It was in 1978 that "Redneck Riviera" first appeared in print. Probably. And in the New York Times no less. That was when Times reporter Howell Raines published a piece that told of how former University of Alabama and then pro-football quarterbacks Richard Todd and Kenny Stabler spent the off-season on a "stretch of beach that some Alabama wags call the redneckRiviera." Raines, a Birmingham boy who one day would become executive editor of the Times and a popular author in the bargain, could turn a phrase with the best of them, and there are those who think he coined it. (1)
The "stretch of beach" to which Raines was referring, the stretch he defined as the RedneckRiviera, began just west of Gulf Shores, Alabama, and continued east to the Flora-Bama, a bar that still sits mostly in Florida to take advantage of more liberal liquor laws, but where enough hangs over into Alabama that the slogan "Doing it at the line" was and still is taken as a challenge by many.
One finds Gulf Coast Riviera references as early as 1941, when the WPA publication Alabama: A Guide to the Deep South described the area as a collection of "little fishing villages that remind the visitor of the southern coast of France." However, there is nothing to suggest that Raines or any of the other "wags," much less Stabler and Todd, saw any similarity between the Alabama coast and the Cote d'Azur, because by 1978 there wasn't any. Raines's Redneck Riviera was a scattering of vacation cottages, honkytonks, picturesque if seedy motels, shacks on pilings, and cafes that served smoked mullet, presided over by sunburned, bearded, beer-soaked refugees from civilization, driving rusted-out pickup trucks. It was where people could say, as Stabler did when a reporter asked if all the stories about him were true, "I live the way I want to live, and I don't give a damn if anybody likes it or not. I run hard as hell and don't sleep. I'm just here for the beer." (2)
And yet, without knowing it, Raines was giving his readers one of the last glimpses of a way of life whose days, or at least years, were numbered. But that is getting ahead of the story. Although Raines was writing about specific people at a specific place in a specific time, truth be told there were many "redneck Rivieras." And they shared a common history. In 1941, all along the northern rim of the Gulf Coast, from Pass Christian, Mississippi, to Panama City, Florida, there were a score or more of little villages that survived on fishing and a trickle of tourists from not too far away, vacationers who came down to spend a week or so in the few "mom and pop" motor courts. They'd swim a little, fish a little, eat raw oysters, buy something tacky at a local shop, and some, freed from hometown social restraints, would visit local night clubs, dance and drink and get rowdy.
After the war their numbers increased. Driving down on military-improved roads, they came mainly from Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, and brought with them the culture of the rising southern white middle class. Children of the Great Depression, they were hard-working and frugal, but wartime experience had taught them that life was short and to be enjoyed. Raising their Baby Boomers, they coordinated trips with the children's vacations, and beach-folks expanded accommodations accordingly. Efficiencies and cottages were especially popular, for restaurants were few and, to most visitors, they were places to go for the occasional treat, not for every meal. So they came loaded with groceries, and many a family lived the week on fried bologna sandwiches and what they caught in the Gulf.
On the whole the visitors fit nicely with the local population, whose racial composition, experiences, and values were not unlike their own. Vacationers appreciated the live-and-let-live attitude of shrimpers, oystermen, and charter boat crews. They were happy to make do with wharfside bars and cafes that served the year-round residents. The idea that these establishments should change to cater to tourists was alien to their way of thinking. They were down to enjoy the coast, not remake it.
Slowly the tourist economy grew and by the mid-1950s the weeks between Memorial Day and Labor Day--"the season"--became a cash cow for locals. Come September some folks shut down and lived the rest of the year on what they made in the summer. Others shifted to winter jobs and waited. While most visitors to the coast rented, a few decided to invest in the region, and before long small "developments" dotted the landscape. Designed to appeal to a more upscale clientele, these communities often included covenants that assured buyers that "no trailer, tent, shack, outhouse or temporary structure" would be put on the property and that no "noxious activities, offensive noises or odors" would be permitted. And since buyers came from the racially segregated lower South, the covenants often specified that lots would not be "sold, leased, or rented to or occupied by any person or persons other than the Caucasian race," although "domestic servants," white or black, would be permitted. (3)
This was the Redneck Riviera--only no one yet called it that. It was just Gulfport, Biloxi, Dauphin Island, Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, Pensacola Beach, Fort Walton Beach, Destin, Grayton Beach, Seagrove Beach, Panama City Beach, and points in-between. It was the small-town, segregated South, but without the biracial society found inland. Along this coast, except for occasional enclaves in Mississippi, black faces were few. White residents and white tourists liked it that way.
