Drive down Harrison Avenue on a Saturday morning right now and you'll see orange barrels, a chain-link fence around what used to be the Civic Center lot, and a stretch of empty pavement where the farmers market used to set up. It's easy to look at that and assume the whole downtown waterfront packed it in for the season. A neighbor asked me last week if "the marina" was even open anymore.
Here's what's actually true: Panama City doesn't have one marina under construction. It has two, on completely different timelines, run by completely different people, plus a park project that pushed a farmers market a few blocks away. None of it closed the restaurants with their own docks. None of it touched the events calendar. If you've been avoiding downtown because it feels torn up, you've been skipping the parts that are still fully open while missing the parts worth paying attention to.
Two Marinas, Not One
The Downtown Marina at 1 Harrison Avenue and the St. Andrews Marina at 3151 W. 10th Street both took real damage from Hurricane Michael back in 2018, and both are mid-rebuild in 2026. That's about where the similarities end.
The Downtown Marina rebuild has been the more public fight. The city spent much of late 2025 and early 2026 negotiating a public-private partnership with a group called City Marina Partners, then walked away from it. In June 2026, commissioners voted to close out that arrangement and reimburse the partnership close to $100,000 for work already completed, according to WJHG. Instead, the city put the first batch of wet slips, somewhere between 44 and 50 depending on the source, out to competitive bid on its own in April 2026, with WJHG reporting that City Manager Jonathan Hayes hoped to have a contractor recommendation ready for the commission's first July meeting. Just the slips themselves were estimated at $4.5 million, and once you add water and sewer lines, electric, stormwater upgrades, and a promenade, the full first phase was pegged at more than $10 million, according to mypanhandle.com's coverage of a city commission meeting. The design concepts residents are reacting to, extending Harrison Avenue into the marina and adding an amphitheater, came out of a workshop covered by WJHG in April, following a January 2026 series of charrettes that drew more than 200 residents and planning professionals, per the city's own progress report.
The St. Andrews Marina is a quieter story with a longer runway. Built in the early 1960s, it remains open throughout its own renovation, and as of April 1, 2026, management of the facility shifted to a new operator, Coastal Marina Management, per the city's marina page. Then on June 23, 2026, commissioners approved a cost-plus contract to rebuild the bulkhead. City Manager Hayes told WJHG that the city's permit to complete the work runs through the end of July 2027, and that if the project stays on schedule, the new marina could be finished in about 18 months from that June approval, putting a realistic finish line somewhere around the end of 2027. Hayes also has personal history there.
"My family has been in the St. Andrew's area for over 100 years and so really excited about the continued rebuild, around all of our city, but this marina is kind of a special part in the heart of my family."
Two marinas, two contracts, two contractors, two finish lines. If you've been waiting for "the marina to reopen" as a single event, that's not how this plays out. The Downtown Marina slips could be under construction before St. Andrews' bulkhead work even wraps.
Where the Market Actually Went
If your Saturday routine used to include the farmers market and you showed up to find it gone, you were probably looking at the wrong park. Panama City actually runs two.
The Market at St. Andrews, the waterfront one under the oaks, hasn't moved and isn't affected by any of the marina work. It's still every Saturday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., at Oaks by the Bay Park, where it's been since May 2022, according to the Historic St. Andrews Waterfront Partnership. Produce, local honey, crafts, live music when a performer volunteers their time. Same spot it's always been.
The market that actually relocated is the original Panama City Farmers Market, which used to run out of McKenzie Park downtown. McKenzie Park is under its own construction right now, unrelated to either marina project, and on March 10, 2026, the city commission voted to make Harrison Avenue the market's permanent home going forward rather than a temporary detour. Per the city's farmers market page, the market will rotate between two sections of Harrison Avenue throughout 2026 while keeping McKenzie Park free for other Saturday events. So the market you might have lost track of didn't close. It just moved a few blocks and picked a permanent address.
The Restaurants With Their Own Docks Never Missed a Weekend
This is the part that gets lost when people see marina construction and assume the whole waterfront dining scene is on hold. Most of Panama City's best dock-and-dine spots don't depend on city marina infrastructure at all. They have their own docks.
Harrison's Kitchen & Bar sits right on the Downtown Marina property and takes in the construction view along with the bay view, but it's open, with live music every Sunday and its own dock out front for boaters, according to Destination Panama City's dock-and-dine guide. Bayou Joe's is a different story entirely. It's on Massalina Bayou, a separate body of water from the marina basin, and boaters can pull straight up to the restaurant's own dock regardless of what's happening downtown, per the same guide. Uncle Ernie's Bayfront Bar & Grill, housed in a historic waterfront home with a two-level outdoor deck, has its own dock too.
None of these businesses answer to the city's construction schedule. The infrastructure being rebuilt is the public slip and bulkhead system. The private docks that get you to dinner were never part of that project.
What's Actually Worth Putting on the Calendar
With the construction noise sorted out, here's what's genuinely coming up in Historic St. Andrews and downtown over the next few months, per Destination Panama City's events page and event listings for the district:
- Saturday, August 29: St. Andrews Play Music on the Porch Day, the Keep St. Andrews Salty way, starting at 3 p.m., with musicians playing on merchants' porches around the district.
- Friday, September 25 and Saturday, September 26: Downtown Panama City Volksmarch, a craft beer and German food walking tour through downtown pubs and eateries.
- This fall: Downtown's Oktoberfest returns for its 38th year, one of the longer-running traditions on the city's calendar.
- October: Fright Nights kicks off its sixth year, a month of themed events around Downtown Panama City.
None of this requires a finished marina. It's happening on the sidewalks, porches, and storefronts that were never part of either construction project.
So What's the Actual Takeaway
The mistake locals keep making isn't wrong information, it's collapsing three unrelated projects into one story. The Downtown Marina rebuild is a city-run slip project on its own bid timeline. The St. Andrews Marina rebuild is a separate contract with a different manager and an 18-month clock that started in June. The farmers market move was McKenzie Park's construction, not the marina's. Treat them as one undifferentiated mess and you'll avoid a downtown that's mostly still open. Treat them as three separate things, each with its own finish line, and you can plan your fall around what's actually happening instead of what the orange barrels make you assume.
If you're the kind of person who tracks this stuff because you're thinking about where you might want to live once the dust settles, that's a different conversation, and one worth having with someone who's watching these projects as closely as the neighbors who live near them. Carly Sostheim and the Sostheim Group are in Panama City every week, watching which blocks are actually changing and which ones just look like it. Contact Us when you're ready to talk about what any of this means for your own address.
