The Water Street Experience
Apalachicola Up Close

Apalachicola is a city where a sense of relaxation and contentment encompasses the Gulf coastline.
It has a style all its own—a blend of waterfront communities, allure of sport fishing, charm of historic homes and a quaint downtown dotted with unique shops and restaurants.

The Water Street Hotel & Marina is the first and only development of its kind in the attractive Apalachicola market. Standing next to Scipio Creek and the Apalachicola River, which flows into the Gulf, this building is truly a place where simple pleasures come alive. The architectural design, by nationally renowned architect Thomas E. Pope, PA of Key West, is distinctive---incorporating stucco over concrete block to resemble the architectural style of the area around the turn of the 20th century. Every hotel condominium affords a private veranda with exceptional water views. Every detail—from the luxurious furnishings to the first class amenities—will reflect the superior standards that you expect.

Whopper catches, certain shellfish, and a sense of rural peace and pacing pervade this flashback strip of Gulf coastline. When you cross the dramatic bridge over the Apalachicola River from the east, time drops you back into the antebellum era. A battalion of brick buildings along the riverfront in Apalachicola reverses time some 170 years, back to the town’s heyday as a thriving shipping port for cotton.

Today, oysters are more synonymous with Apalachicola than cotton. The waters of Apalachicola Bay, where the river flows into the sea, make oysters happy as, well, clams.

Today oysters are farmed in the bay and harvested by oystermen with long-handled tongs and wooden flats boats. Fish houses line the waterfront of Apalachicola and neighboring town of Eastpoint, selling the prized shellfish. The town brags that it produces more than 90 percent of Florida’s oysters and 10 percent of the oysters America eats.

It also boasts more antebellum sites than anywhere else in Florida. Upwards of 200 homes and commercial buildings, which hold boutiques, shops, galleries, restaurants, churches and B&Bs, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The circa-1912 Dixie Theatre hosts a repertory group. John Gorrie Museum State Park commemorates the 19th-century doctor who invented an ice-making machine, the precursor to modern air conditioning, while searching for a way to make his yellow fever victims more comfortable.

From Eastpoint, one can reach out-of-the-way, 28-mile-long St. George Island via bridge. Here begins the renowned blinding-white, dunes-piled sand beaches of Florida’s Panhandle. An intimate inn and rental homes along the beach accommodate vacationers to the skinny island. The best place to take to the beach is St. George Island State Park, where it remains in its natural state of ghost crabs, salt-dwarfed pines, wild rosemary and reindeer moss. On the beach side, loggerhead and green sea turtles lumber ashore to lay eggs every summer. On the bay side, salt marshes host snakes, turtles and a variety of fish among their reeds.

Tours take you canoeing or boating in search of nature or off to islands unconnected by bridge to the mainland. The largest of these, St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge, is sanctuary to a rare mix of native animals and exotics that have survived from the island’s former life as a hunting preserve. Here, Asian sambar deer co-exist with native white-tailed deer and reintroduced red wolves.

East of Eastpoint, the tiny town of Carrabelle offers some of the best charter fishing around. It also has antique shops, art galleries and claims the smallest police station in the world---the size of a phone booth. Carrabelle is another good place to get your fill of fresh oysters at casual fish houses along the waterfront.

Courtesy of VISIT FLORIDA.