This family-focused summer economy changed little until 1960. That year Hollywood released Where the Boys Are, a movie about Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale. Before then, not many students from the Lower South went to the beach for Spring Break--at least not to the beaches of the northern Gulf. It was too cold and windy, and the Break back then was only a couple of days. But Where the Boys Are got students, war babies, and the first wave of Baby Boomers thinking that being "cool" offset being cold, and it was "cool" to Break at the beach. Communities along the coast had to decide whether the income from the invasion was worth the hassle and the damages, and as they would from that time forward, beach towns took the money. So another season was born. From mid-March to mid-April high school and college students ruled the coast. Then they went home, leaving motel owners time to clean up before the families arrived in June.
To accommodate the expanding tourist market local entrepreneurs built more motels. These were, for the most part, of a single plan: on or across the road from the beach, two or three stories, less than 100 units, maybe a cafe or bar (or at least within walking distance of one), and close to something for the kids (miniature golf, an amusement park, or a hangout, complete with jukebox, for the teenagers). It got to the point that the same people came down at the same times, and motel reunions were highlights of the trips. Because owners could count on tourists being largely from the same places, local establishments catered to their particular likes and dislikes.
Some hosts even supplied visitors with the newspapers they read back home, and in the racks at larger motels you could find (depending on where you were) papers from Jackson, Montgomery, Birmingham, and Atlanta stuck in with local editions. By then a certain demographic pattern was taking shape. Folks from Mississippi with a longing for the beach could be found around Gulfport or Gulf Shores. Alabamians took up territory from Mobile Bay to St. Andrews Bay. So many from the state's largest city descended on the strip west of Panama City that one enterprising bar owner named his establishment the "Little Birmingham." Georgia was divided on the issue, with some preferring the Atlantic, but it was pretty safe to say that if you lived south of Atlanta and west of Macon the Gulf Coast was your destination.
As the region grew up, so did the offspring of these early pioneers. Baby Boomers, the children of post-war passion, were part of the youth rebellion, with a southern twist. Along with the Beatles and the Stones, they grooved to Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers. In the clubs they danced to the music they danced to at fraternity parties back in Tuscaloosa and Atlanta. Sometimes the bands were black, but the dancers were always white. Alcohol (beer, in particular) was their drug of choice, though as the years passed the sweet smell of marijuana was increasingly evident--and yet, like their parents, they were middle class to the core.
These bourgeois Bubbas and Bubbettes created the Redneck Riviera that Howell Raines saw and described. Growing even slower than Florida beach towns, in 1978 the Alabama coast consisted of a few family motels, a state park with campgrounds, and a collection of charter boat outfits, bait shops, piers, and docks. Scattered in-between was a hodge-podge of vacation cottages, belonging mostly to south Alabama folks, and as fine a collection of beach bars as could be found on the Gulf--the L.A. Pub & Grub, the Bear Point Marina, the Pink Pony, the Seagull Lounge, and the Flora-Bama, where the "Interstate Mullet Toss" would soon exemplifyredneck recreation.
The Alabama strip was the Redneck Riviera distilled to its essence. Sports Illustrated writer Robert F. Jones visited and described the folks he found as falling into two categories: "upper-crust, matronly, Rotarian with cash register eyeballs," and "the Stabler gang, raffish, sunburnt, hard of hand and piratical of glance." (4) And because other parts of the coast shared this general ambiance it was not long before the name was being applied to the whole northern rim of the Gulf--and with good reason. While not every town could boast, as Destin could, of a group with a name like "The Trashy White Band," almost every coastal community could provide redneckery on request.
