Walk out to the Newport Fishing Pier on any weekday morning and you'll still see the same thing you've always seen: a couple of regulars leaning against the rail with rods in the water, a jogger cutting through on the way to Samson Oceanfront Park, someone's grandkid asking why the pelicans aren't scared of people. What's changed is what's behind you. The hotel that's leased this pier from the state since the 1980s isn't the Newport Beachside anymore. It's The Sunny, and the rebrand that finished last November is the reason you've probably seen fencing, permit notices, or a slightly different lineup at the bar near the pier entrance this year.
None of that means the pier itself is going anywhere. If anything, the opposite is happening. The city and the hotel's new ownership are in the middle of quietly rebuilding the pier as two separate experiences that happen to share the same 776 feet of concrete: a free public fishing pier, and a paid hospitality lane running alongside it. That split isn't cosmetic. It's the direct result of a deal the city struck decades ago that the current owners can't simply walk away from, no matter how much the hotel around it changes.
The Rebrand You've Already Noticed
The Newport Beachside Hotel & Resort, a fixture on Collins Avenue since the late 1960s, spent most of 2024 and 2025 under construction as HB Capital Group carried out a full-scale transformation of the property. The Sunny opened its doors on November 1, 2025, which means as of this September it's been running under its new name for close to a year, long enough that the newness has worn off but not so long that residents have stopped noticing what's different. Florida-based architecture firm EoA Group led the redesign, and the finished resort carries 339 guest rooms, six food and beverage outlets, and more than 22,000 square feet of event space, according to hospitality trade coverage of the opening.
The dining lineup is where the change is most visible if you actually use this stretch of beach. The old Beach Bar concept is gone. In its place, the hotel has built out a Mexican-American restaurant called ¡Viva!, from chef Ray Garcia, along with a grab-and-go café and an adults-only lounge closer to the lobby. The pier restaurant itself, a spot most locals know as Sandbar at Newport Pier, is still standing and still open, but it's operating under a refreshed menu as of this year. Anyone who's ordered a Furikake Crusted Seared Tuna Salad there recently, priced at $29 on the current menu, is eating off a different card than the one that existed under Newport Beachside.
So far, this is the easy part of the story. A hotel changed hands, got a new name, and updated its restaurants. That happens up and down Collins Avenue every few years. What makes the Newport Pier different is that the pier isn't actually the hotel's to remodel however it wants.
The Deal Nobody Renegotiated
The pier dates to 1936, built by the Miami Beach Fishing Pier Company as a way to draw visitors to what was then an undeveloped stretch of sand. It survived, barely, through a rough patch in 1980 when the city considered it unsafe enough to demolish. A historic designation in 1982 bought it time, and in 1985 the owners of the Newport Beachside Hotel struck the arrangement that still governs the pier today: they leased it from the state and agreed to renovate it into a working attraction for fishing, shopping, and dining, in exchange for operating rights on the site. Hurricane Wilma tore it up again in 2005, and by 2012 the city had entered a formal public-private partnership with the hotel's ownership to rebuild it properly, on the condition that it remain what it had always been, the last public fishing pier left in Miami-Dade County.
That condition is the part that carries forward no matter who owns the hotel now. The pier isn't hotel property that happens to have public access as a courtesy. It's public infrastructure that a private owner is obligated to maintain, and that obligation didn't reset when Newport Beachside became The Sunny. Whatever HB Capital Group wants to do with the six restaurants, the pool deck, or the branding, the pier at the end of it still has to stay open, and it still has to stay free.
That's a genuinely unusual constraint for a luxury hotel rebrand. Most oceanfront resorts that upgrade their amenities get to decide who has access to them. This one doesn't get that choice on 776 feet of its own footprint.
Why a Walkway Instead of a Wall
The solution the city and the hotel landed on, laid out in commission filings from a 2025 hearing, is architectural rather than contractual. Instead of trying to negotiate away public access, or building some kind of gate that would inevitably draw pushback, the plan splits the pier physically into two lanes that run parallel to each other.
Phase one, already underway, redesigns the restaurant footprint at Sandbar so the dining room opens more directly toward the ocean, relocates the restrooms and back-of-house functions closer to the entrance, and updates the facade. That's the part that shows up as a new menu and a slightly different layout if you've eaten there this year.
Phase two is the more consequential piece, and it's still working through the approval process rather than sitting finished. The plan calls for a cantilevered pedestrian walkway along the south side of the pier, built specifically to separate anglers and people just passing through from the diners seated at the restaurant tables. City officials reviewing the proposal described the goal as protecting the pier's working character while giving the hotel room to run an "elevated Florida fish shack" concept alongside it, rather than instead of it. Later phases on the books address broader site improvements, shading structures, and updates to the surrounding pier park.
What that means in practice, once the walkway is actually built, is that you'll be able to fish, walk, or just watch the water from a public lane that never overlaps with the paid seating at the restaurant. Right now, the two uses still share the same walking surface, which is part of why the pier can feel crowded or oddly split between two different crowds depending on the hour. The engineering fix for that crowding is approved on paper. It hasn't finished construction as of this writing, which is worth knowing if you've been expecting to see a finished walkway and instead just see the same shared deck you've always used.
What Actually Changes for You This Year
If you use the pier the way most residents do, here's the honest version of what's different and what isn't.
- The pier is still free. The city's arrangement with the hotel's owners has always guaranteed that, and nothing about the rebrand or the current construction plans changes it.
- Sandbar is still open and still on the pier, just with a new menu and a slightly reworked dining layout from phase one of the redesign.
- The rest of the hotel's food and beverage lineup, including ¡Viva! and the new café near the lobby, sits inland of the pier and doesn't affect how you access it.
- The cantilevered walkway that will eventually separate fishing traffic from restaurant seating is approved but not finished. Expect the shared-lane feeling to continue for a while longer before that construction phase actually breaks ground.
- The pier's legal status as the last public fishing pier in Miami-Dade County isn't up for renegotiation. That's baked into the original 1985 and 2012 agreements, not something the current ownership group has any ability to unwind.
None of this is dramatic news, and it shouldn't be. The pier you've walked for years is being preserved, not phased out, and the changes underway are aimed at making the fishing side and the dining side coexist better rather than picking one over the other. It's the kind of project that moves slowly enough that most residents will only notice it in pieces, a new railing here, a construction fence there, until one day the walkway is just part of the pier and the crowding you used to navigate around isn't there anymore.
If you're weighing a move within Sunny Isles Beach or just trying to understand how a piece of public infrastructure like this affects the neighborhood around it, that's the kind of on-the-ground context Tayse Dantas tracks closely across Sunny Isles and the rest of South Florida's coastline. Let's Connect.
