The Bilmar

I can't stand Bill Maher, but I love the Bilmar.

That's the Bilmar Beach Resort, right next door to the Thunderbird in St. Pete's Beach. Another fine old relic from the past that somehow still stands today, the Bilmar is a hip, swingin' and affordable place even into the 21st century.

But it's the Bilmar of another time that I'd surely love to experience, when it apparently had a restaurant and nightclub across the street called Kings Inn, complete with swing big-band music.

Though its gaudy yellow and tan stripe paint job screams retro, apparently this is a relatively new innovation. An old postcard from the early 1970s shows the inner walls painted yellow but the outer façade merely a dull gray.

Thunderbird

Treasure Island's Thunderbird Resort was really something back in the glorious days of Exotica, and we should all be damn glad it still carries that tattered flag of 1957 into the 21st century.

Of course, once you get back behind the immense monolithic slab of its facade, you realize the place is really just another motel. But that's okay.

Then again, they do have a top-notch restaurant, called Feola's. I had a Philly Cheesesteak that was so big, they had to cut it in half to fit it on the plate. And dee-lish. The two cocktails I imbibed - a Blue Hawaiian and a Rum Punch - were worth coming out here again for. Especially at times when my regular Blue Hawaiian pit stop, O'Maddy's in Gulfport, is lined out the door with inebriants who had the foresight to get to Happy Hour early.

When I was passing through the courtyard, a fun lady named Fiona was playing electric ukelele (accompanied by a drum machine and effects) and singing Edie Brickell's "What I Am". There's a second bar out on this courtyard, a little tiki shack called Ikky Woowoo's, which is probably where I really shoulda gotten the drinks. Next time.

Yeehaw Junction

Yeehaw Junction, fabled in biker story and song, spoken in letters writ large in legendary terms by hushed whispers of awe, isn't a myth, it's real. It's approximately 30 miles west of Vero Beach and 30 miles north of Lake Okeechobee, at a great crossroads of the sort which Robert Johnson would surely find worthy of offering himself. (It's also a hellacious speed trap, unfortunately, so watch for cops and watch your speed.)

The "Yeehaw" supposedly comes from the Seminole word for "wolf" but I don't believe anything anyone tells me about the origins of place names in America and neither should you. The town was originally named Jackass Crossing - allegedly dating to the days when local ranchers rode on burros to visit the local house of prostitution, the Desert Inn. But I'm not sure I believe that story either.

In the 1950s they changed the name to Yeehaw Junction, ostensibly so doing in honor of the nearby Yeehaw railroad station several miles to the east, at Standard Oil's behest. As the story is told, when they moved operations into the area they were embarassed at the idea of having "Jackass Crossing" on their official letterhead. It all smells sketchy and reverse-engineered to me; add these datums to your doctorate thesis at your peril.

The earliest records of Yeehaw Junction state it was started by the Consolidated Land Company in the 1880s, a mere 40-some years after Florida became a state. At this time, central Florida was even more of a swampy, lakey mess than it is even now, and considerable effort was made to reclaim the wetlands into usable solid ground. According to the Desert Inn's website:

Between 1917 and 1930 history was made with the cowboys moving cattle from Kissimmee River, Orlando and places north down to the Indian reservations and places south in which Yeehaw was the only watering hole!!! The Desert Inn patrons at that time included Indians as well as cowboys, business people, moonshiners, traders (trading goods and lumber), and lumber men. Cowboys remember ox teams and Model T's.

In the 1930's Dad Wilson bought the property and fixed it up a little so it was more than a shack. It now had gas pumps, according to stories. Also, from the stories, Dad Wilson was a railroad hobo who was 'kicked off' in yeehaw... then borrowed lumber from the railroad! Somewhere in this time period, a man named Boree has a going sawmill a stone's throw from the restaurant. Supposedly, Dad Wilson and Boree had several squabbles~ Also, this was about the time that roads were paved.

The Desert Inn, though no longer a brothel, is still a fine motel and restaurant. Okay, I haven't actually stayed in the motel, but it looks pretty fine from the outside. I can report qualitatively, however, that their cheeseburgers are five-star.

In typical laidback "Living on Florida Time" tradition, their stated opening hours are "Open 8:30-ish daily...maybe 9 on Sunday".

Dale Sings Sinatra

Last night I had the pleasure of watching Dale Williams perform his lounge act at the lavish Peninsula Inn in Gulfport. Sometimes you need a few cocktails to make a small-town lounge act bearable - and the cocktails here were indeed top-notch - but I genuinely enjoyed Dale's show. Gulfport should count its lucky stars that Dale remains here and isn't in Vegas or Atlantic City where he really belongs.

Though his act is based around Sinatra's style, which he has down to a T, I have to agree when his website states that he's not doing an imitation of Sinatra. He doesn't mimic Frankie's mannerisms or come off like an impressionist. He has his own take on the Sinatra style. In fact, in many ways he's even more Sinatra than Sinatra - he uses the "wandering jazz vocalist" trick of Frank's to even greater degree, coming in on the melody at very different points than the ear expects. This was also a key technique used by Willie Nelson in his early years, and subsequently by Ray Price when covering Willie's songs. Back then, it was often misinterpreted by cowan's ears as simply, "ugh, he's singing the melody wrong, he's drifting all over the place and coming in too early or too late." That's jazz, baby, get hip or go home.

