EverBank Stadium Cut 27,000 Seats This Fall. The Blocks Around It Got Busier Anyway.

Jaguars President Mark Lamping described the 2026 schedule as having "a little bit of a donut in the middle," the two-week stretch built in so construction crews could get onto the field between home dates. It's an odd way to talk about a football season, but it fits the year downtown Jacksonville is actually having. EverBank Stadium seats about 27,000 fewer people than it did last season. The bowl above the 200 level is gone. And in the same stretch of blocks, a brand-new marina just opened its slips, three restaurants signed leases, a grocery store and a fitness studio started buildout, and a trail segment kept moving toward the river despite losing its biggest federal grant. The stadium got smaller. The neighborhood around it didn't.

The Trade Fans Actually Got

The Jaguars originally proposed shutting EverBank Stadium down entirely for two full seasons, 2026 and 2027, to finish the $1.4 billion Stadium of the Future on schedule for an August 2028 opening. Fans and downtown businesses pushed back hard enough that the team and the city landed on a different deal: only 2027 gets played away, at Camping World Stadium in Orlando, while 2026 stays home at reduced capacity.

That capacity is roughly 42,500, down from a stadium that normally seats around 67,000. Almost the entire cut comes from the upper bowl. The 400 level is offline for the season, along with sections of the 200-level corners, part of the North End Zone, lower-level Club seating, and the North End Zone's Spa Deck and Sky Patio. Six regular-season home games will actually be played inside those reduced walls this fall: the Sept. 13 opener against Cleveland, Sept. 27 against New England, Nov. 1 against Indianapolis, Nov. 29 against Tennessee, Dec. 14 against Pittsburgh, and a still-unscheduled date against Washington. Two more games that would normally be home dates are being played across the Atlantic instead, one at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and one at Wembley, part of an NFL-brokered swap that also carved out that two-week construction window Lamping mentioned.

The TaxSlayer Gator Bowl still plays EverBank Stadium this December before it, too, moves out for a year, relocating to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville for the 2027 game and returning to Jacksonville once the new stadium opens in 2028.

The Marina Opened While the Upper Deck Came Down

On Aug. 12, with a fireboat blasting water into the air behind her, Mayor Donna Deegan cut the ribbon on Met Park Marina, a 78-slip facility built where an older city dock used to sit off Gator Bowl Boulevard. The $2 million rebuild was funded by the city and built by Iguana Investments, the development arm run by Jaguars owner Shad Khan and his family, the same group behind the Four Seasons Hotel & Residences rising next door. The slips handle vessels from 30 to 400 feet, there are two dedicated water taxi spots, and within hours of opening, eight boats had already tied up next to the new One Tower Court office building.

The timing is not a coincidence so much as a byproduct of the same construction calendar. The Four Seasons is still under construction, expected to open sometime in 2027, and the Museum of Science & History has a new building planned nearby on the bank of Hogans Creek, with groundbreaking targeted for 2027 pending city approvals. The marina simply finished first. For anyone who lives near the river, that means a working waterfront amenity exists this fall independent of whether the stadium across the street is full or half empty on a given Sunday.

Three Restaurants, a Grocery Store, and a Fitness Studio All Picked This Season

Asado Life opened at 5 Tower Court, part of the same Shipyards complex as the marina and the Four Seasons build. A few blocks over, the team behind Norikase in Tinseltown and Beachside Seafood in Jacksonville Beach signed a lease through Pearl Hospitality Group to bring a new restaurant, Norikawa, to riverfront space with a patio along the Riverwalk, roughly 4,500 square feet inside and another 2,000 square feet outside.

In Brooklyn, at 1 Riverside Ave., the city issued a permit in September for a 38,300-square-foot Whole Foods Market build-out at a project cost of $7.5 million, with a Solidcore fitness studio going into an adjacent 2,104-square-foot space under an August permit. And at Riverfront Plaza, the site of the old Jacksonville Landing, a Downtown Investment Authority committee voted in April to recommend Baltimore's Atlas Restaurant Group to design, build, and lease a restaurant there, pointing to the company's Choptank concept as the kind of brand it wants to bring to the Northbank. Plans also call for a European Street Cafe at the same site, reworked into what the city has described as a grab-and-go format with coffee, breakfast, and Italian ice rather than the chain's usual sit-down model.

None of these openings depend on football. They depend on construction crews finishing buildings that were already funded and permitted before anyone decided how many seats EverBank Stadium would lose this year.

The Trail Keeps Moving Despite a Lost Grant

The Emerald Trail's Hogan Street Link broke ground last September, a 0.9-mile stretch adding a separated bike track and walking path along the west side of one-way Hogan Street, running past City Hall and James Weldon Johnson Park. In July 2025, a $147 million federal grant tied to the trail's future segments was voided after President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Groundwork Jacksonville, the nonprofit building the trail alongside the city and the Jacksonville Transportation Authority, says the Hogan Street work continues anyway because it was already funded through the $132 million local gas tax allocation approved by City Council years earlier, separate from the rescinded federal money. The stretch closest to the river, between Water Street and Bay Street, is slated to open this year, with the rest of the link to Union Street following in 2027.

As of 2026, roughly half of the planned 30-mile Emerald Trail network is either open, under construction, or in design. The trail will eventually link 14 neighborhoods, 16 schools, two colleges, and 21 parks, but the piece that matters for this fall is the segment closest to downtown, moving forward on local money while a much bigger federal number disappeared from the budget.

What Changes on an Actual Fall Gameday

Put these pieces next to each other and the picture that emerges isn't a quieter football season. It's a busier neighborhood wrapped around a smaller game. Post-game traffic already looks different: construction on the Main Street Bridge has southbound traffic down to a single lane leaving the stadium, and westbound drivers are being rerouted toward the Acosta Bridge to keep things moving. Anyone walking from a home game toward the river this fall is going to pass a marina that didn't exist last season, at least one restaurant that just opened its doors, and trail construction that's still active despite losing its biggest funding source.

The stadium bowl is smaller this year. The stretch of riverfront around it is not standing still while that gets sorted out.

If you're the kind of person who tracks how a neighborhood actually changes, not just what it costs, Sharon Mills keeps an eye on Jacksonville's riverfront the same way, one permit and one ribbon-cutting at a time.