Iconic Florida Gulf Coast bar burns to ground this morning

The Red Bar (left, in my photo of 2017) burned to the ground this morning (2/13/2019). The iconic Grayton Beach bar/restaurant was in an old building steeped with Florida Panhandle history.

Van Butler's general store occupied the building for decades. Butler's was more than just a hard-to-find little store, located off a once-desolate section of now-toney highway 30A. It was a honky-tonk, a dance hall, a pool hall, and an ersatz community center.

My mother, and several of her sisters, celebrated the end of WW-2 at Van Butler's. In the 50s, we would ride with our dads down the short stretch of oyster-shell road that was the old FL-30A, from Blue Mountain Beach to Van Butler's store at Grayton Beach, after rent-house suppers on hot August nights. My dad and uncles (all WW-2 veterans) drank beer, and we kids - cousins - would play pool and eat ice cream.

Too bad. It makes me sad not so much that a mediocre bar is gone, but that the avaricious developers - circling like vultures for years - can now swoop in and make old town Grayton Beach yet another Gulf Coast playground for the ultra wealthy.