But even as the Redneck Riviera rocked along, the seeds of its destruction were being sown. First came the storms. In August 1969, Camille, one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded on American shores, hit Mississippi. When it leveled Biloxi, some said it was God's vengeance. Biloxi in the 1950s and 1960s had been one of the most corrupt places on the coast. It had gambling, prostitution, and liquor--all illegal in Mississippi--which gave country boys from the red clay hills and military men from nearby bases a place to drink their fill, lose their money, and watch women dance naked. Families might be welcomed at Gulfport, Gulf Shores, and other places, but Biloxi was where you went to get away from the wife and kids. It was redneckery at its outlaw best, and Camille laid it low.
But if God was mad at Biloxi, He took it out on everyone else. East and west of the city the storm destroyed old hotels, some dating back a century, flattened tourist courts, tore seafood joints from their pilings, ripped up 100-year-old oaks, and washed away scores of cottages where coastal people had lived and loved for decades. Away from the bright lights and the sleaze Biloxi was a charming city, and that too was gone. Some realized what they had lost. The writer Elizabeth Spencer lamented:
If I could have one part of the world back the way it used to be, I
would not choose Dresden before the fire bombing, Rome before Nero,
or London before the blitz. I would not resurrect Babylon, Carthage
or San Francisco. Let the leaning tower lean and the hanging
gardens hang. I want the Mississippi Gulf Coast back the way it was
before Hurricane Camille....
The western flank of the Redneck Riviera was devastated, and that was just the beginning. Six years later, Nature sent Hurricane Eloise against the eastern end, and Panama City's beaches felt its fury. When the winds subsided and the water went back into the Gulf, the Little Birmingham and the teenage hangout were gone, never to return, and so were so many of the small motels, cafes, and cottages that gave the beach its character.
Then came Frederic. On the evening of September 12, 1979, a year after Raines wrote of the region, Frederic hit the Alabama coast with 120-mph winds and a record storm surge. The hurricane destroyed homes and businesses on Dauphin Island, and the bridge connecting it to the mainland collapsed. Gulf Shores and Orange Beach also sustained heavy damage, but their bridge to the mainland held--about the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal picture. Dismal, that is, until the 1980s began and over in Mississippi someone discovered that state law allowed gambling offshore, a holdover from steamboat days. Encouraged by this, promoters bought a boat named the Europa Star, outfitted it as a floating casino, tied it to the dock at Biloxi, and promised folks that once again the town would be Las Vegas South. The rest, as they say, is history.
Meanwhile, coastal folks were learning what is now general knowledge: storms destroy, but they also clear the ground for builders to build. Gulf Shores is a classic example. Before Frederic, Gulf Shores had one chain motel, a couple of small condominiums, a few restaurants, bars, and beach cottages. There was one bank and no supermarkets. The hurricane leveled most of it. Then came the easy credit of the '80s. Banks had money to loan and Baby Boomers, now in their thirties and approaching their forties, were ready to borrow. Having learned to love the beach in their bourgeois Bubba days, they wanted to recapture the magic without having to sleep ten to a room--so they bought a piece of it.
Folks who had seen their cottages wash away and were wondering how they could rebuild were being offered more money than they had ever dreamed of for their little piece of sand, and they took it. Developers then pieced the pieces together, and the condominiums and resort hotels began to rise. In less than two decades the quiet beach towns of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach became the destination of over i million tourists a year. Panama City's beaches experienced the same sort of growth, and soon it spread to communities never touched by the hurricanes. Where there was beach property to be developed, there were developers to develop it. With few environmental controls and with county governments in the hands of inland agricultural interests who cared little for the coast, the foxes were loose in the hen house. And folks paying big bucks for a condo were generally not the sort who came down to "redneck" it up. Maybe they had been once, but not any more.
