means Lauderdale-By-The-Sea has no authority to repair it directly. The town can only apply pressure through code enforcement, which is why fines have been accruing at $200 a day for years, with certified penalties that had already climbed past $145,000 by mid-2023.
What the town can't do is force the pace of federal review. Attorney Robert Lochrie, representing the pier's owners, laid out the actual sequence to the town commission: applications go to the Army Corps of Engineers, then to state environmental regulators, then to Broward County, and only after all three sign off does the town get a say.
"It is a long process. There's a lot of environmental agencies that will be reviewing it."
That's not an excuse so much as a description of how a private structure in a federally regulated waterway actually gets rebuilt. Four different agencies, each on its own clock, each capable of resetting the whole schedule if a hurricane, a redesign, or a pandemic gets in the way. All three have happened at least once already.
The Date That's Different This Time
So why did 2026 read differently than 2019 or the 2024 promise did? Because for the first time, the timeline attached a named federal permit with a specific expiration date, rather than a general promise to "begin work next year." The town's own project page lists permit SAJ 1993-30014 expiring March 14, 2026, with a new permit anticipated in April and contractor bidding opening in May.
Here's the part worth sitting with. Every one of those 2026 milestones, the March permit expiration, the April reissuance, the May bidding window, and the construction start the town had targeted for July, has already come and gone as of this writing. The town's public timeline hasn't yet posted confirmation that ground broke on schedule. Reporting from last year framed the realistic outcome this way: if that July start held and the two-year build stayed on schedule, the pier would reopen in summer 2028, eleven years after Irma first damaged it. Given a project that has already missed deadlines in 2019, 2021, and now possibly its own 2026 construction start, 2028 is worth treating as an estimate rather than a fact. Tom Ansbro, the special magistrate who has overseen the case through multiple hearings, put the toll on the project in blunt terms when a section collapsed in 2022.
"This has dealt a huge blow."
What's Actually Open While You Wait
The closure has reshaped how people in this pocket of the coast use their own neighborhood, and the workarounds are worth knowing even if you've lived here for years.
- Anglin's Beach Café has stayed open the entire time the pier has been closed. It's still the easiest coffee stop on that stretch of A1A, even with the fenced structure next door.
- The beach itself has a safety closure. The town has closed the area one block north and one block south of the pier to swimmers and fishermen, since the unsupported structure remains a hazard.
- Earl Lifshey Ocean Park, a short walk or bike ride south, is the calmer beach access point people have shifted toward, with fewer crowds than the pier ever drew.
- El Prado Park hosts a farmers market on Sundays, a rhythm that's held steady through the entire pier saga and gives the neighborhood its own weekend anchor independent of the beach.
- Galt Ocean Mile's restaurant row still absorbs most of the dinner traffic that would otherwise walk to the pier, from Casa Calabria's Southern Italian menu at Ocean Manor to the water views at Shooters Waterfront.
- Circuit, the free electric shuttle, still runs up and down the coast into Lauderdale-By-The-Sea, which is the easiest way to get to the café or the farmers market without moving a car.
None of this replaces what the pier offered. It's just what's actually available right now, and it's held steady long enough to become the neighborhood's default rather than a temporary substitute.
How to Use the Rest of 2026
If you're timing a visit to Anglin's around the pier reopening, don't. The town requires the owner's representatives to appear before a Special Magistrate roughly every three months with a status update, which means the most current information will always come from that hearing schedule rather than from a fixed calendar date. The town's own Anglin's Pier Timeline page is updated as those hearings happen, and it's the most reliable single source for confirming whether the March permit, May bidding window, and July construction start ever actually happened, since nothing public had closed that loop as of this writing.
In the meantime, the loop that's formed around the closure, café to farmers market to Galt Ocean Mile dinner, works fine on its own. It just isn't the loop this stretch of coast was built around.
If you're weighing what a longer horizon on the pier means for how this pocket of the coast lives day to day, or you're curious how nearby Coral Ridge or Fort Lauderdale Beach compare for the same kind of walkable, water-adjacent routine, Latitude Key knows this stretch of the coast block by block. Reach out and we'll walk you through what's actually changed here this year, not just what the headlines promised.
