The Salt Line, Vol. 109: The House Ivan Left Behind, and a Deadline Still Written as X
Minutes of the Salt Line Board of Review. Regular session, Thursday, October 1, called to order at the picnic table under the carport. Present: the chair, two members, and a pelican on the dock piling, seated as an observer without a vote. Absent: the sun, excused through Monday.
Old Business: the house on Gulf Boulevard
The board took up the oldest item on any agenda in the region. Santa Rosa County has taken ownership of a long-neglected house on Navarre Beach, the brick place on Gulf Boulevard just past the Navarre sign. Hurricane Ivan damaged it in 2004. Nobody repaired it. The county sued ten years ago, the trial court ruled for the county, the appellate court agreed, and the lease is terminated. “That matter is final and over with,” the county attorney said, and the board asks that the record reflect how rarely a government lawyer sounds that happy.
A child born the week Ivan came ashore has been old enough to order a Bushwacker for a full year. For that child’s entire life, everyone driving to that beach has passed a Havisham house, every clock inside stopped at the storm. Nobody on this coast needed a reminder of Ivan. The house supplied one daily anyway.
What comes next is where the board leaned forward. The county attorney’s suggestion is to sell it as is, possibly at auction, to the highest bidder “who is willing to guarantee its renovation within an X period of time.” The property is reported to be worth at least $2 million, so there will be bidders. The question is X.
The board’s view is that X is the whole policy. The original arrangement on this lot also assumed the house would be fixed, and it took a lawsuit, an appeal and twenty-two years to establish that it would not be. A guarantee is worth exactly the date written in it and the penalty behind it. Write X in months. Put it on page one. Attach a consequence that does not itself take another decade in court.
This is not only Navarre’s business. Every beach town on this coast, Orange Beach and the Key included, will have its own version after some future storm, and how long a ruin may stand at the front door of a tourist town is a question each of them will answer, either on purpose or by default.
Ruling: The county did the slow part correctly. The board urges it to do the fast part fast. X should be a small number.
New Business: several lots, and the word “after”
Pensacola is moving to buy blighted property along the Pace-Cervantes corridor: several vacant commercial lots near the intersection, paid for out of a $5 million Community Development Block Grant the state awarded in 2024. The Community Redevelopment Agency takes up a demolition vendor next week, and then it goes to council. Affordable housing, small businesses and grocery stores have all been floated, and Councilman Delarian Wiggins wants the lots on the market for developers to bring “something long-lasting.” City Administrator David Stafford was more economical about the order of operations: clear the blight first, “and then the development comes after that.” The board observes that “after that” is where a great many plans in this region go to wait.
Ruling: Approved, with one amendment. Before the bulldozer leaves, say which of the three it is for. An empty lot is tidier than a ruin. It is not a grocery store.
Committee on Weather: no cone, plenty of rain
Nobody on the Key is refreshing the cone this week. FOX10 reports that Tropical Storms Fay and Hannah have both dissipated and the Atlantic is quiet, and that it may rain five to seven inches south of I-10 anyway, courtesy of a slow-moving front nobody will bother to name: scattered showers Thursday, the heaviest Friday through Sunday, more Monday. Localized flooding is possible, so check /beach-today/ before anyone walks down to the water. In the same packet, Foley’s Tacos & Tequila Festival was pushed back a month, from this weekend to November 7 and 8, on account of the weather.
Ruling: A call made days ahead, in plain words, by people who read the forecast. Commended to every public body on the coast as a model.
Proclamations: a record at The Wharf
A kids fishing tournament at The Wharf in Orange Beach raised $30,000 for Make-A-Wish Alabama, a fundraising record, with 125 young anglers and their families at the sixth annual event, presented by Rouses Markets. A local kid’s wish was granted at The Wharf during the tournament itself, so the people who gave got to watch it land. The big tournaments on this coast end with a marlin on the hoist and prize money for the boat. This one ended with the money going the other way.
Ruling: So proclaimed. A fishing story with a verified number in it, which on this coast is its own kind of record.
Arts and Letters: the Creature’s side of the story
Ballet Pensacola opens its 48th season with a world-premiere Frankenstein, choreographed by Gonzalo Galguera, two acts, Friday through Sunday at the Clark Family Cultural Center on South Jefferson Street. Galguera, who has read Shelley’s novel three times, in German, Spanish and English, says the Creature “is a victim, not a victimizer,” and that “it’s Hollywood that made a monster.” The novel sides with him on Hollywood. On the victim question it is less tidy, since the Creature kills three people, but Shelley hands him whole chapters to make his case, which is a good deal more than Boris Karloff got. The board notes that the performances are indoors, which this weekend is a selling point, and that Mary Shelley began the book in the summer of 1816, when, as she put it later, “incessant rain often confined us for days to the house.”
Ruling: The forecast and the arts calendar are, for once, in agreement. Go.
Adjournment
Shelley’s real subject, and the ballet seems to know it, is not the making of a monster but the walking away: Victor builds the thing, abandons it, and everything after is the bill. The coast keeps its own versions, a house on Gulf Boulevard and several lots near Pace and Cervantes, each built by somebody and then left to the weather. It is going to rain all weekend, which, historically, is how this lesson gets written down.
— Chris
P.S. Know a restaurant, charter, shop or event we’re missing, Florida side or Alabama side? Add it, free, no appellate court required: /submit/