However, if you want to pick a date when the decline of the Redneck Riviera began in earnest, try 1982. And a place? How about a plot of sand and scrub, no more than 80 acres, about 1,000 yards of it on the Gulf, midway between Panama City and Destin? That was where Robert Davis, an Alabama native with a northern education, set out to build an "old fashioned" Florida village and ended up building what Time magazine declared "could be the most astounding design achievement of its era." Seaside. (6)
In a sense Seaside reflected what had become of the Baby Boomers who were evolving from bourgeois rednecks to just plain bourgeois. It began simply enough with developer Davis copying Florida vernacular architecture--single-story wooden "cracker cottages" built along dirt streets just like they used to be. Influenced by the school of New Urbanism, Davis envisioned a community of likeminded citizens who would live and work together, and in their spare time sit on front porches under ceiling fans in a serene (and sweaty) society.
But bourgeois Bubbas and Bubbettes didn't like the dusty streets, so homeowners had them paved--with bricks. They didn't like the heat, so no one sat on the porches. They wanted more than shack-vernac, so they began building bigger and bigger. It is hard to say whether Davis inspired this or if it inspired him, but it wasn't long before Seaside had become a code-controlled community of architecturally designed wooden houses, painted colors that never appeared in nature, topped with tin roofs, and christened with cute names. Pedestrian-friendly streets connected houses to a central business district made up to look like an Italian holiday town and to beach pavilions that were works of architectural art. "Pastel Hell," as the neighbors called it, was designed to appeal to the upper-income, Southern Living-reading, Lexus-driving, Republican-voting, Dixie yuppie. No road houses, no bait shops, no drink-'til-you-puke parties; just clean, pretty, and (according to the New York Times, which you could buy at the newsstand there) "as relentlessly tasteful as any place on the planet." (7)
Seaside, with its art shops, up-scale restaurants, concerts, and private croquet field, was created for and by the South's (mostly) lily-white Baby Boomers. It was a place where the capitalist urges of the 1980s and 1990s blended comfortably with the southern counter-culture urges of the 1960s, where people in clothes that matched the colors of their cottages and $100 high-tech sandals drank designer coffee at a sidewalk cafe and read the Wall Street Journal, then returned to the family back at the house they rented for $3,000 a week to get ready for the wine tasting festival, the proceeds from which would go to benefit Habitat for Humanity. Observers called Seaside many things, but no one called it redneck.
The success of Seaside inspired others and soon clones were appearing all along the coast--some of them gated, which, to its credit, Seaside was not. And people who bought into that lifestyle were a far cry from those who bought into beach life three decades before. First with money from the hot stock market of the 1990s and then with low interest loans after the dot-com bubble burst, Baby Boomers began to buy into a coast that a Baby Boomer generation of developers was developing to sell.
One example might serve for all. Down in the Florida Panhandle the St. Joe Paper Company owned over i million acres of land, which included some five miles of undeveloped beach and about zoo miles of property on rivers, inlets, and bays. Faced with declining profits from paper and increased environmental pressure, in the 1990s the company reinvented itself, got rid of the paper mills, and concentrated on being the St. Joseph Land and Development Corporation. Then, around the turn of the century, right next to Seaside, they built "Watercolor," an upscale community with all the amenities one could want, but without the artificial ambiance of Seaside. Although Watercolor had a small stretch of beach for residents, salt water and sand were not what attracted investors. Recreational shopping and eating, leisure activities, and nearby golf were what kept owners and visitors entertained. At the same time, the rapid rise in property values made a house in Watercolor a much better investment than the intemperate stock market.
So it was that the Redneck Riviera, which had been slowly dying as Baby Boomers aged, became an investment opportunity for some, and a place of calculated and carefully controlled leisure for others. Meanwhile, more and more of the sort of people who had come down to make the region what it once was found themselves priced into a shrinking selection of motels and condos, and the bars and seafood joints they once frequented became in-vogue eateries with designer decor and ferns.
