Drive past 131 1st Street West this fall and the theater site still reads as a construction zone: chain-link, a stripped slab where the old multi-purpose room used to sit, Stevens Construction signage out front. It's the kind of view that makes a longtime resident assume the whole campus is still catching up from Hurricane Milton two years on. It isn't. Most of the Community Center of Boca Grande's rebuild is already finished and back in daily use. The one piece still visibly torn up, the new theater, is also the one piece scheduled to run the longest, which is exactly why it looks like the whole project stalled when it didn't.
The gap between what's done and what's still standing open is worth walking through, because the sequence explains a few things islanders have probably wondered about without connecting to the same source: why the Island School addition finished quietly last year, why the sand volleyball court isn't on the lawn anymore, and why the Historical Society is showing up in a building it didn't used to occupy.
What Hurricane Milton Actually Changed
Before Milton made landfall on October 9, 2024, the Community Center's renovation was already in the design phase, planned by Friends of Boca Grande as a set of updates meant to serve the various groups who use the campus. The storm hit the buildings hard enough that the scope had to change from cosmetic upgrades to structural fortification, and that revision is the reason this project has run longer and covers more ground than the original plan called for.
Friends of Boca Grande is funding the expanded work through what it calls the Renaissance Fund Campaign, a $15 million effort. More than $2.5 million of that has come from the Friends board and staff themselves, the kind of lead giving that typically has to happen before a capital campaign like this gets real traction with the wider donor base. Stevens Construction broke ground on the multi-phase work in April 2025, sequencing it deliberately so the campus could keep hosting programming while the buildings came apart and went back together around it.
The Parts Already Back in Use
This is the half of the story that doesn't show up from the road, because it's finished and therefore invisible. Over the past year and a half, several distinct pieces of the campus have gone from storm-damaged to fully reopened:
- The Dishong Bowen House, repaired after storm damage with a new plywood subfloor early in 2025, was back in use by June 2025.
- The Teacherage House followed the same path, with its own restoration wrapping up by November 2025.
- The Crowninshield Building, a 4,658-square-foot structure built in 1929, had its multipurpose room, foyer, restrooms and workroom renovated, part of preparing the building to become the new home for the Boca Grande Historical Society.
- The Island School's 2,520-square-foot addition, which added offices, a resource lab, counseling space and restrooms, broke ground in April 2025. Flood protection and new fire suppression systems, along with a tile replacement, followed and were finished by the end of this past summer.
- The Community Center's own East and West wings got a full structural repair, replacing damaged floor joists and pouring a new concrete slab under what used to be crawl space, then finishing the wings with terrazzo flooring. The West Wing restrooms were the first piece to reopen there, completed by November 1, 2025, with the broader wing project wrapping up by this past March.
Anyone who's used the Island School's new counseling room or the Crowninshield's renovated restrooms in the last year has already been standing inside the finished half of this project without necessarily clocking it as part of the same campaign that still has fencing around the old auditorium.
The One Piece Still Down
The visible construction right now is the new theater and auditorium, a 9,200-square-foot building designed to be fully handicap accessible with expanded seating, a larger lobby and updated audio-visual capability. Demolition of the old multi-purpose room to make way for it began in May 2026 and the project is scheduled to run through May 2027, which puts the campus roughly four months into a build that still has most of a year left.
It doesn't end there. Once the new theater is up, Friends of Boca Grande plans to remodel the existing Auditorium Wing into a multi-purpose room and fitness room, a second phase currently scheduled for April through October 2027. There's also unscheduled work still ahead: additional lifting, remodeling and restroom additions at the Teacherage and Dishong Bowen houses, plus a kitchen addition and new foundation work at the Crowninshield, both listed on the organization's own project page without firm dates yet attached.
So the honest read this fall is that the campus is roughly two-thirds finished by project count, with the largest single piece, the theater, still mid-build and not likely to wrap before next spring at the earliest.
Where the Volleyball Net Actually Went
If you've looked for the sand volleyball court on the Community Center lawn recently and come up empty, that's not storm damage. It's moved, on purpose, to 9th Street on the beach. Friends of Boca Grande has been upfront about why: pulling the court off the campus frees up green space for what they describe as a "campus quad," with new decking planned along the south side of the Crowninshield and the building that currently houses Boca Bargains, the History Center and the Art Center. The idea is to let those separate buildings read as one connected space rather than four institutions that happen to share a fence line.
It's a small relocation with an outsized effect on how the campus will actually feel once the theater work wraps. Right now it just reads as one more thing that's different. Once the new theater is finished, it's the detail that ties the whole plan together.
What This Means for the Season Ahead
None of this touches the rhythm most residents actually track, which is the Boca Grande Farm & Fish Market returning to the Ball Field on Wheeler Road each winter, its usual run of Friday mornings drawing the same mix of locals and seasonal residents back out after the quiet months. The market is its own separate tradition on its own field, unconnected to the Community Center's construction schedule, but the two are easy to think about together this year, because both are signs of the same seasonal return: one campus finishing its rebuild in stages, one market picking back up exactly where it left off.
What's actually true of the Community Center this fall is that the school, historic houses, restrooms and wings are back in service, though some additional work remains at several buildings. The part that still looks unfinished from First Street, the theater, is going to keep looking that way for a while yet, not because the project stalled, but because it was always going to be the longest single piece of a plan that's mostly already done.
If you're the kind of resident who likes knowing what's actually happening behind a construction fence, or you're weighing what a rebuilding season like this means for a legacy property near the village core, the Steffan Sieglaff Team keeps close track of exactly this kind of change on the island. Reach out anytime you want the real story behind what's going up, or coming down, around town.
