The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera: An Insider's History of the Florida-Alabama Coast

11. Taming the Redneck Riviera

179 hortly after the 1978 Howell Raines New York Times article gave the Redneck Riviera national exposure, concerns that the nickname might bring negative publicity to the region prompted a member of the Gulf Shores City Council to introduce a resolution condemning the label. It was voted down. Mayor Mixon Jones, one of the three real estate developers who served on the council and an opponent of the measure, explained his vote this way: “No, sir,” he told a writer from Sports Illustrated, “we don’t think the publicity [from the Raines article] was all that bad. . . . We believe that any publicity helps—good or bad—just so they spell our name right.” That may have been the prevailing attitude then, but in the years that followed, as chambers of commerce and tourist development councils sought to attract more upscale, affluent visitors, boosters tried to distance their beaches from the name and the image it conjured up. For the most part they succeeded, and by the turn of the century a travel writer for the Montgomery Advertiser passed over the “fortunately shortlived sobriquet ‘Redneck Riviera’” with little comment, while Golf & Travel announced that down in south Baldwin County the “Redneck Riviera [is] no more.” As if to confirm this transformation , in 2002 Panama City Beach tourist promoters came up with a new slogan—“White Sand, White Wine, White Necks.” e l e v e n Taming the Redneck Riviera S 180 chapter eleven In their efforts to put the region’s redneck past behind them, advocates of the upscale had little interest in preserving what was left of the old. Besides, forgetting the past and embracing the future had always been what the coast was about. In the fall of 2000, the Panama City newspaper noted, “With only minute amounts of undeveloped beachfront property left . . . a new trend is afoot to demolish small, decades-old properties and build taller and much denser buildings in their place.” The old Gulf Crest Motel, whose “Holiday Inn rip-off neon sign” was a landmark on Panama City Beach not unlike the Green Knight in Destin, was one of the first to go. In its place they built what was the tallest building on the beach, for a little while at least. Even the older residential communities showed little enthusiasm for clinging to what used to be. In the early 1990s Robert Davis and Van Ness Butler were, according to Davis, “almost tarred and feathered” when they “made a proposal for a historic district” in Grayton Beach that included a plan for managing “the conservation and development” of the village. Davis and Butler backed off, and in the years that followed, Grayton’s dirt streets were paved, “monster houses” were built in and among the older cottages , and more restaurants and shops opened, including one with grounds designed to replicate, or at least resemble, Monet’s garden at Giverny—a far cry from Ross Allen’s Jungle Show, which once packed them in at Panama City Beach. But modern tourists did not come to the beach to savor the old. Back in the 1990s a visitor to Grayton wrote in the American Airlines publication American Way of her visit to what was “once referred to as the Redneck Riviera” and rented a “cabin” which was, as she described it, plenty redneck for her. The “cabin” was “actually a small house made from large cement blocks, with a puzzle of rooms behind plastic sliding doors”—not the accommodations she had expected. But she did find “several museum-quality paint-by-numbers renderings, and a Fifties kitchen with an eating bar and anelectricstovethesizeofaCadillac,”wherethe“trainedchef”intheirparty was able to whip up a gourmet meal. Things were made better by Seaside being close and by the fact that the beach at Grayton deserved its reputation as one of the nation’s best. Had she returned to Grayton a decade later she likely would have been happier, for Grayton had changed. In 2008, the New York Times “discovered ” the village and told readers how what was once “a low-key spit of sand that offers nothing but houses and beach” had become a “haven” for folks taing the redneck riviera 181 like the employee-benefit consultant out of New Orleans who happily paid $500,000 for a three-bedroom getaway tucked in among the “clutch of oldstyle cottages and waterfront homes on...