Remember the folks that the Sports Illustrated writer found when he visited the coast in the '70s--the "upper-crust, matronly, Rotarian with cash register eyeballs" and "the Stabler gang, raffish, sunburnt, hard of hand and piratical of glance"? As the 1990s approached historian Emory Thomas looked at what they had become and decided that the two types "had mated and produced a new generation of raffish Rotarians, pirates with cash register eyeballs, and hard-handed matrons." (8) He was right. Yet in their own way these "raffish Rotarians" and "hard-handed matrons" were just as freewheeling as the less-sophisticated rednecks they replaced. They just had more money and built better.
This became apparent when in the fall of 1995, after a period of relative calm, Hurricane Opal slammed into the Florida Panhandle. Older, low-lying beach communities were badly damaged, but Seaside, built high and back and under a strict construction code, only lost its architectural award-winning dune walkovers to the surge. The beach erosion, however, was significant and the discussion that followed--should the beach be restored, who would restore it--warned of a coming conflict between beachfront property owners who claimed the beach they overlooked was theirs and folks down for a week or so who believed the beach belonged to everyone.
Then the storms subsided, or at least went elsewhere, and the sense of urgency subsided as well. State and county agencies tightened building codes, largely from the lobbying of the insurance industry, but old construction that was grand fathered in sat awaiting another blow. It came with a vengeance in September of 2004, when Hurricane Ivan blew in right on top of Orange Beach and tore the Redneck Riviera apart. Ivan did more damage than Hurricane Frederic, for, after twenty-five years of post-Frederic development, there was more to damage. Less than a year later, Hurricane Dennis followed almost the same path. However, except for those people directly affected by the storm, Dennis soon became an afterthought, for a few weeks later Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans.
Because it hit a major city, one made more vulnerable by location and poor disaster planning, when people think of Katrina today they naturally think of the Big Easy. But the Mississippi Gulf Coast, that western wing of the Redneck Riviera, had it just as bad--some would say worse. Pass Christian, Bay St. Louis, and Gulfport seemed to disappear with the wind and the waves, while the casinos of Biloxi were torn from their moorings and tossed inland.
Inland, however, was just where the owners wanted their casinos to be. Building them on barges so that they would not be on Mississippi soil was a sham and everyone knew it, a compromise the state made with itself so that opponents of gambling could claim there was no gambling in Mississippi, even as the state was reaping the benefits. Mississippi had done this before, and the Gulf Coast (Biloxi in particular) had profited from it. Mississippi was one of the last states to remain "legally" dry. This was accomplished by a casino barge-like arrangement that prohibited the sale of liquor in the state, but added that if a county decided to let what was illegal be sold, those selling it would be required to pay what came to be known as the Black Market Tax. Coastal counties quickly went "wet," the tax was collected, and since it was illegal anyway, virtually anyone who could afford to drink was allowed to drink.
Lawmakers did the same for casinos, and folks came from all around the region to roll the dice and play the slots just off shore, not in Mississippi. The benefits were many and immediate. In a state with historically high unemployment and low tax revenues, the casinos provided jobs and filled state and local coffers, so when Katrina left them wrecked and stranded, a cry rose that they should be allowed to rebuild on dry land. just as Mississippi lawmakers had done when someone challenged the legality (not to mention the logic) of the Black Market Tax, rather than risk losing such a profitable enterprise the state ignored the feeble pleas from church groups, and less than two months after Katrina hit the Mississippi legislature legalized gambling on Mississippi soil.
Just what else will come from the destruction wrought by Katrina is yet to be determined. In the wake of the storm, government and private interests held meetings, consulted with New Urbanists, laid plans, and talked of rebuilding the Gulf Coast in a series of communities not unlike Seaside. But talk is cheap and rebuilding is not. Moreover, the social consequences of such a project caused many to question the whole undertaking. Although Seaside began as an experimental community where people from all walks of life would, as an initial investor recalled, live together and "love each other ... like back in the old days," that dream quickly died as the price of land went up and the houses became more elaborate and expensive. We set out "building Kansas," one of Seaside's early collaborators complained, and we ended up "getting Oz." In Oz there were no poor people, no black people, and little if any of the cultural and class diversity that had characterized parts of the Gulf Coast before the storm. Many feared that what was being put on the drawing board for a post-Katrina revival would drive diversity inland, leaving the coast to wealthy whites?