Dale also covers all sorts of post-Sinatra-era songs like Van Morrison's "Moondance", which are always a revelation when heard performed in the Sinatra style. At first it may seem like the cognitive-dissonance humor of Joe Piscopo's parody medley in which Ol' Blue Eyes sings incongruous Springsteen and Joan Jett covers, but in fact the man always did have an ear to the ground for the latest tunes to transform with his own magic - witness his covers of Petula Clark's "Don't Sleep In The Subway", Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline" and "Song Sung Blue", Jim Croce's "Bad Bad Leroy Brown", Tony Orlando & Dawn's "Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree", and Billy Joel's "Just The Way You Are".

You can catch Dale's act at the Peninsula Inn every Saturday from 7-10pm, or listen to the audio clips on his website linked above.

Drunken Fashion Show

A 1960s fashion show in a Holiday Inn filled with women getting sloshed on fifty cent booze? I'm in.

The Soreno Hotel

In downtown St. Petersburg, there's another one of those infuriating historical signs that, like the Vilano Beach Casino, tells us basically that "a really cool building used to be here, but they tore it down."

It makes it all the more a sore point to learn that the Soreno was demolished by a developer who couldn't develop: the super-important whatever-it-was project that the Soreno was blown up to make room for never came to fruition.

The producers of Lethal Weapon 3 (starring Mel Gibson and Danny Glover) got wind of the building's impending destruction and got in on the action, working the explosion into the film and shooting numerous scenes on the hotel grounds prior to - and even during - the demolition blast.

It's fascinating to watch it go down on this recorded live footage from TV channel 13; note how evenly the building collapses neatly into its own footprint... which of course, as you know, only happens with deliberate controlled demolitions such as these. *cough*

Magic Beach Motel

This wacky inn is located on that island near St. Augustine that has no name, but I call it Vilano Key because Vilano Beach is its primary hub unless you count Mickler's Landing and I don't.

Originally this motel, which is very near the pier and the pavilion that once was the Vilano Beach Casino, was called simply Vilano Beach Motel. But in 1999, it was used as the set for the TV series Safe Harbor, which altered the sign to read "Magic Beach Motel" because the show's setting was in the fictitious town of Magic Beach, FL. After the show was cancelled, the owners chose the keep the sign and the name change, and is now of Florida's most elusive specimens: a old-school retro "Cadillac" motel that is also clean, updated and modern at the same time.

And yes, at night when the sign's turned on, the neon bunnies light up in a staggered manner so that it creates the illusion of them bounding out of the top hat.

The Breakers Hotel

The Breakers Hotel, in Palm Beach overlooking the Lake Worth Lagoon, was originally the Palm Beach Inn and opened in 1896. It burned down in 1903 and was quickly rebuilt in 1904. But in 1925 it burned down again and was once more rebuilt - this time out of fireproof concrete instead of wood - in 1926. The magnificent paintings on the ceilings of the 200-foot main lobby were done by a team of seventy-five Italian artisans, brought over to America specifically for the job.

On August 24, 2009 a large creature was caught on tape leaving a wake in the Lake Worth Lagoon as it traveled along, just under the surface of the water. The identity and existence of the creature remains unconfirmed, but all kinds suggestions have been made - ranging from burmese python to sea monster. It's been dubbed "The Muck Monster", but most cryptozoologists are a bit underwhelmed about an alleged creature that no one's actually seen.

Chopstick Charley's

I've frequently been mesmerized by this abandoned building on Phillips Highway in Jacksonville - a bygone remnant of the Mad Men era called Chopstick Charley's, complete with a politically-incorrect caricature of an Asian man, presumably Charley, painted on its sign. Fortunately, it doesn't really show up in the picture I took here. But once while driving by, I spied an elderly Asian man, also presumably Charley, exiting the building and locking up. Wow, I thought, even though the place is obviously long shut down, he must still be using it for storage or something, or maybe he's working on renovating it to resell the property.

Imagine my surprise and horror when I googled it and discovered, to my astonishment, that the place is not abandoned, not out of business: it just looks that way, and on purpose. Yes, Chopstick Charley's in all its decrepit grandeur is still operating.

I don't usually go in for the oh-so-snarky school of hipster jerkoff "critics" using the internet to shame and ridicule people or businesses, but in the interest of socio-archaeological completeness I'm going to have to link to this restaurant review of Chopstick Charley's, dated this summer, July 19, 2013. This intrepid soul actually took one for the team, entered this place, and dined. And lived to tell, though also lived to regret. And of course, next time I'm back in Jax you know I'm going to have to check it out for myself, and hopefully write some sort of positive review (albeit from my own warped perspective) to help counterbalance the negativity of "Jaxfoodcritic"... even though I have no doubt every word he said was true.

Adjacent to Charley's is a dirty old paint-peeling-off motel that also appears abandoned, but now that I know CC's is still a thriving business venture I'm not so sure. The motel is seemingly a part of the Chopstick Charley's complex, and its sign simply reads, "The Joe." I don't understand. I don't want to understand.