Philippe Park's main playground is closed as Pinellas County installs a replacement

Terraced stone retaining walls at the Tocobaga Indian mound in Philippe Park, Safety Harbor, in a 2006 file photo showing the park setting. Photo: Dlohcierekim's sock at English Wikipedia / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5). Resized; website wordmark added. Photo source · License

The main playground at Philippe Park, 2525 Philippe Parkway in Safety Harbor, is closed while Pinellas County installs a replacement, according to the county's "County Parks: Know Before You Go" page, last updated Oct. 2. The closure is one of several at the 92-acre waterfront park, the oldest in the county, which is open daily from 7 a.m. to sunset.

The county points visitors to the park's second playground with rock structures, which remains open and is visible from the main road farther into the park, and to the two large playgrounds at John Chesnut Sr. Park, 2200 East Lake Road. The new playground is paid for with federal pandemic-relief money — award SLFRP4653 to Pinellas County from the U.S. Treasury under the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act.

Parents should know the county's own pages are not consistent on the schedule. The updates page gives a fall 2026 start and winter 2026 completion, but the separate Philippe Park page still says the main playground is "closed indefinitely while a new playground is in the planning stages," and its amenities section carries an older notice saying construction was postponed and the current playground would remain open. Residents counting on a specific reopening may want to confirm with Parks and Conservation Resources.

Philippe Park projects and county construction windows

Project	Construction window
New main playground	Fall 2026 – Winter 2026
Shelter 1 repair	Fall 2026
Seawall repairs and living shoreline	Fall 2026 – Spring 2027
Hurricane Helene seawall replacement	Fall 2026 – Spring 2027
Shoreline sidewalk and erosion control	Fall 2026 – Spring 2027
Wastewater collection system	Fall 2026 – Summer 2027

Source: pinellas.gov; pinellas.gov

Restrooms and Shelter 1

Indoor plumbing is being replaced one restroom at a time across the park. The updates page lists Restrooms #1 and #8 closed with that work ending in fall 2026, while the park's own page lists Restrooms #5 and #8, on the north side near the Philippe Parkway entrance, and an October finish — so which buildings are usable may shift during a visit.

Shelter 1 is out of service, one of the park's eight picnic shelters. The county says Hurricane Milton damaged it badly in 2024, affecting several structural components, and that new columns and part of the roof must be built before it can reopen. Construction on that repair is anticipated this fall.

Shoreline and sewer work ahead

Behind the playground sits a larger package of county work, with design listed as in progress as of the project page's Aug. 10 update. Crews are to repair the concrete cap atop the seawall, reset some of the tiebacks that hold it and fill eroded ground behind the wall, while living shoreline elements go in front of it to add habitat and buffer the structure. A separate repair addresses roughly 150 feet of seawall on the southern end that shifted outward during Hurricane Helene in 2024, taking the adjacent sidewalk and railing with it. A new shoreline sidewalk and an erosion control structure are also planned.

The wastewater project is the one most likely to outlast the others: it would retire four onsite septic systems, tie park facilities into the City of Safety Harbor's wastewater system and rehabilitate the park's master pump station. Because the work sits beside the Safety Harbor Tocobaga Mounds — a National Historic Landmark also listed on the National Register of Historic Places — the county says archaeologists investigated the areas before construction.

Penny for Pinellas money funds the seawall, sidewalk and wastewater work, with a Florida Department of Environmental Protection grant covering part of the sewer project and support from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, the Tampa Bay Environmental Restoration Fund and Resilient Florida for the living shoreline. County project manager Jorge Hernandez, P.E., can be reached at (727) 464-5209.