This was already happening in places other than Seaside. Unable to find workers locally, resort owners bussed in people from upcountry, many of them part of the wave of Hispanic immigrants (legal and illegal) who had come to the States looking for work. In the evening they were bussed out again, leaving the coast to those who could pay the price. From time to time coastal city councils would discuss how to provide low-cost housing in their communities, but to date little has progressed beyond the discussion stage.
During the first decade of the new millennium the Redneck Riviera has been a region in transition and in conflict. Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Destin, and Panama City Beach, once playgrounds for people like Stabler and his gang, have become a get-rich-quick investment opportunity for Baby Boomer empty nesters. Aided by liberal lending policies, pliable local governments, aggressive developers, and overzealous real estate agents, Boomers began to buy pre-construction condo units, resell them at a profit before a nail was driven to someone who would sell to another buyer who would sell again, sometimes as many as five times before an owner finally received a set of keys. Although this "flipping" was a national phenomenon that even spawned reality TV shows, along the coast it generated what one writer called "condo mania."(10) One enterprising agent organized his "flippers" into what he called "The Dolphin Club" (cute, no?) and they made a lot of money--for a while. Soon double-digit storied condominiums replaced many of the remaining mom-and-pop motels, vacation cottages, and low-rise condos, and absentee owners settled back to watch their investment grow while they made mortgage payments by renting to "snowbirds" in the winter and to anyone else who had the money the rest of the year. Then, when the time was right, they would sell and smile.
Over the years this "snowbird" trade had become particularly important to the local economy as retirees from the North descended on the coast in search of weather a little warmer at a price a little less than they'd have to pay farther south. In income and attitude these folks were more like the middle-class southerners who came to the beach after World War II than the well-heeled who wintered in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. But unlike their post-war counterparts, who liked to "redneck it up," the snowbirds were more inclined to sit by the pool in the sun, play cards at senior centers (some opened just for them), hit the buffets for the "early bird special," and maybe drop by a local bar for a beer before bedtime. (One enterprising owner puts polka music on the jukebox when the snow begins to fall in Minnesota.)
Full-time residents are of a mixed mind about this migration south. Chambers of Commerce full of "raffish Rotarians" love them and the money they spend, although they wish the visitors would spend more. (The running joke is that Canadians come down with a white shirt and a $100 bill and don't change either.) Locals also complain that the old and northern drive too slowly, clog up the check-out lines at the grocery stores, are rude and pushy and, more than anything else, are Yankees--which explains the popular bumper sticker that reads: "If this is snowbird season, why can't I shoot one?"
And there are other changes. Although African American faces remain few--even as a traditional labor force, which Hispanics largely have taken over--the sort of in-your-face racism that characterized the Riviera early on has become more subtle and in some places seems to have disappeared all together. Gone are the covenants that reserved beach communities for whites only--a consequence of court decisions and federal legislation rather than a conversion to racial tolerance. Even "redneck" stalwarts like The Trashy White Band now offer up a variety of music that on stage is mostly country and offstage is often gospel, for the very culture that gave rise to the Redneck Riviera was also a culture full of churchgoers who wanted to visit the beach for the family activities it offered. However, once arrived they found that for every goofy golf course, water park, and carnival-like attraction in family-friendly surroundings, there was a bar or a club, liquor store or lounge, often in the motel where they were staying.
So what were good Christian families to do? Go to a church retreat. During the boom of the 1980s a number of large churches in cities like Atlanta and Birmingham bought old motels, refurbished them, and turned them into places where other churches would feel safe taking their youth groups. Local churches encouraged this and opened their doors to visitors. More conservative in dress (no bikinis) and more organized in activities (group trips to Ocean Opry), they represented an aspect of the white, middle-class South that those who focused on the region's redneck reputation often overlooked. (Over on Mississippi's segregated coast Gulfside Summer Assembly, an African American religious resort, had long offered middle and upper-middle class blacks the same "safe" surroundings for their families, though it is doubtful that white churches saw this as a precedent.)
