For most of eight decades, the snack bar at the south end of Casey Key was a retired Ybor City streetcar. Someone bought it in Tampa in 1946, floated or trucked it down to the jetty where the Intracoastal meets the Gulf, and a woman named Marilyn Sawyer turned it into a restaurant. She ran it for 31 years. When she retired, Sarasota County bought the trolley car itself and kept it going as a bait shop and snack counter, the kind of place where you'd grab a hot dog and a cold beer before walking out onto the jetty to fish.
It didn't make it through 2024.
If you live in Nokomis, you already know the trolley is gone. What's less obvious, unless you've been paying close attention to what the county has quietly rebuilt around it, is that North Jetty Park didn't come back the same way it left. It came back organized around a different idea of what survives a hurricane, and that idea is worth understanding if you spend any time on that stretch of Casey Key.
Two Storms, Fourteen Days Apart
Hurricane Helene hit the trolley car on September 26, 2024. Two weeks later, on October 9, Hurricane Milton finished the job. Both storms brought the kind of surge that doesn't leave much room for negotiation with a wooden structure sitting close to sea level, and by the time the water receded, the trolley car that had fed the jetty since the Truman administration was beyond repair. Sarasota County removed what was left of it at the end of February 2025.
The dock and observation deck that once extended off the trolley had already been stripped away years earlier, back in 2017, after a run of tropical storms made clear they couldn't hold up either. So in a sense, 2024 finished a story that had been unfolding since at least 2016.
What Survived, and Why That Matters
Here's the detail that actually explains the recovery timeline. In 2014, ten years before Helene and Milton, the county built a separate, more modern snack bar and restroom facility at North Jetty, set on higher ground than the trolley car had ever occupied. When both hurricanes tore through, that building came out largely intact. The trolley, sitting lower and built to a much older standard, did not.
That gap in elevation is the reason North Jetty didn't sit empty for years. The county wasn't rebuilding from nothing. It had a structure standing, permitted, and ready to lease. A new tenant, North Jetty Grill, moved into that surviving building and reopened on March 1, 2025, just under five months after Milton came ashore. Compare that to the South Jetty across the inlet in Venice, which took a harder hit. Local reporting from early 2025 estimated it could stay closed for a year or more, a timeline North Jetty never came close to needing.
The lesson isn't really about one restaurant. It's that the newer, code-compliant building at North Jetty functioned as a kind of insurance policy the older structure never had, and the difference in how fast each side of the inlet came back traces directly to that decision made a decade earlier.
What's Actually at North Jetty Right Now
If you haven't driven out to 1000 S. Casey Key Road lately, here's what you'll find:
- North Jetty Grill, open daily, operating out of the county's 2014 concession building, serving the same kind of casual beach fare (tacos, burgers, cold drinks) the old trolley used to.
- Jetty Rentals, run by Joey and Lindsey, who have operated the kayak and paddleboard rental business at this exact spot since January 2017. They've now weathered both Hurricane Ian and the 2024 storms without closing for good, which says something about how a small water-sports business plans for risk in a place like this.
- Public restrooms and a kayak launch on the Intracoastal side, both part of the same surviving building.
The concession operation appears to run under Shark Tooth Beach Concessions, which also handles the food and drink stand up at Nokomis Beach proper, a mile or so north. That's a small but telling sign of consolidation. Two beachfront concessions that used to feel like separate, independently run stops are now under one operator, which likely made it easier to staff and supply both locations after two straight storm seasons thinned out the pool of businesses willing to operate this close to the water.
What's Changing Before Winter
North Jetty isn't finished changing. Sarasota County has a dune walkover replacement project underway at the park, and a staging area closure tied to that work began as early as June 10, 2026, and is expected to run through fall 2026. The kayak launch just north of the staging zone stays open the entire time, so Jetty Rentals customers aren't affected, but anyone walking to the beach from that specific parking area should expect the detour to still be in place this fall.
Farther north, on the same Legacy Trail system that runs through Nokomis Community Park, the county finished a new six-foot pedestrian sidewalk running parallel to the main trail between Beneva Road and Shade Avenue, with a ribbon-cutting on March 31, 2026. It's not at North Jetty itself, but it's part of the same 18.5-mile trail that plenty of Nokomis residents ride north into Sarasota, and it separates walkers and slower riders from the growing number of e-bikes on the path, which is worth knowing if you bike that stretch regularly.
Closer to home, mark your calendar for September 19, 2026. That's the date of the International Coastal Cleanup at North Jetty Beach, one of the more direct ways to see the current state of the shoreline up close and put in an hour or two helping keep it that way.
The Ritual That Never Missed a Season
A mile north of the jetty, at Nokomis Beach, the drum circle hasn't skipped a beat through any of this. Every Wednesday and Saturday, roughly an hour before sunset, drummers and dancers gather near the lifeguard tower the way they have since around 2000. No organizer, no ticket, no building that can wash away. It started as a handful of people and grew into one of the more recognizable traditions on this part of the Gulf Coast, and it's a useful reminder that not everything that makes this stretch of Casey Key feel like home depends on a structure standing.
The trolley car did depend on a structure, and that structure is gone. What replaced it wasn't a downgrade so much as a different bet: elevated construction, an operator who could absorb two hurricane seasons in a row, and a park that keeps finding ways to reopen faster than the damage suggests it should. If you've walked out to North Jetty recently and wondered why it feels different but not diminished, that's the reason.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of Nokomis is actually worth, or just want a clearer read on how this corner of Sarasota County has held up through the last two storm seasons, Bonnie Schiavone knows this neighborhood block by block. Reach out and let's talk about what's changed, and what hasn't.
