On the third Thursday of the month, Historic Bridge Street closes to through traffic for a few hours, string lights go up outside Bridge Street Bistro, and Sun Down Get Down turns four blocks of Bradenton Beach into a slow crowd of neighbors carrying drinks between the shops. That has happened every month for years, and it is still happening this fall. Just down the road, a different kind of activity is starting on the same corridor: after seven years in design, the Florida Department of Transportation is set to break ground on a new Cortez Bridge this September, according to an August 13 report from Your Observer's Longboat Key desk.
Those two things landing in the same season, the party and the construction crews, is why the question keeps coming up at Tide Tables and in neighborhood group chats. Is Bridge Street about to get cut off? Is this the year the drive over gets bad enough to just stay home?
Based on what FDOT and Manatee County have actually published, the answer is more specific, and less alarming, than the rumor.
What Actually Starts This September
Phase 1 of construction focuses on building new roadway approaches on the north side of the existing bridge. Per Your Observer's reporting, traffic will not be halted while that happens. Instead, lanes at both bridge entrances shift slightly to the south, giving crews room to work on the north side without closing the crossing. The current 1956 drawbridge, now in its 70th year of service, keeps operating through the shift.
That distinction between a shift and a closure matters more than it sounds like it should. A lane shift means slower merges and some cone-dodging near the Cortez Road intersection. A closure would mean detouring north over the Anna Maria Bridge or looping through Longboat Key, adding real minutes to every trip on or off the island. FDOT's plan calls for the first option, not the second, for the length of the project.
The full build is expected to run about 1,200 days, roughly three years and four months, based on reporting from last November. This is not a project that appeared out of nowhere. Manatee County spent much of 2025 relocating water and sewer lines that were attached to the underside of the old bridge, work that wrapped by spring 2026 to clear the way for the bridge contractor. A federal magistrate judge also ruled against a group of plaintiffs who had challenged FDOT's fixed-span design, a decision that removed the last legal obstacle before crews could mobilize.
Bradenton Beach Mayor John Chappie has been public about the upside once the work is done:
"The bridge is going to help traffic off the island, I think, a lot more than it will coming onto the island. It's safer because traffic will be able to flow easier, with less opportunity for people getting upset in traffic."
The Bridge Being Replaced Is Older Than Most of Bridge Street's Businesses
The current Cortez Bridge is a two-lane bascule drawbridge, meaning it physically opens for tall boats, with a vertical clearance of just 17 feet when closed. Any vessel taller than that stops both lanes of car traffic for the length of the swing. The replacement is a fixed span with no moving parts at all.
| Current Cortez Bridge | New Cortez Bridge | |
|---|---|---|
| Built | 1956 | Under construction, 2026 to 2029 |
| Type | Two-lane bascule drawbridge | Fixed span, no moving parts |
| Vertical clearance | 17 feet | 65 feet |
| Travel lanes | Two | Two, 12 feet each |
| Shoulders | None | Two, 10 feet each |
| Sidewalks | Narrow | Two, 10 feet each |
A 65-foot clearance means almost no boat on Sarasota Bay will ever force the bridge to stop car traffic again. For a town whose main commercial strip sits just up the road from the bridge, that is the quieter headline buried under the construction news: fewer stalled cars idling near Bridge Street once the new span opens, not more.
Who Actually Decided What the New Bridge Looks Like
The design didn't arrive from Tallahassee without local input. FDOT convened an 11-member Bridge Aesthetics Committee made up of Cortez and Bradenton Beach residents and business owners, including Karen Bell of Tide Tables, Joe Rogers of Seafood Shack, Mike Bazzy of Bradenton Beach Marina, Ann Marie Nichols of Room with a Hue, Jeff Vey of Bridgeport Condos, and Mayor Chappie. The group met between 2020 and 2024 and settled on a multi-column pier design with a waterline footing, plus a concrete barrier separating the roadway from wide sidewalks trimmed with blue metal railings in a wave pattern.
It is a bridge shaped by the same names attached to the marinas and storefronts it feeds, which is a different story than the one most drivers assume when they see a state DOT project sign go up.
The Real Risk Isn't the Lane, It's the Rumor
Ask around Cortez Village on the mainland side and the worry sounds different from the traffic-flow talk on the island. James Gowett, who has worked at the Star Fish Company for 25 years, told Bay News 9 in February that his real concern isn't the construction itself, it's whether people simply assume the island is inaccessible and stop making the drive. "People just won't be able to get here," he said. That's a perception problem more than a capacity problem. A construction zone at the foot of a bridge reads as closed even when both lanes are moving.
That gap between what's actually open and what people assume is closed is exactly what the Bradenton Area Convention and Visitors Bureau is trying to get ahead of. The organization is launching a third Gulf Islands Ferry route timed to the start of construction, giving residents and visitors a way onto the island that skips the Cortez Road corridor entirely. BACVB Executive Director Elliott Falcione described the expansion as a direct response to the project's timeline, a way to give people more options while the crossing is under active work rather than waiting to react once traffic backs up.
What This Means for Your Next Sun Down Get Down
For now, the monthly rhythm on Bridge Street doesn't change. The third Thursday street party still runs beach to bay, Bridge Street Bistro still seats its sunset crowd on the third floor for gulf views, and Island Time Bar & Grill still opens onto the sidewalk below it. If you're planning a night out this fall and want a buffer, two moves are worth making: budget a few extra minutes for the lane shift near the bridge entrances, and keep the new ferry route in mind if you're coming from off-island and would rather skip Cortez Road at peak evening hours altogether.
The bigger change is still a few years out, when the fixed span opens for good, the drawbridge stops stalling mid-block traffic, and the Anna Maria Bridge to the north eventually gets its own overhaul, with FDOT expecting to open bidding on that project in July 2028. Bridge Street's evening crowd will look the same as it does tonight. Getting there just gets a little more predictable.
Renne' Rupp and the team at FL Home Collection track every infrastructure project, zoning question, and construction timeline that touches the barrier islands, because knowing what's actually happening on the ground, not what the group chat assumes, is part of knowing this market well. If you're curious how a project like this affects a specific block on Anna Maria Island, reach out anytime.
