"For anybody outside of a car, we had nothing over the Howard Frankland, nothing."
Christine Acosta, a founding member of the advocacy group Walk Bike Tampa, was talking about the bridge that carries most of Beach Park and Sunset Park traffic toward Clearwater and the beaches. She wasn't describing a design flaw. She was describing an absence. For the entire life of the Howard Frankland Bridge, a walker or a cyclist standing at the edge of this neighborhood had exactly one way to cross Tampa Bay without a car: the Courtney Campbell Trail, a paved path that runs alongside the causeway itself, not the bridge. That changed earlier this year, with a shared-use path planned for the new southbound span of the Howard Frankland, the first dedicated crossing in the bridge's history.
That's one construction project touching this stretch of the Westshore district. The other is happening less than two miles away, at International Plaza and Bay Street, where Simon Property Group is in the middle of the mall's largest rebuild since it opened in 2001.
Neither project waited on the other. Both land inside the same twelve months. Together they say something about how Beach Park and Sunset Park connect to the rest of the bay that a single ribbon-cutting wouldn't.
Bay Street Is Under Construction While You're Still Eating There
International Plaza announced in February 2026 that it would undergo a major redevelopment, part of a $250 million investment Simon Property Group is making across International Plaza and two of its other shopping centers. At International Plaza specifically, the plan includes a 50,000-square-foot open-air expansion and a rebuilt version of Bay Street, the mall's outdoor dining and retail wing.
The scale is worth putting in context. International Plaza carries more than 170 stores and roughly 30 restaurants, anchored by Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Dillard's, and Dick's House of Sport, with Bay Street itself built around Restoration Hardware, The Capital Grille, The Cheesecake Factory, and Bar Louie. Against that footprint, the nine new brands arriving this year are a small slice of the whole. Most of what's familiar about a trip to Nordstrom or Neiman Marcus isn't changing. What's changing is the outdoor wing.
BRITTO, the lifestyle brand built around artist Romero Britto's work, opened July 11. Bissinger's Handcrafted Chocolatier, a family chocolate company with roots back to 1668 in Paris, and Rowan, an ear-piercing and jewelry studio, are both already open. Vuori's activewear store was slated to land next door to TravisMathew by August. By fall, the roster grows to include Dolce & Gabbana, Roberto Coin, Edikted, Kendra Scott, and both a Pottery Barn and Pottery Barn Kids, several of them opening their first Tampa Bay location anywhere.
The name worth knowing if you've lived here longer than a season is Ceviche Tapas Bar & Restaurant, which was slated for a summer opening on Bay Street. Ceviche has operated in Tampa Bay since 1997, longer than International Plaza has existed, and its new location fills the space that used to be Alma Restaurant & Bar. The group behind it, Caledon Concepts, also runs Rococo Steak and picked International Plaza specifically to give the tapas brand a spot inside the mall's growing dining lineup rather than a standalone building elsewhere in Tampa. For a neighborhood where dinner reservations already default to Bay Street, that's less a new restaurant than an old one changing addresses.
None of this happens without some friction on the drive there. The rebuild sits inside the broader Westshore Interchange project, a $643 million overhaul of where I-275, the Veterans Expressway, and State Road 60 converge, which broke ground in January 2026. Some of that construction runs along the frontage roads feeding the interchange, including a stretch of Cypress Street closed around the clock into 2027. Getting to Tampa International Airport or catching I-275 from this side of the district may take more patience this fall than it did last year, and the project's later phases aren't funded until 2030 and 2032, so this isn't a one-season disruption.
The Bridge That Finally Has a Sidewalk
The Howard Frankland's new shared-use path runs on the bridge itself, parallel to the interstate lanes, which makes it the shortest way to cross the bay on foot or by bike rather than the longest way around it. Before this year, that trip meant driving or riding the slower route along the Courtney Campbell Causeway instead.
The causeway trail isn't new. It has run alongside Courtney Campbell for years, connecting Hillsborough and Pinellas counties along a path wide enough for joggers, cyclists, and families with strollers. The route starts near Ben T. Davis Beach, a stretch of sand and picnic tables that also happens to be the first sight of Tampa Bay for anyone landing at the airport, and it's the same access point Beach Park riders already use to start that ride today.
What's changing is the far end. A pedestrian overpass over State Road 60, expected to open by the end of 2026, will connect the causeway trail to Clearwater's Bayshore Trail without forcing riders onto the shoulder of a state highway to make the link. Right now, that gap is the one place where an otherwise rideable route across the bay dumps cyclists into traffic. Once it closes, and with the Howard Frankland path now part of the crossing, someone leaving Beach Park on a bike has two full ways across the water that don't require a car, for the first time since either bridge was built.
FDOT planners describe projects like these as a shift in how the region thinks about crossing water at all, not just how it moves cars across it. Applied to this stretch of the bay, that shift means a bridge that has carried nothing but vehicle traffic for its entire existence now carries people on foot too.
What Actually Changes on a Saturday
Nothing about the Publix run changes. Grady Elementary is still Grady Elementary, and West Shore Park is still where people take their kids on a Saturday morning. Sunset Park's own streets, laid out just south of Beach Park and still named after poets the way they've been for decades, aren't part of either construction zone.
What changes is the shape of two specific trips. Beach Park's boundaries run from Kennedy Boulevard on the north to Beachway Drive on the south, with Tampa Bay forming the entire western edge, which puts most of the neighborhood within a few minutes of both projects without sitting inside either one. Getting to Bay Street for dinner this fall might mean routing around a Cypress Street closure that wasn't there last year, in exchange for a Ceviche location that's closer than its old spot ever was. Getting across the bay for a bike ride used to mean the causeway trail or nothing. Now it means a second option that didn't exist for the entire time this neighborhood has been here.
Two projects, one year, and neither one asked the other's permission before starting.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a Beach Park or Sunset Park address you already own, or one you've had your eye on from a distance, Louis Acevedo tracks projects like these as part of the job. Schedule a call anytime you want the ground-level read on how it plays out.
