Panama City Beach Florida — Retro Vintage History

What’s with the Miracle Strip? For half a century the stretch of beach road through Panama City Beach was the Miracle Strip — a glorious tangle of neon, putt-putt, surf shops, and old-Florida kitsch, anchored by an amusement park. The Miracle Strip Amusement Park opened on Memorial Day weekend in 1963 around the Starliner, a wooden out-and-back roller coaster that was the first ever built in Florida. For forty years the Starliner’s white wooden hills were the skyline of the beach; in 1980 someone rode it for 336 straight hours and set a world record. The park closed in 2004 and the coaster was hauled away, but the name still means something here: the Miracle Strip is shorthand for old, neon, unpretentious Florida fun.

The Strip’s other landmark is older and stranger. In the late 1950s a welder-artist named Lee Koplin began pouring concrete dinosaurs, a sphinx, and a giant grinning gorilla beside a miniature-golf course, and Goofy Golf was born — Day-Glo roadside folk art that a Washington Post writer once said “ought to be placed on the national historic register.” It still stands. Around it grew the whole vocabulary of the old beach: motels with neon signs, sno-cone stands, a fake volcano, live sharks in tanks at the surf shops. This is the Florida of cheap, happy, slightly tacky fun, and Panama City Beach kept more of it than almost anywhere.

The town that holds all this came together piece by piece. A resort “Grand Opening” in 1936 put the beach on the map; over the next decades a string of separate beach communities — Long Beach, Edgewater, Gulf Beach and more — grew along the shore, incorporated in 1953, and finally merged into a single City of Panama City Beach in 1970. Before the resorts there were fishing hamlets, turpentine camps, and, during World War II, a shipyard and a gunnery range on St. Andrews Bay.

Walk barefoot here and the beach is as white as sifted flour and soft as powder — and that is not an accident of marketing. The sand of the Florida Panhandle is almost pure quartz, ground down from the Appalachian Mountains and carried south by rivers over millions of years, then polished fine and bright by the Gulf. That is why it glows, why it squeaks underfoot, and why it stays cool in the sun. Set against the Gulf’s emerald-green water, it earned Panama City Beach its oldest and proudest title: the World’s Most Beautiful Beaches.

The water lives up to the sand. This is the heart of the Emerald Coast, where the Gulf runs from peridot to jade depending on the light, clear enough to see your feet in the shallows. At the east end, St. Andrews State Park guards the pass with dunes and jetties, and across the channel lies Shell Island — miles of undeveloped barrier beach where the only crowds are the dolphins. Nine miles of public sand, a pier or two, and that water: the whole reason the beach exists.

A word about the name, because it confuses people. There are two Panama Citys here: the older inland city of Panama City, the Bay County seat across the bay, and Panama City Beach, the resort city on the Gulf — separate towns with separate governments. (Neither is the one in Central America, though the inland city is said to have taken its name from its spot on a straight line between Chicago and the canal.) When people picture “Panama City” with white sand and neon and a roller coaster, they mean the Beach.

Our Panama City Beach logo carries the Florida alligator over “Florida Territory · Est. 1845,” the year Florida became a state — the shared emblem of every Merlin Classics Florida town. Printed in clean retro black-and-white that reads like an old crate label, the alligator stands for Florida as a whole; what makes this one Panama City Beach is everything behind it — the neon Miracle Strip and the Starliner’s wooden hills, Goofy Golf’s concrete dinosaurs, and the quartz-white sand and emerald water of the World’s Most Beautiful Beaches.

Today Panama City Beach is miles of sugar-white sand and emerald water, a family beach with a little neon still glowing on the Strip. Our Panama City Beach designs gather that identity — the alligator emblem, the Miracle Strip nostalgia, the World’s Most Beautiful Beaches — into wearable form. Panama City Beach — sugar-white sand, emerald water, and a little neon nostalgia on the Miracle Strip.

Panama City Beach, Florida — Travel Guide

Visiting Panama City Beach Today

Panama City Beach is a Gulf resort city famous for its sugar-white quartz sand and emerald water, with miles of public beach, two long fishing piers, and the undeveloped barrier sands of Shell Island just across the pass. It blends easy family beach days with a little surviving Old-Florida neon.

The Beach, the Strip & Shell Island

For visitors looking for things to do in Panama City Beach, Florida:

• Spread out on the sugar-white sand along the nine-mile public beach.
• Explore St. Andrews State Park — dunes, jetties, and clear water by the pass.
• Boat across to Shell Island for undeveloped beach and dolphins.
• Walk the Russell-Fields City Pier or the M.B. Miller County Pier for Gulf views.
• Play a round at Goofy Golf among Lee Koplin’s 1950s concrete dinosaurs.
• Hike the boardwalks of Conservation Park through Panhandle wetlands.
• Watch for loggerhead sea turtles nesting in early summer.
• Browse Pier Park’s open-air lanes near where the Miracle Strip once stood.

Why People Visit Panama City Beach

Panama City Beach rewards visitors who want bright white sand, warm emerald water, and an unpretentious good time, with a thread of retro neon still running through it. Add the piers, Shell Island, and the year-round Gulf sun, and the World’s Most Beautiful Beaches make their own case.

Kindred Cities

Greetings to visitors from the Gold Coast, Australia and Cancún, Mexico (bienvenidos) — kindred high-rise beach towns built for sun and good times.

Panama City Beach lives for the beach, and the Gold Coast and Cancún play the same tune. Australia’s Gold Coast stacks its towers behind Surfers Paradise and the endless Queensland surf; Cancún lines its hotel zone along the turquoise Caribbean; Panama City Beach runs miles of sugar-white Gulf sand below a wall of resorts, the spring-break capital that grew into a family one. Three coasts that turned sun, sand and a good time into a way of life.

Panama City Beach welcomes anyone chasing the easy beach holiday: powder-soft sand and emerald water, a boardwalk and a pier, go-karts and beachfront balconies, and the kind of warm Gulf night that made the place famous. Come and visit us soon.

When you plan the trip, Visit Panama City Beach is the place to start.

For deeper reading on the Panama City Beach history described here — the early fishing, turpentine and timber economy and the WWII St. Andrews Bay shipyard and gunnery era, the 1936 resort grand opening, the 1953 incorporation and 1970 consolidation of the beach communities, Lee Koplin’s Goofy Golf, and the 1963 Miracle Strip Amusement Park and the Starliner — it may be useful to consult (1) the Bay County Public Library and its local-history collections, (2) the Bay County Genealogical and Historical Societies, (3) the State Library and Archives of Florida, (4) the Panama City Publishing Company Museum and area heritage collections, and (5) the City of Panama City Beach clerk and records office. For travel and visitor information, it may be useful to contact (1) Visit Panama City Beach, (2) the Panama City Beach chamber of commerce, (3) the Panama City Beach parks and recreation department, (4) the Florida state-parks office for St. Andrews and Camp Helen, and (5) the Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport information desk.