Drive west on First Street past the Caloosahatchee and you will pass a building most people in Fort Myers have eaten at without ever knowing its name. According to Business Observer, it has worn two names in four decades and sat behind a chain-link fence for most of the last year. If you have wondered what happens next to that stretch of riverfront, the answer just became public, and it is bigger than a restaurant swap.
A building with one address and two identities
The structure at 2024 W. First St. went up in 1984 as a Chart House, the kind of dark-wood, water-view seafood house that anchored a certain era of Florida dining. It held that identity for nearly two decades before Joe's Crab Shack took over the space in 2003, trading white tablecloths for buckets of crab legs and a louder, more casual crowd. Joe's ran there for over twenty years. When its lease expired in 2025, the restaurant closed, and the building went quiet for the first extended stretch in its history.
That is the part most people already know, because it is the part you can see from the road. What comes next is where the story gets more interesting than a simple tenant change.
What's actually going in
Southwest Florida restaurateur Leonard Lemmer plans to open Nellie's Boatyard on the site in late 2026. Lemmer is not a newcomer experimenting with a first concept. He already operates Cantina Laredo in Fort Myers and Walk-On's Sports Bistreaux in Cape Coral, and in July 2026 he bought the property behind Nervous Nellie's on Fort Myers Beach outright after leasing it for twelve years. Nellie's Boatyard will carry some of that beach restaurant's most popular menu items to the mainland, which tells you the concept is less an experiment and more a proven format finding a second location with better road access and a bigger footprint.
In his own words, Lemmer described taking on the space as revitalizing a building with a storied history rather than erasing it. That framing matters, because the building's two previous chapters were both single-tenant restaurants competing for the same lunch and dinner crowd along First Street. Nellie's Boatyard is being built around something the Chart House and Joe's Crab Shack never had.
The part the fence doesn't tell you
The restaurant sits inside a larger project called Legacy Harbour, and the restaurant is only one piece of it. The redevelopment includes a new 131-slip marina, with Nellie's Boatyard positioned to overlook it directly. Beyond the marina, the broader plan calls for two 25-story riverfront residential towers and a parking garage on the same stretch of waterfront.
That changes what this corner of First Street is actually becoming. A restaurant that replaces a restaurant is a footnote. A restaurant built to overlook a 131-slip marina, with two residential towers rising behind it, is a different kind of anchor. The building spent four decades facing the road. What it faces next is the water, and the boats that will soon be tied up along it.
For anyone who has walked or driven this stretch for years, the mental map probably still treats it as one restaurant lot among several along the river. That map is about to be out of date. The marina alone will bring a different rhythm to the block, more boat traffic idling toward slips, more foot traffic moving between docks and the restaurant's outdoor seating, a different kind of activity than the parking-lot-to-front-door pattern that defined the Chart House and Joe's Crab Shack years.
What Lemmer brings with him
It helps to know the rest of what Lemmer runs, because it tells you what kind of operation is likely to open here. His current portfolio includes:
- Cantina Laredo in Fort Myers
- Nervous Nellie's on Fort Myers Beach, which he purchased outright in July 2026 after leasing it for twelve years
- Walk-On's Sports Bistreaux in Cape Coral
That is not a portfolio built on quiet, low-turnover dining rooms. It leans casual, coastal, and volume-friendly, the kind of format that tends to do well next to a working marina rather than a quiet residential street. If Nellie's Boatyard performs the way its sibling concepts have, the new marina slips are likely to fill with boats belonging to people who plan to walk straight from the dock to a table.
What this means for the rest of the year
Construction on a project this size does not move in a straight line, and Lemmer's own statement gave a target of late 2026 for opening, not a specific date. What you can reasonably expect between now and then is a construction site that stays active on that block, fencing that will likely persist through the fall, and a marina buildout that will change how the water itself looks before the restaurant ever seats a guest.
If you are the kind of resident who takes an evening walk along First Street or drives it on the way to dinner elsewhere, this is worth watching rather than ignoring. The building you have driven past for years without a second thought is being repositioned as the public face of a marina and a two-tower residential project, and that kind of repositioning tends to reshape a block gradually and then all at once. The seafood house feel of the Chart House years and the bucket-of-crab-legs energy of the Joe's Crab Shack era are both giving way to something built explicitly around slips and boat traffic instead of parking spaces.
None of this requires you to do anything except pay attention. The building is not disappearing. It is changing what it is facing, and that is a more permanent shift than a new sign out front.
A note from Potter Trinity
We follow projects like Legacy Harbour closely because our work sits at the intersection of construction, permitting, and the coastal communities our clients call home. A marina buildout next to a residential tower project is exactly the kind of development that reshapes property values and daily life along a waterfront corridor, sometimes years before the first slip is occupied. If you are watching this stretch of the Fort Myers riverfront and wondering what it means for a home you already own or one you are considering, Potter Trinity is glad to walk through what we are seeing on the ground. Schedule Your Consultation whenever you are ready to talk it through.
