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Panama City Beach, Florida, was once the Redneck Riviera — a stretch of sugar-white sand lined with family-owned motels, seafood shacks, and the Miracle Strip Amusement Park, home to the first roller coaster ever built in the state. In the 1990s, the town made a deliberate decision to invite the spring break crowds that Daytona Beach was throwing out. MTV came. Club La Vela became the largest nightclub in America. The strip pulled in close to $400 million every March. Then the condo developers arrived and demolished the old motels. Then the Miracle Strip was torn down for a development that was never built. Then the city banned alcohol on the beach after a string of shootings in 2015, and the bed tax collapsed overnight. Then Hurricane Michael, a Category 5 storm, destroyed what the ordinances hadn't — La Vela never reopened, Spinnaker was demolished, and Tyndall Air Force Base lost 95% of its structures. This is the story of a town that replaced itself so many times it finally replaced the thing that made people want to visit in the first place.
Sources
"Wild Times and Crazy Money: The History of the Spring Break Capital of the World," WMBB News 13, Panama City Beach, February 2022
"From Motels to High-Rises: The Evolution of Panama City Beach's Landscape," OldPanamaCityBeach.com, February 2024
"How Panama City Beach Got Started," OldPanamaCityBeach.com, May 2017
Harvey H. Jackson III, The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera: An Insider's History of the Florida-Alabama Coast, University of Georgia Press
Hurricane Michael post-storm report, National Weather Service, Tallahassee, FL (weather.gov/tae/hurricanemichael2018)
"Legendary Spinnaker Beach Club in Panama City Beach Has Been Completely Demolished," WMBB News 13, September 2024
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