If you have lived in North Port long enough, you have probably written off two of its biggest landmarks without meaning to. Warm Mineral Springs has been "getting renovated" since before most people can remember a specific timeline, so it is easy to assume the buildings will sit behind construction fencing forever. And CoolToday Park empties out every March when the Braves head north, so it is easy to assume nothing happens there again until February.
Both assumptions are wrong this month, and the reason matters more than a typical roundup of local happenings. One of these places just crossed from planning into an actual construction phase after years of false starts. The other has quietly built a weekly calendar that has nothing to do with baseball. If your mental map of North Port still treats these as a closed spring and a shuttered ballpark, it is worth updating before the rest of the season fills back in.
The Spring Everyone Assumed Would Never Get Fixed
Warm Mineral Springs has a longer history of near misses than most people realize. The city put the full building renovation out to bid back in 2020, but construction costs came in too high to move forward. Then Hurricane Ian hit, and what had been a partial closure of the restrooms and a failing roof became a full shutdown of the Admission Building, the Spa Building, and the Cyclorama, the three structures architect Jack West designed for the park in the 1950s.
That changed this summer. On July 7, 2026, the North Port City Commission passed a $4,082,133 budget amendment on second and final reading, closing the funding gap between the $12.6 million already set aside and the project's revised guaranteed maximum price. That brought the total project cost to about $16.7 million. Twenty days later, on July 27, city leaders marked the actual start of construction, not another vote or another design phase, but crews breaking ground on the historic renovation of the Admission Building and a hybrid renovation of the Spa Building, alongside floodproofing and utility upgrades.
Parks and Recreation Director Sandy Pfundheller framed it this way in a city release:
"This investment reflects the city's ongoing commitment to preserving one of North Port's most significant historic and natural resources while enhancing the experience for residents and visitors."
City officials have not published a construction completion date, so if you are used to walking past the trailers and temporary facilities on the property, that will keep being true for a while longer. What is different is that this is no longer a stalled plan waiting on money. The water itself has stayed open through all of this, and the park continues to draw an estimated 150,000 visitors a year even in its current, partially mothballed state. The difference now is that the buildings around that water finally have a funded, in-progress path back to use.
The Ballpark Nobody Thinks Is Open In August
CoolToday Park is easy to file under "closed until spring training" if your only association with it is the Atlanta Braves' Grapefruit League games in February and March. But the park runs a real weekly schedule through the summer, built around the Superior Pools Tomahawk Tiki Bar & Grill in the left field corner, which stays open six days a week year round according to the Braves' own facility page.
Here is what that looks like most weeks in August, based on the park's current events calendar:
Day | What's Happening |
|---|---|
Wednesday | Trivia Night at the Tomahawk Tiki Bar |
Thursday | Suncoast DJ Bingo at the Tomahawk Tiki Bar |
Selected weekdays | Free Florida Complex League Braves games, the club's summer minor league team playing at CoolToday Park |
Late August | A back-to-school send-off with live music, a hot dog eating contest, wiener dog races, and a kids' splash zone |
None of this requires a spring training ticket. The FCL Braves games are listed as free admission, and the tiki bar's weekly programming runs independent of whether there is a game on the field at all. If your image of the ballpark is a locked gate from March through January, that image is a few years out of date.
Saturday Or Sunday: Two Different Weekend Markets
North Port residents who like a weekend market actually have a choice now, and the two options serve different purposes. The Shop Local North Port Market runs Saturday mornings at the high school, with the produce and crafts mix rotating week to week depending on which vendors show up. It reads as the more neighborhood version of the two.
The Fresh Harvest Farmers Market runs Sundays, year round, in Downtown Wellen Park, and it functions more as an anchor for that newer, master planned part of the city, with a steadier vendor lineup tied to Wellen Park's own commercial buildout. Between the two, a resident could realistically make farmers market shopping a two day habit without repeating the same walk twice.
Two New Names On US-41
The restaurant corridor along US-41 has added at least two names worth knowing this year. Anna Maria Oyster Bar opened a new North Port location off US-41, a large format space at more than 7,000 square feet with over 220 seats, a raw bar and shucking station, and two private dining rooms. It is the kind of opening that signals a restaurant group betting on North Port's growth rather than testing the water with something small.
Mako Coastal Kitchen has also opened recently, with a simpler seafood and burger menu that has drawn early attention from regulars who pass it on their daily routes. Neither of these erases the fact that North Port's dining scene is still smaller than Punta Gorda's or Port Charlotte's, but both point in the same direction as the ballpark and the springs: things that were empty lots or empty buildings a couple of years ago are filling in.
How To Use What's Left Of August
The common thread through the springs, the ballpark, and the restaurant corridor is timing. Construction at Warm Mineral Springs has started but has no announced finish date, which means the park will look different by next summer without anyone being able to say exactly when the change happens. The tiki bar's weekly calendar and the free Braves games are running now, before the fall crowds and the eventual return of spring training season change the rhythm of the place. The Saturday and Sunday markets are both operating on their normal schedules, with no seasonal gap to worry about.
If you have been meaning to see what construction actually looks like at the springs, or catch a free FCL Braves game before the season wraps, or figure out which farmers market fits your Saturday better, the next few weeks are a reasonable window to do it without waiting on anything else to open first.
North Port keeps changing in ways that reward paying attention to specifics rather than assumptions. That is true of the springs and the ballpark this month, and it tends to be just as true of the local housing market, where the headline number rarely tells you what is actually happening street by street. If you are ever curious how any of this local momentum, the Wellen Park growth, the US-41 corridor, the renewed investment in city landmarks, is showing up in what homes are actually selling for around North Port, Chadwick Knight puts together a free home valuation and market consultation for exactly that kind of question.
