Anyone who drives First Street past Centennial Park has watched the same building sit dark for more than a year. The parking lot that used to fill up for boiled crab and sunset drinks has been quiet since Joe's Crab Shack closed when its lease ran out in May 2025, as Gulfshore Business reported. Now there's construction fencing, new landscaping going in, and a name on the permits that a lot of Fort Myers regulars already know from the other side of the bridge: Nellie's Boatyard.
The short version is that Len and Tyler Lemmer, the father-and-son team behind Nervous Nellie's on Fort Myers Beach, are converting the old Joe's Crab Shack building at 2024 W. First Street into their fourth Southwest Florida restaurant, with a targeted opening by the end of 2026. The longer version, the one worth knowing if you actually live near this stretch of the Caloosahatchee, is why this particular building keeps getting handed to whoever is betting biggest on downtown Fort Myers, and why the Lemmers are pitching it as a place for locals rather than a once-a-year destination.
A building that has only changed hands twice in forty years
Restaurants on waterfront property tend to churn. Leases expire, concepts flame out, national chains rotate through the same storefronts every few years. This particular building has not worked that way. It went up in 1984 as a Chart House steakhouse, ran under that name for nearly two decades, and then became Joe's Crab Shack in the early 2000s, where it stayed until last year's lease expiration. Two tenants, one building, more than forty years. Local reporting has traced a restaurant back on close to this same stretch of river for nearly a century, which is a strange thing to say about a city that has otherwise rebuilt or repurposed most of its downtown waterfront more than once.
That kind of staying power tells you something about the site itself. It sits on the Caloosahatchee, right next to Centennial Park, at the edge of what is now the Legacy Harbour redevelopment. It is not inside a hotel, not gated behind a private marina club, and not stuck on a strip of Cleveland Avenue traffic. For a city that has spent the last few years adding hotel rooms and high-rise plans to First Street, this remains one of the few spots where you can walk up, sit down, and watch the river without a room key.
Ten companies wanted this lease
If you assumed a building that sat empty for over a year must not have had much interest, the leasing story says otherwise. According to the brokers who represented the landlord, LQ Commercial Group's Mike Doyle and Michael Price, ten different companies were in the running for this exact space before the Lemmers won it. That is not the profile of a dead corner. It is the profile of a site everyone in Southwest Florida's restaurant business has been watching, waiting for the timing to work.
The pitch that won it was not simply "we'll put another seafood restaurant here." Tyler Lemmer, who will help run the new concept, put that ambition in concrete terms.
As Gulfshore Business reported, Tyler Lemmer said, "I want people to eat there three to five times a week, not just once or twice a year on special occasions. I want all the locals to feel good about coming here three times a week."
That is a specific bet: the Lemmers are building Nellie's Boatyard around the idea that enough people now live close enough to downtown Fort Myers to fill a 250-seat dining room on a Tuesday, not just a Saturday in February.
What's actually changing inside
The building itself is getting gutted more than it is getting refreshed. Len Lemmer has budgeted close to $1 million for the interior work, with Fowler Construction handling the buildout: new floors, a new bar, new bathrooms, all aimed at what Tyler Lemmer described to Gulfshore Business as a "polished coastal" feel rather than the theme-restaurant look Joe's Crab Shack carried for two decades.
A few specifics worth knowing before it opens:
- Seating for 250, plus a 40-seat circular bar
- A menu built around aged steaks and local seafood, with some fan-favorite dishes carried over from Nervous Nellie's
- 82 floor-to-ceiling windows facing the river and the new marina
- A staff of more than 100, run under a new entity the Lemmers formed called River District Restaurants
- A view Tyler Lemmer has called close to 200 degrees of open water, with the First Street bridge visible from the dining room
That window count matters more than it sounds like it should. The building's old footprint leaned into a dim, nautical-kitsch dining room. Eighty-two floor-to-ceiling windows is a deliberate reversal, a bet that the river itself, not a themed interior, is what should draw people back three nights a week.
The family behind it already has a track record here
This is not a first-time operator testing a new market. Len Lemmer moved to Southwest Florida from Melbourne and bought Cantina Laredo, next to Bell Tower in south Fort Myers, back in 2004, running it for two decades under L&S Restaurant Concepts. He and Tyler took over Nervous Nellie's in 2014, leasing the Estero Bay-front building on Fort Myers Beach for twelve years before buying the property outright this past July for $8.5 million. In between, the family opened Walk-On's Sports Bistreaux off Pine Island Road in Cape Coral in April 2025.
That timeline includes Hurricane Ian, which closed Nervous Nellie's for a stretch and put a real dent in the business before the beach's recovery brought crowds back. Len Lemmer has talked about those lean years candidly, the kind of stretch where a restaurant owner leans on relationships with lenders to get through a slow season. The point isn't the hardship, it's that the family kept the same restaurant running through it and came out the other side confident enough to buy the real estate and open a second, larger concept downtown in the same year.
What it means for the river side of Centennial Park
Nellie's Boatyard is one piece of a larger change happening on this same stretch of waterfront. It sits inside the Legacy Harbour redevelopment, which just finished a new 131-slip marina next door, the same view the new dining room's windows are built to frame. Longer term, the broader Legacy Harbour plan includes two 25-story mixed-use towers and a parking garage, though that phase is still ahead and not something happening this year.
For now, what changes for anyone who already lives near downtown is simpler than a redevelopment master plan. A building that has sat dark since last spring is coming back to life, the marina next to it now has slips instead of empty water, and by late this year there should be a place to walk or boat over to on a weeknight that is not trying to be a tourist attraction. Whether the Lemmers' bet on locals pays off the way it has on the beach side of the bridge is something the neighborhood will find out together over the next few dinners.
If you're the kind of person who likes knowing what's actually changing along the water before it shows up on a for-sale sign, that's the kind of local read Dr. Frank Dittschar likes to share. Reach out any time you want more of what's really happening in Fort Myers, Naples, and the rest of Southwest Florida.