Not surprisingly, church retreats presented a problem for the "raffish Rotarians" who ran things, for what they pumped into the local economy hardly compared to the money spent at the clubs and restaurants for which the region was famous. Then the rumor spread that some of the retreats planned to declare themselves churches and force local officials to close down nearby bars because of ordinances that prohibited liquor being sold within a prescribed distance from a house of worship. So far nothing has come of that; however, in an ironic twist, one minister successfully convinced a county to waive its distance restriction because he and his congregation wanted to build a church but were prohibited from doing so because the land was near an establishment that sold alcohol. (11)
And then there was the evangelical angle. A Birmingham mega-church decided to use its retreat as the headquarters for a missionary effort in the wilds of Panama City Beach. Young volunteers came down, roomed at the retreat, paid their way with church-arranged jobs at local businesses, and when they were not at work or at worship the church expected them to use at least some of their free time walking up and down the beach talking with other young people about the wages of sin. It wasn't an easy sell, at least according to one of the missionaries who observed that "it was hard to witness to someone who was drinking a beer and wearing a thong," but at least the missionary tried. (12)
There is also the question of who owns the beach, which wasn't a question at all during the Stabler era. Back then, there was plenty of beach to go around, and those seeking a spot on the sand seldom came in conflict with those who owned Gulf-front property. Motels often denied the public use of their access points, but anyone who wanted to sit on a motel beach could walk in from next-door. However, as more and more people came to the beach and set up umbrellas and canopies in what beachfront homeowners considered their backyards, "Keep Off, Private Property" signs began to appear. The matter came to a head when the storms of 2004 and 2005 eroded the beach and tourist development folks sought government help in restoring what was the region's main attraction. Some property owners, fearing that if the government restored the beach the government could also claim ownership, went to court to stop restoration. At this writing some are still in court.
Yet of all the clashes, cultural and otherwise, going on along the coast, the one that seemed to capture both the differences and the similarities between the people who created the RedneckRiviera and the ones who are shaping it today took place in the spring of 2008, when the town of Orange Beach, Alabama, decided to build a second public boat ramp. The folks who put the "redneck" in Redneck Riviera perhaps best expressed themselves through their relationship with their boats, which they considered an extension of their personalities. Whether built for speed or for fishing or both, whether used on the Intracoastal Waterway, taken back into the creeks and marshes, or powered out into the Gulf, the boats were lovingly maintained and treated with respect. But boats needed water, and since most boat owners did not have a dock of their own, they depended on public ramps--the common man's marina.
Orange Beach had one public ramp and parking there was limited. So when the weather warmed and boaters arrived, trucks and trailers spilled out of the lot and onto the shoulders of the road. Neighbors complained about the noise and traffic--and the pollution. The ramp was on a slow-moving bayou, and the gas and oil that boaters spilled into the water did not flush out. Environmentalists, whose influence on coastal planning had been increasing for years, called for the city to do something to clean up the mess. The city had a solution: at the east end of town was a plot of waterfront land, public-owned, with access to the pass that led into the Gulf. It was undeveloped, just big enough for a ramp, parking lot, and restroom facilities.
This seemed the perfect fix. Only it wasn't--at least to owners of upscale condos nearby and to the folks with homes on Ono Island, a gated community across the pass from the proposed ramp. They protested to the City Council that the noise from the rednecks and their boats would take away their peace and tranquility and spoil their quality of life. The City Council was aware that most condo and Ono owners were not residents (and therefore did not vote), whereas many of the boaters lived in town. Plans for the ramp went ahead.
