-
14. “Where Nature Did Its Best”
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
229 ’ve always found it more than a little ironic that C. H. McGee chose “where nature did its best” to entice people to come to Seagrove Beach and despoil it. But McGee was no different from the other developers who were attracted to the natural beauty of the Redneck Riviera and, once there, set about erasing as much of it as they could. When Peter Bos arrived in Destin in 1972, only a few years out of Cornell School of Hotel Administration and “searching for development opportunities,” he looked at the harbor and declared it “the singularly most beautiful piece of property” he had ever seen. For the next thirty years Bos built a career in the area. He took over and expanded Sandestin Golf and Beach Resort, developed marinas, built an upscale shopping mall that he called Destin Commons, and created Legendary Inc., a family of companies that gave him an interest in just about every sort of business on the coast. Among the properties he developed was HarborWalk Village, a collection of shops and restaurants anchored by the Emerald Grande Towers, “Destin’s only full-service resort.” Emerald Grande, in all its buff and burgundy glory, sat at the foot of the Destin Bridge, squarely in the middle of that “singularly most beautiful piece of property” that caught his eye in 1972, dwarfing the docks and dominating everything. Bos’s Legendary operations may have been what Dewey Destin was referring to when he talked about “what you get fourteen “Where Nature Did Its Best” 230 chapter fourteen when you exchange nature for economic well-being.” However, it must be said that Bos was no worse, and in some cases was better, than most when it came to preserving and protecting natural surroundings, though he did so in that well-established Florida tradition of making nature conform to what developers wanted it to be—whether what they wanted it to be was “natural” or not. The Emerald Grande was just that: grand, and colorful, and gaudy, and well appointed, and opulent (what else could you call a countertop made of marble that the brochure boasted came from the same quarry that supplied the Paris Opera House?), and overwhelming—so tall that in some seasons it shaded parts of old Destin from dawn to dusk, like a sundial . So it was no surprise that Bos’s creation had more than its share of we-want-our-village-as-it-used-to-be critics. But Destin city manager Greg Kisela would have none of it. “Whether or not you like Emerald Grande,” he told the local press, “it has to be successful, because the harbor is our ticket. It is our past and our future.” The harbor was also where old and new Destin collided, and often both sides came out the worse for it. From the harbor the working charter boats went out in the morning and to the harbor they returned with fish on ice Emerald Grande dominating Destin Harbor, 2009. Photograph by the author. [3.91.245.93] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:51 GMT) “where nature did its best” 231 and gulls following behind. As the harbor developed, trendy restaurants came in and built decks where patrons could sit and eat and drink and watch the drama of the docks as the day’s catch was displayed and filleted. But some people on the restaurant decks eating and drinking and watching complained of the smell and of the noise, as though they thought fish would not smell fishy and gulls would quietly wait their turn for the heads and tails and backbones the deckhands threw into the water. So to cut down on the smell, clean up the harbor, and attract fewer birds, deckhands were told not to throw out the heads and tails and backbones for the crabs and gulls, but save them till the next day, when the smelly mess could be carried out and thrown into the Gulf to feed the fishes waiting there. One more inconvenience for the captains and crews, one more bit of old Destin that visitors would never know, fewer crabs under the docks, and, if there were a latterday Rusty McHugh around, fewer backbones for the gumbo. But nature was known to take revenge on those who pushed her too far. Build where you shouldn’t and a storm will get you, cut down trees or dig up vegetation and the soil will wash away, foul the...