expression
BOOKS
TRAVERSING 30A Coffee-table book celebrates coastal development by WYNN PARKS
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Paradise might have been a more readable publication if it had. Chapter one’s notes on the Panhandle’s prehistoric cultures, and later, its frontier days with its timber and turpentine economy and presidential land grants, are quite interesting. So, too, are the chapters that describe the flora and fauna of the region and coastal dune lakes. But there the fascination stops, and all too soon, the narrative turns to singing the immortal real estate sagas of each designer community from one end of Scenic County Highway 30A to the other: Dune Allen, Santa Rosa Beach and Gulf Place, Blue Mountain Beach, Grayton Beach, WaterColor, Seaside, Seagrove Beach and Eastern Lake, WaterSound, Seacrest, Alys Beach, Rosemary Beach, and Inlet — naturally — Beach, ad infinitum.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
↑ Above: Jeep owners gathered for a Fourth of July event at Seagrove Beach in the 1980s. Top: The east end of Lake Allen and the area of the Dune Allen Beach plat and first addition. The Oyster Lake outfall is visible in the foreground.
Dropped are the names of Panhandle notables, paired with summaries of their investor-visions, and details of who bought which parcel of swamp, scrub or dune land. We learn how boundaries were revised by half a degree west, perhaps, to conform to whatever the new Land Politics had decreed.
Robert O. Reynolds was raised in Montgomery, Alabama. His family started vacationing in Northwest Florida in the 1950s. His parents discovered Seagrove Beach in the 1960s and bought a house there, and he has been returning ever since. Reynolds is the author of Simply Seagrove about the history of that community. With his latest book Pathway to Paradise, he addresses all the communities along Scenic Highway 30A, which since its creation in 1937, has become home to architecturally and culturally significant coastal developments.
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June-July 2021
EMERALDCOASTMAGA ZINE.COM
PHOTOS COURTESY OF ROBERT REYNOLDS
athway to Paradise is the kind of volume that leads a reader, after a few pages, to suddenly ask, “What kind of book is this?” Appearance-wise, it’s a double-wide, coffee-table type book, lavishly produced, the kind of book that one might find gracing a blue, Mexican-tile-top table in the Florida room. The front cover? It’s a full-bleed, artsy photo of a gateway through sea oats to the beach beyond, a blurred realm of unformed possibilities of infinite glamor. On the back cover, a coastal landscape — old school “expressionism.” Inside, there are 136 slick pages of heavy stock, redolent with color photography and a plethora of maps and other graphics one has to see to appreciate and appreciate to see. There’s no question that Robert O. Reynolds invested considerable sweat equity in researching, editing and publishing Pathway to Paradise, but considering how many thousands of words are represented by the photography alone, the actual text could have been left out. In fact,