The opponents tried another tactic--stop the ramp to save the beach mouse. In recent years environmentalists had employed federal environmental protection laws to stop a number of projects and change the habits of beachgoers. In Walton County, Florida, regulations to save sea turtles put an end to the long-standing tradition of leaving chairs, toys, umbrellas, and tents on the beach overnight. On the Fort Morgan peninsula developers put their plans on hold when it was determined that the endangered beach mouse's habitat would be threatened. If the mouse could stop work at Fort Morgan, opponents of the ramp reasoned, it could stop work at Orange Beach.
Although the folks on Ono and in the condos previously had shown little if any interest in saving the beach mouse, overnight they became advocates for the endangered rodent. And to help them in their crusade they brought in environmentalists who they were sure would be their allies. But it did not work out as planned. When environmentalists appeared before the City Council they testified that building a ramp wouldn't endanger the beach mouse, because there were no beach mice where the ramp was to be built. Surprised, but undeterred, opponents announced that they would catch some mice at another location and turn them loose on the proposed site. Won't work, said the environmentalists, because the feral cats will eat them--just like they ate the mice that once were there. You can't restore the mice until the cats are gone.
Now, feral cats have been a problem for native species for some time, but this particular cat population had a specific origin. It seems someone pointed out to a developer planning a condo nearby that he might have trouble getting the necessary permits because there were beach mice on the property. Not to worry, said the "raffish Rotarian" developer, and he went down to the local animal shelter, adopted some cats, and turned them loose. They solved the beach mouse problem by putting a cat problem in its place. To complicate matters, some local ladies with political connections started feeding the cats (being out of mice to eat they were hungry) and the cat-feeders were not about to allow the solution suggested by one wag: hold a cat hunt. So the condo/Ono coalition hired a professional trapper to humanely trap the cats, move them to another location, and open the land for the mice. But the trapper trapped a cat that was not feral, the owner was outraged, and it looks like this too will wind up in court, which is where so many coastal conflicts are resolved today.
But in Alabama the courts seem to be siding with the rednecks. When Hurricane Ivan battered the beach in 2004 it destroyed the lodge at Alabama's Gulf State Park. A simple (some would say "Spartan") facility, before the storm some had suggested that it should be taken over and maintained by the state Historical Commission so future generations could see what a RedneckRiviera motel once was. But when Ivan washed it away the administration of Republican governor Bob Riley began to lay plans for a convention center and upscale hotel with more than twice the rooms renting at more than twice the price. Critics sued, claiming that the governor's plan not only violated state leasing laws, it failed to take into account "the average per capita and average family income of Alabamians" who had used the old facility but could not afford the new one. When the courts agreed that the plan was illegal, some hailed it as a victory for the common man.
Meanwhile traditional beachgoers were getting another break. The heady days of "condo mania" and "Dolphin Clubs" were coming to an end. The warning signs were already there when, late in 2008, the housing bubble burst and, as one real estate agent put it, "the flippers flopped." Pre-construction loans dried up. Grand plans were put on the shelf. Scores of units sat foreclosed and empty. Developers, those who could get financing, began considering hotels and convention centers for paying guests, instead of condos for flipping.
Then, just as things looked darkest, a light appeared. As condo prices fell, cautious buyers began to emerge; people who were more interested in a vacation place that could generate a little money on the side than in a unit for quick sale and a quick profit. These folks, mostly from the Lower South, were much like their parents and grandparents who came to the coast in the '50s and '60s: white, middle class, and comfortably so, but with just enough redneckery in them to help keep places like the Flora-Bama going strong. And down on the coast, another generation of "raffish Rotarians, pirates with cash register eyeballs, and hard-handed matrons" are stepping up, ready and willing to help them. Though much of the old Redneck Riviera has declined and fallen dormant, from these seeds a new one may one day sprout and grow.
There are those who hope so.
Jackson, Harvey H., III. "The rise and decline of the Redneck Riviera: the northern rim of the Gulf Coast since World War II.(Essay)." Southern Cultures. University of North Carolina Press. 2010. HighBeam Research. 4 Jul. 2011 <http://www.highbeam.com>
0 comments:
Post a Comment