On June 26, 2025, Wendy Easton posted to the Black Eyed Pig BBQ Facebook page that the restaurant would close on July 26. The lease at 5307 Shirley St. ran through December 2026, she wrote, but circumstances she didn't spell out made selling the business or moving it somewhere else impossible. Almost seventeen years after Carl Osburn opened the place in October 2008, tucked into an industrial park just north of Pine Ridge Road, it was over. Osburn had died of pancreatic cancer in July 2023, a week shy of his sixty-fourth birthday, and left both Black Eyed Pig and his other spot, Franklin Social, to Easton. Franklin Social closed in 2024. Black Eyed Pig lasted one more year before Easton had to let it go too. She thanked the staff by name: JP, Ammy, Maegan, JD, Kaitlyn, Brittany.
No rendering. No groundbreaking ceremony. No press release with a completion date. Just a Facebook post and a closed sign on a barbecue joint that fed the industrial corridor's lunch crowd for the better part of two decades, known for a hoagie stacked with pulled pork over a smoked Italian sausage link and collard greens that Gulfshore Life once singled out in its Best of the Gulfshore issue.
That's how the middle of Pine Ridge Road loses something. Quietly, with a Facebook post, no fanfare.
The two ends of the road are having a very different year.
Two Groundbreakings, Three Weeks Apart
In early January 2026, Genesis of Naples broke ground on a standalone luxury dealership at the intersection of Pine Ridge Road and Interstate 75, the road's eastern reach. The Zellers family, who trace their presence in Collier County's auto business back to Arlie Zellers launching Tamiami Ford in 1973, is building a 12-acre campus with more than 30,000 square feet dedicated to Genesis sales, service, and customer space. It will replace the brand's current arrangement of sharing a showroom with Tamiami Hyundai. The project had been stalled since a planned 2025 start, held up by a roadway easement dispute with a neighboring property owner that took months to untangle.
Three weeks later, on January 28, construction started at the road's other end. The Carnelian, a 70-room boutique hotel, and Sterling's Club, a private membership space attached to it, broke ground at 5400 Trail Blvd. on U.S. 41, directly across from Waterside Shops, which sits at the western terminus of Pine Ridge Road. The site used to be the Bowland Beacon bowling alley, closed and razed in late 2024. Local entrepreneur Phil McCabe and his sons Joseph and Philip are developing it, with all suites at club level and a public restaurant on site.
Here's the comparison, side by side:
| Genesis of Naples | The Carnelian & Sterling's Club | |
|---|---|---|
| Location | Pine Ridge Road at Interstate 75 | 5400 Trail Blvd., across U.S. 41 from Waterside Shops |
| Former site | Vacant land | Former Bowland Beacon bowling alley, razed late 2024 |
| Scale | 12 acres, 30,000+ sq. ft. | 70-room hotel and private club |
| Groundbreak | Early January 2026 | January 28, 2026 |
| Expected opening | Early 2027 | Late November 2027 |
Neither project is small. Neither is aimed at Pine Ridge Estates residents specifically, since a car dealership and a boutique hotel serve a regional market, not a single neighborhood. But both sit on the same road, at its two opposite ends, and both broke ground inside the same month. That hasn't happened before on this corridor, at least not in a way that put a literal bookend on both directions of a single drive.
Why the Middle Doesn't Feel It
Pine Ridge Estates is bordered by U.S. 41 to the west, Goodlette-Frank Road to the east, Vanderbilt Beach Road to the north, and Pine Ridge Road to the south. It has no HOA and no gate. Lots run from one to several acres under a canopy of mature oaks, and the county's zoning has kept it that way for decades, which is exactly why a hotel groundbreaking at the neighborhood's own western corner and a dealership groundbreaking miles east on the same road can happen without a single tree coming down inside the neighborhood itself. The construction is real. It is also, architecturally, someone else's project on someone else's parcel.
What residents will actually feel is smaller and more specific than a skyline change. It's traffic patterns on both ends of the road they use to leave the neighborhood, one direction toward the interstate, one direction toward U.S. 41 and the beach. It's watching a familiar structure, the old bowling alley, disappear and something unfamiliar rise in its place by late 2027. And it's noticing that while all this construction activity concentrates at the two far points of the road, the one everyday, unglamorous business that actually served the middle of the corridor for lunch closed with no replacement announced.
That's the asymmetry worth sitting with. Big capital moves toward the ends of the road, where visibility and traffic counts justify a dealership or a hotel. Small, everyday commerce in the middle, the kind that doesn't need a rendering or a groundbreaking photo, is more fragile. Black Eyed Pig didn't lose a bidding war to a developer. It lost its owner, then its second owner's ability to keep going. Nobody built anything to replace it, because nobody has a reason to build a barbecue joint in an industrial park when the land isn't the constraint, the labor of running a small restaurant is.
What Hasn't Moved at All
Set against two years of groundbreakings and one closure, a few things on Pine Ridge Road haven't changed and aren't likely to:
- The Pine Ridge Road Farmers Market still runs every Sunday, year-round, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the corner of Pine Ridge and Livingston roads, in the plaza anchored by Starbucks and First Watch. Produce, flowers, baked goods, and local vendors, same as it's been for years, pets welcome.
- Clam Pass Park is still about 1.8 miles from the neighborhood by bike, with its free tram and a three-quarter-mile boardwalk through a mangrove forest that Collier County has maintained across 35 acres of coastal habitat for as long as most residents can remember. Nobody is redeveloping the mangroves.
Those two things anchor the weekly rhythm of living here more than either of the two big projects will, at least until 2027, when both open. A Sunday morning at the farmers market and a bike ride to the boardwalk are the parts of Pine Ridge Estates life that a car dealership or a hotel groundbreaking simply doesn't touch.
What to Watch For
Both projects are still more than a year from opening. The Genesis dealership is targeting early 2027, and The Carnelian is aiming for late November of that same year. Between now and then, expect construction traffic and staging at both ends of Pine Ridge Road, more visible near U.S. 41 given The Carnelian's proximity to Waterside Shops than at the I-75 end, where the dealership site had more room to work with from the start.
What's worth watching in the middle of the corridor is whether anything moves into the old Black Eyed Pig space before that December 2026 lease deadline passes, and whether any other small operator on Shirley Street or along Pine Ridge Road follows the same path. The road's two ends are getting capital. Its middle is where the neighborhood's actual daily errands happen, and that's the part with no announced future yet.
If you live in Pine Ridge Estates, none of this changes the acre of oak canopy behind your house or the quiet of a non-gated street with no HOA newsletter. It does change what you'll pass on your way out. Two ends of the same road, moving in the same direction at the same time, while the middle waits to see who fills the gap.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a property here, or you're trying to understand how a corridor like Pine Ridge Road affects value on a specific lot, Mario Furillo can walk through it with you. Let's Connect.
