"You've got to be kidding me."
That is what restaurateur Rick Doody told his landlord on a Friday afternoon in May, the same day Naples' newest hotel welcomed its first guests two steps from his front door. Four years of permits, redesigns, and one state mediation later, Doody thought he had finally cleared the way to put tables on the sidewalk at the corner of Third Street South and Broad Avenue. Instead he got a phone call, then a termination letter, then silence.
If you live in Olde Naples, you already know the building. It sits at the edge of everything, the new hotel on one side, the shops of Third Street on the other, and it has looked exactly the same for as long as most residents can remember: handsome, restored, and completely empty.
A Deli, Then Nothing
The building at 1148 Third St. S. went up in 1921 and spent its early decades as something close to the entire civic apparatus of a young town. It has served at various points as Naples' first town hall, its first movie theater, a doctor's office, a library, and a church, along with hosting the city's earliest council meetings. That kind of resume is rare for a building this size, and it is part of why the Camalier family, who bought the property in 1983 for $550,000, pursued a full historic restoration rather than a teardown once plans won approval in 2010. The work uncovered pine timber trusses that had been hidden behind a ceiling for decades.
The last business to actually operate there was Fantozzi's of Olde Naples, a deli, wine, and cheese shop that closed in 2006. Since then, the building has sat vacant while a wave of change moved through the rest of the block around it, including the demolition of the old Third Street Plaza in 2021 and its replacement, the Olde Naples Hotel, which finally opened this year on the same corner.
The Deal That Looked Like a Sure Thing
In 2022, the Camaliers signed a lease with Rick Doody, an Ohio restaurateur with a genuine track record in this exact kind of project. Doody co-founded the Bravo Brio Restaurant Group in 1992 with his brother and sold it in 2018 for about $100 million. His family has run Lindey's, a Columbus institution, for more than four decades. He and his wife have owned a second home in North Naples' Kalea Bay condominiums for years, which made him a known quantity rather than an outside operator chasing a trend.
The plan called for a classic American grill in the mold of Lindey's, something Doody described as built to last for generations rather than to chase a season. It later evolved into JoJo's Bar, a high end Italian American steakhouse concept from his restaurant group, NCR Ventures. Either way, the pitch was the same: a permanent, upscale anchor for the corner, matched to the building's history rather than working against it.
There was one condition attached to all of it. Doody was clear that the restaurant needed outdoor seating to compete on a street where nearly every other dining room in Naples has a patio. That single requirement turned into the entire story of the last four years.
Four Years of Parking Math
The Olde Naples Building has no parking of its own. It predates the city's incorporation and the rules that came with it, which makes it a legal nonconforming structure rather than a code violation, but that status did not settle the fight over what the building is allowed to do next. In June 2023, Naples City Council voted down an outdoor dining application for the property, citing parking requirements. The Camaliers, who by their own account had already spent 17 years working to bring the building back, pushed the dispute into a state process under the Florida Land Use and Environmental Dispute Resolution Act, which allows a special magistrate to weigh in when a property owner believes a local government decision unfairly burdens their land.
That magistrate, Derek Rooney, issued a report in December 2024 concluding the city's 2023 denial was unreasonable and recommending a compromise: a smaller outdoor dining footprint in exchange for demolishing part of the building's mezzanine to reduce its parking obligation. On paper, it read like the path to a resolution.
Instead, on February 5, 2025, City Council rejected that compromise outright, and did so unanimously. Doody found out from Camalier by phone and initially misread the outcome as approval, since a unanimous vote sounds like good news until you learn which way it went.
"It's unfortunate because it's a great corner, a great building and great potential," Doody said after the vote.
The fight did not end there. By Doody's account, the outdoor dining he had been chasing since 2022 finally got approved later that same year, and the approval came with a one-year grace period attached to his lease. After years of hearings, a magistrate's report, and a public reversal, the last obstacle standing between the Olde Naples Building and an open restaurant had cleared.
What Actually Changed in May
Then the hotel opened, and something about the corner's calculus shifted anyway.
Just five months into that one-year grace period, on the same day the Olde Naples Hotel welcomed its first guests, wrapping around two sides of the very building Doody had leased, Camalier called to say the family was reconsidering the restaurant plan. Four days later, Doody had a termination letter in hand. He still does not have a clear explanation.
Here is what makes the timing worth sitting with. The permit fight was supposedly the whole obstacle for three years, and by Doody's account it had finally been resolved in his favor. The lease died anyway, right as the hotel next door opened its own restaurant, Annie's Bistro, Bar & Bakery, presumably without needing a separate outdoor dining battle since that seating was already part of the hotel's own approved plan. For the first time since Fantozzi's closed, the family has a functioning food and beverage business of their own next door generating exactly the kind of foot traffic and street life that the vacant building's outdoor dining fight was supposed to deliver.
Doody has his own theory about what happened next. He described his original arrangement as below market rent in exchange for giving Camalier a 21 percent stake in the restaurant, the kind of structure he says he has used with partners before. Now he suspects someone else offered more straightforward economics.
"I don't know whether they have another tenant that they talked to," Doody said, adding that he believes another party may simply have offered more rent.
Whether or not that is exactly what happened, the sequence tells its own story. A landlord who spent nearly two decades fighting to activate one corner of that block now has a working answer to the same problem sitting a few feet away, under the same roof they already control. The four year old lease negotiated before any of that existed suddenly looks like the wrong deal at the wrong price, not because the building failed, but because the family's own hotel changed what the corner is actually worth to them.
What This Means If You Live a Few Blocks Away
For now, the practical answer for anyone who walks this stretch of Third Street is unchanged: the building stays as it has been for two decades, restored, handsome, and closed. Doody has said he believes he has rights under the lease and intends to pursue them, so this is not necessarily the end of the story, just the latest turn in it.
In the meantime, Annie's Bistro, Bar & Bakery runs morning through evening service inside the hotel next door, its dining room done up with murals, a piano, and a gilded ceiling. It is currently the closest thing this exact corner has to what Doody spent four years trying to build a few feet away.
Naples changes fast in some places and barely at all in others, sometimes on the same block. The building at Third and Broad has spent twenty years being the second kind. Whether that changes now depends less on permits than on what the family that owns both properties decides their own hotel just proved.
If you are thinking about your own place in this stretch of Naples, whether that means the value of a place you already own or what a move into the historic core would actually cost right now, Chiodo Group tracks the block by block detail behind stories like this one. Get an Instant Home Valuation to see where your Naples property stands today.
