Flora-Bama gone!

[Obtuse Angler]

They just reported this: it just ain't there anymore. Does anyone have any memories of evenings spent there after a hard day of fishing they would like to share?

[Steve D]

Dang, the Flora-Bama was just down the beach from my sis-in-law's condo. We never made it there since we always had the kids with us. Wonder if the Crab Shack a little further east is still there (great burgers). Lulu Buffett recently built out and opened a new place on the ICW down beside the bridge between Gulf Shores and Foley, AL. Wonder how it held up?

[GonetoSeed]

That's terrible news! I sure hope no one was injured and hope they can re-build, especially in time to hold the Mullet Toss.

[THE EG]

Obtuse,

Any at all chance/hope this could be a rumor.

It is sad to hear. I went in there just this past Memorial Day. It was my kind of dive.

Several of the wive's from my neighborhood were going down to Perdido Key this weekend specifically to go to the Flora-Bama. That obviously didn't happen.

In a strange twist. The word from those same folks that went there quite often was that it was going to close soon anyway (I think somebody may have made them an offer they couldn't refuse).

The ladies were supposed to pick me up a "I Have Friends in Low Places" T-Shirt before it closed down. That obviously didn't happen either.

[THE EG]

Sorry Obtuse, I bumped this to "off topic" before seeing the reference to fishing stories.

I don't have any fishing stories to relate but the mother of one of my neighbors who is in his forties was thrown out of there (a pretty mean feat) with her friends for rowdy and obnoxious behavior. Besides various other reasons, she flashed somebody. http://www.georgia-outdoors.com/ubbngto/wink.gif

That's the effect the place had on even a seventy year old grandmother. Yep, I'm going to miss that bar.

[GonetoSeed]

EG - here's the answer to the closing soon rumor http://www.florabama.com/florabamasold.htm

I hope like you that it being gone is only a rumor. This world has lost too many real honky-tonks to martini selling fern bars.

[THE EG]

Thanks GTS.

I'll wait for verification before beginning the wake.

I now still have hope of acquiring a T-Shirt.

[sageboy]

Anyone ever make it to the annual "mullet toss?"

[Steve D]

Start mourning Eg, its gone....saw some reports on the Perdido Key community forum on one of the Pensacola News-Journal website...

The website's front page pic this morning shows a view down Perdido Key Drive - looking west I'm pretty sure. Here's a link. There are some photo galleries worth having a look at too...
http://www.pensacolanewsjournal.com/

[This message has been edited by Steve D (edited 09-17-2004).]

[Steve D]

Maybe there's a glimmer of hope....Its only mostly gone...not completely....read on

Legendary Flora-Bama belted, buried, standing

Portions of bar's walls, roof damaged
Friday, September 17, 2004
By JOE DANBORN
Staff Reporter

The Flora-Bama lives.

In a manner of speaking.

That's the tentative answer to one of the more earnest questions that
people on Alabama's coastline were asking Thursday: Did the Flora-Bama
Lounge & Package store, that Perdido Key paragon, survive Hurricane Ivan?

"I heard the 'Bama's totally gone," an officer said at the Orange Beach
police station. A friend of his got that from folks in Florida, he said,
raising his eyebrows, pursing his lips and nodding gravely.

Actually, it remains in its rightful place, straddling the state line on
Beach Boulevard. But its familiar wood floor is now 3 feet of sand. The
structure lost portions of walls and its roof and appeared to have heaved
its contents onto Alabama 182.

Among the items left standing were the bar's marquee and a front window
covered by a plywood sheet on which someone had spray-painted, "till we
float away."

Parts of the bar itself and much of what had been inside were strewn across
the high way -- simple bar stools, aged ice chests, electric beer signs,
steel kegs, a wood-handled blade for shucking oysters. An industrial-sized
propane tank sat on its side in what would have been the roadway, hissing
and smelling of sulfur. Something else reeked of rotting seafood.

And everywhere, there was booze. Stacked neatly on a shelf inside, bottles
of champagne and merlot. Cast about in the tempest, flasks of Southern
Comfort and Jose Cuervo Gold, 1.75-liter bottles of Jack Daniel's and
Finnish vodka and Puerto Rican rum and several longnecks of Flora-Bama
Mullet Head Red, some near-buried in sand, a few broken but most still
sealed.

It was as if a pirate ship had run aground.

The Flora-Bama has been a beloved rebel legend. Before Baldwin County eased
its blue laws, Alabama drinkers would go there to pick up a six-pack on
Sunday. And Alabamians would avoid the authorities' evacuation orders by
shuffling to the Florida side of the bar, and vice versa. Or so the story
goes.

Developers built their high-rise condos, pastel and sand-hued, steadily
closer to the bar in recent years, to the point that one began to steal
some of the beachfront bar's sunlight. The Flora-Bama and its gritty,
graying wood stayed put. Until Ivan.

There's probably enough of the structure left that the proprietors could
bolster a couple of the walls, build around it and insist that the
Flora-Bama never fell.

Still, the bar and the few other older buildings took the storm far harder
than the more recent structures, especially in the stretch between Alabama
Point and the state line. Ivan tore away the walls of several of the
shorter condos. Practically every single-family home sustained more severe
damage. A few were leveled, their utensils sitting atop the sand hundreds
of feet from their kitchens. One house just across the Florida line came to
rest more or less intact, squarely in the middle of the sand-covered road.

The hurricane mangled large sections of the highway, which was undriveable
at any rate due to a massive crane that fell across it. And the storm
flattened the Perdido Key dunes.

At least the Flora-Bama is still there, for now.

Mobile lawyer Braxton Counts was among the handful of souls who managed to
make the pilgrimage Thursday. He had come back to assess the damage to a
nearby residence he and his wife own, one they had visited just Monday.

But Mrs. Counts didn't want to make it down to the 'Bama that night, her
husband recalled.

"I tried to get her to come," he said, "but she wouldn't do it. I said, We
need to go one more time, just in case.'"