Tonight, if you're anywhere near Beach Boulevard, you'll hear it before you see it. The Gecko Crawl and Poker Run kicks off at 4 p.m. today, August 9, general admission $30, poker-only tickets $10, the kind of low-stakes chaos Gulfport has been running every late summer since 2001. It's the second stop in what the Gulfport Merchants Chamber calls Gecko Season, a monthlong build toward GeckoFest itself on September 5. But ask around about where the Gecko Ball lands on August 29, and you'll get an answer that would have sounded strange five years ago: Stetson University's Gulfport campus at 1401 61st Street South, not the Casino Ballroom.
That's not a downgrade so much as a workaround. For thirteen years, since 2013, the Gecko Ball has been held inside the Historic Gulfport Casino Ballroom, the 1934 dance hall on Shore Boulevard that's spent most of its life as the closest thing this town has to a town square. This year the Ball moves because the Casino can't hold anyone. It's been fenced off since Hurricane Helene's storm surge shifted the building on its foundation in September 2024, and the repair math has only gotten longer since.
What The Repair Actually Costs
City officials put the damage at $3 million when they last gave a public accounting, and the fix isn't a simple rebuild. Because the Casino sits on the National Register of Historic Places, repairs have to clear the State Historic Preservation Office and the federal register process before construction even starts, stacked on top of the same insurance and permitting queue every other flooded building on the waterfront has been standing in. Demolition of the Casino's day docks, the piers boaters used to tie up at for a quick trip ashore, only began in July 2026, nearly two years after the storm hit. Gulfport's cultural facilities supervisor, Justin Shea, told Bay News 9 the goal now is to get people back inside the ballroom by late 2027 or early 2028, more than three years after the storm that closed it.
Shea has called it a lengthy process, but said the city intends to "get the dancers back in it enjoying the night here in downtown Gulfport."
That timeline is worth sitting with if you live near the waterfront. A building that anchored Gecko Ball for over a decade, hosted a hundred years of town meetings, and doubled as the default wedding venue for anyone who wanted a Boca Ciega Bay sunset in the background is now entering its third full year offline. The Ball's move to Stetson isn't a retreat from tradition. It's a sign of how much of the neighborhood's calendar has had to route around one missing room.
Two Reopenings, One Still Missing
Not every Gulfport institution is stuck on the Casino's clock. Hurricane Eddie's, the Shore Boulevard bar that's run live music long before Gecko Season had a name, reopened on March 12 after more than sixteen months of repairs, timed just ahead of the St. Patrick's Day crowd. The bar's general manager described water reaching five feet inside the building, with waves as high as seven, enough to wash the boat-shaped bar counter clear across the room and send the coolers out the back door, according to Tampa Bay's ABC affiliate. It's back now with the same weekly rhythm regulars remember: poker Mondays, bingo Tuesdays, karaoke Wednesdays, and a Thursday locals' night that knocks 15 percent off the tab for anyone who actually lives here.
Beach Boulevard also picked up a new anchor this summer. Sober Bar opened June 16 at 3062 Beach Boulevard South, in the 1,400-square-foot space that used to hold Anani Bistro. Owners Sean Hawthorne and Collin Horton built it to run two different lives in one room: espresso and matcha by day, a New Orleans speakeasy look after dark, none of it alcoholic. Hawthorne has said he found his way into the kava scene a few years back looking for the kind of community a kava bar offers without the hangover. Gulfport already had Low Tide down the block for that. Sober Bar is betting there's room for a second one, and the crowds since opening suggest there is.
Put those two openings next to the Casino's status and the picture gets clearer. The businesses that could rebuild on their own timeline, on their own dime, are mostly back. The one public building that has to answer to a federal historic registry before a single beam gets replaced is the one still sitting behind construction fencing.
The Season That Doesn't Stop
The parts of Gulfport that never closed are still running on the same clock they always have. The Tuesday Fresh Market still sets up on Beach Boulevard every week, trimming its hours through the hottest stretch of summer. First Friday Art Walk, which the Gulfport Merchants Chamber has hosted since 1993, still turns the same stretch of Beach Boulevard into an open-air gallery on the first Friday of the month, no jury fee for visitors, no cover, dogs welcome. And if a stroll down Beach Boulevard isn't enough walking for one evening, Gulfport Arts & Heritage runs guided tours of Clam Bayou Nature Park, the last natural estuary left on this stretch of the bay, tracing the fishing industry that worked those waters before restoration efforts took over.
The rest of Gecko Season this month runs on a schedule that hasn't needed to change, even with the Ball relocating:
- August 7: Gecko Art Show opens at the Catherine A. Hickman Theater, nine local artists, free admission, on display through August 27
- August 9: Gecko Crawl and Poker Run, 4 to 9 p.m., tonight
- August 29: Gecko Ball at Stetson University's Gulfport campus, 6 to 10 p.m., followed by the Backtrack Blues Band at the Hickman Theater from 8 to 10:30 p.m.
- September 5: GeckoFest itself, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. at 3000 Beach Boulevard South
Twenty-six years in, GeckoFest still expects something close to 10,000 people on September 5, roughly the same draw it's pulled for most of the last decade, according to SIK Promotions, the event's producer. That number hasn't moved even while the venue for one of its own signature nights had to.
None of this makes the Casino's absence less strange to live with day to day. It's the kind of building you stop noticing until it's gone: the wood floor generations of Gulfport couples learned to two-step on, out of the rotation for two years and counting, with at least one more Gecko season likely to pass before it's back in use. Whatever comes of the reopening timeline, the neighborhood has already shown it knows how to keep its calendar running without the room it was built around.
If you're trying to figure out what a slow, phased recovery like this actually means for property values, insurance costs, or timing a move near the water, that's a longer conversation than one Beach Boulevard update can cover. The Silver + Welch Collective team works this market year-round and can walk you through what we're actually seeing on the ground here, not just what shows up in a listing description. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
