For most of the last decade, if you lived east of Collins Avenue and walked past the old Newport Beachside Hotel on your evening loop, the pier behind it was scenery. You could see the pilings from the sand, watch a few anglers cast lines at sunset, maybe wander out for photos when out-of-town family visited. But the hotel itself felt closed off, a fixture from another era that residents drove past rather than into. That changed this past November, and the shift is worth understanding on its own terms, not as a real estate story but as a change in how the neighborhood actually spends its evenings.
The pier didn't get better by accident. It took a full ownership overhaul, a name change, and a renovation large enough to make national trade press before the neighborhood's most recognizable public landmark started functioning like one again.
A pier that survived three near-deaths before this one
The Newport Fishing Pier stretches 776 feet into the Atlantic at Sunny Isles Beach Boulevard and Collins Avenue, and it is, as of this writing, the last remaining public fishing pier in Miami-Dade County. That fact alone should reframe how residents think about it. This isn't one amenity among many along the Collins corridor. It's the only structure of its kind left in the county, and it has nearly disappeared at least three times.
Built in 1936, the original wooden pier aged into a safety hazard by 1980, and county officials began discussing demolition. A historic designation in 1982 bought it time, and in 1985 the Newport Beachside Hotel's owners struck a deal with the state to lease and restore it, reopening it a year later after more than a million dollars in repairs. Hurricane Wilma tore through in 2005 and damaged the structure badly enough that engineering firms deemed it unsafe again. The city and the hotel split the cost of a full rebuild, roughly $6.5 million total, with the hotel contributing $2 million in exchange for the pier being deeded to the city as part of what's now called Pier Park. It reopened in 2013 after eight years shuttered.
That history matters because it explains why the pier's public identity has always been tangled up with whoever owned the hotel behind it. When the hotel felt tired, the pier felt tired by association, even though the structure itself belonged to the city. Fix the hotel, and you fix how the whole corner reads to someone walking by.
What $42 million actually changed
That fix arrived under HB Capital Group, which took on a $42 million renovation and rebrand of the Newport Beachside property, working with Florida-based architecture and design firm EoA Group. The result, now called The Sunny, opened to guests on November 1, 2025, ahead of the February 2026 completion date that trade press had reported when the renovation was first announced. Reviews on Tripadvisor as recent as August 2026 confirm the property is fully operating, drawing a 4.5 rating across more than a hundred recent reviews, so this isn't a renovation still working out its kinks. It's been open and functioning for ten months now.
The part that matters for residents isn't the room count. It's what happened to the ground floor.
The historic pier is now anchored by Sandbar at Newport Pier, an oceanfront bar built directly onto the pier structure itself and marketed explicitly as a shared space for hotel guests and neighborhood regulars.
Sandbar's own description leans into that mixed crowd, and the reviews back it up. Regulars mention bartenders by name, describe trivia nights, and treat the place the way you'd talk about a corner bar rather than a hotel amenity you'd only visit on vacation. That's a different relationship than most beachfront hotel bars manage to build with the people who live three blocks away.
The renovation's announced plans go further than Sandbar. According to reporting on the project, the full food and beverage lineup was designed to include:
- Sandbar at Newport Pier, the oceanfront bar on the pier itself
- VIVA!, a Mexican-American restaurant from chef Ray Garcia
- Lovebirds Café, a grab-and-go breakfast and coffee counter in the lobby
- The Newport Room, an adults-only lounge
Sandbar is the one with a live menu, current hours, and a year of resident reviews behind it. The others were part of the renovation's stated plan when it was announced, and residents checking them out in person, rather than taking a construction-era press release at face value, is the honest way to treat any new opening before it has its own track record.
The rest of the loop, pier to plate
None of this means Sandbar is the only reason to walk that stretch of Collins. It's just the one that changed most recently. The corridor around it has quietly built out a real dining scene over the past couple of years, and residents who've been eating the same three places on rotation are missing some of it.
Il Mulino New York, the fine-dining Italian spot on Collins, has become the kind of place locals book for anniversaries and visiting parents rather than a spontaneous Tuesday dinner, with a prix fixe lunch that runs considerably lighter than the dinner tasting menu if you want the experience without the full price tag. A few minutes south, Mykonos Kitchen & Bar has built its identity around dock and dine access, letting boaters pull straight up to a private marina slip and walk into a Mediterranean dining room without ever touching a parking garage, which says something about how much of daily life here still runs on the water rather than the road. And at Solé Miami, BALEENkitchen keeps a rotating oceanfront menu going through the shoulder season, with happy hour running 5 to 7 p.m. most evenings, a detail worth knowing if you're trying to time a walk with a drink.
None of these are new discoveries for anyone who's lived here a while. But strung together with the reopened pier, they sketch an actual evening route that didn't quite exist in this shape two years ago.
Where to walk it off
The pier sits inside Pier Park, which functions as one of the main public beach access points along this stretch, with a small metered lot and a lifeguard station during operational hours. It's a short walk from Heritage Park, a four-acre spot with a splash pad, playgrounds, and a Veterans Wall that tends to draw families in the late afternoon once the direct sun backs off. If you'd rather not deal with parking at all, the city runs a free shuttle connecting Sunny Isles Beach to Aventura, Hallandale, and North Miami Beach, which is an easy way to string together an evening that starts at the pier and ends somewhere else entirely.
None of this required a hotel renovation to exist. The parks were already there. What changed is that the anchor point at the north end of that walk, the pier itself, stopped feeling like it belonged to someone else's guests and started feeling like it belonged to the block.
That's a small thing to notice about a neighborhood, but it's the kind of detail that tells you something a median price never will. A landmark that survived a hurricane, repeated brushes with demolition, and a decade of feeling closed off finally has a bar on it that locals treat like their own. Worth a walk out to the end of it this fall, if you haven't yet.
If you're weighing what a corner like this means for property in Sunny Isles Beach, whether you already own here or you're watching the market from a distance, Urdapilleta Real Estate can walk you through what's changing block by block. Schedule a private consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
