The New St. Pete Pier

The Rogers Partners / ASD|SKY / Ken Smith Workshop design for the new St. Pete Pier creates a destination that embraces the Pier’s role both as an icon for the City of St. Petersburg and an integral part of the vitality of downtown – a place for tourists and the local community alike, one that honors its history, while establishing a new icon for a 21st century public place.

The reimagined St. Pete Pier is a 12-acre armature of rich, local, and destination-based programming adaptable over time as recreation and quality of life grow and change with generations. Activities are diversified through flexible planning and programming that elevates and establishes a sustainable relationship between the natural and built environments.

Diverse, unique spaces enable active and passive connections to the bay: a coastal thicket, wet classroom, tilted lawn, and places for dining, fishing, boating, and swimming. Hydrodynamic modeling was conducted, resulting in the introduction of a new artificial reef and breakwater, helping to create a naturalized beach frontage and produce calmed water, both enhancing recreational use and providing more suitable environments for marine animals and seagrass habitats. Organized as a linear cut through the uplands, the one-acre Coastal Thicket emerges alongside the pier to the education center. Establishing new microecologies, this landscape experience provides both an educational opportunity and a shaded passage from beach drive to the heart of the pier.

The Pier extends the city’s green necklace of downtown parks and activities over the water, out onto the pier. Rather than a singular and heavily programmed destination at the pierhead, our design is a platform for a multitude of smaller and more flexible programs and experiences for both tourists and the local community – from children to seniors, nature lovers to boaters, fishermen to fine diners. It is a hub for activity from start to finish.