Loss is part of life: we all know this. But when you lose your favorite bar, your clubhouse, your dear old dive, well, that’s a pain that never goes away, a wound a dozen martinis could not heal.

After 32 years, Waterworks, the world’s greatest tiki bar, is no more. It survived the 2000 presidential election vote recount mess, various hurricanes, COVID-19 and even the occasional incursion of frat boys. It was part of Tallahassee’s history; it was part of my personal history. I laughed in that bar; I cried in that bar; I fell in love in that bar; I flounced off to that bar to drink white Russians after a bad breakup. It was my clubhouse.

The building, located in what’s now called Midtown, once housed a smoky joint called Kent’s Lounge. The Leon County Sheriff’s Office was right next door. Kent’s served up cheap drinks and stellar live music, including The Replacements, Alex Chilton and Florida Music Hall of Famer and hot sauce genius Bill Wharton. When Kent’s shut up shop, Don Quarello—a Miami boy with a taste for tropical decor, his grandmother’s killer eggplant Parmesan recipe and a cheerfully twisted sense of humor—threw open Waterworks’s palm frond-canopied doors. Don somehow kept the best part of Kent’s vibe going but with a double shot of wit. He hosted events called Science Salons at which researchers from Florida State University, Florida A&M University and more would discuss particle physics, superconductivity and the complex social structure of fire ant colonies. There was a yearly celebration of Dr. John B. Gorrie of Apalachicola, the father of air-conditioning. There were jazz performances by local musicians, surf bands, folky punk (or punky folk—I never could decide). A guy in a gorilla suit who called himself Jungo ran bingo. Every time I went to Waterworks, it was as if I were stepping into a really good party already in progress.

But Don decided to move away, writing in a Facebook post on Jan. 24, 2024: “We’ve had 32 years of ridiculously amusing times … it’s a good time to wrap it up and we did, last Saturday.” 

Since the announcement, I’ve had to try out other bars. And in the process, I’ve taken a trip through Tallahassee’s long and weird watering hole history: the fancy bars, the cheap bars, the cool bars, the scary bars, the ones packed with sharp-suited women and men in red ties, the ones festooned with long-haired girls in cowboy boots and the ones where grad students argued over pantheism and the embodied text in “Moby Dick.” 

You can get decent literary and political conversations at Ology Brewing Co. on Sixth Avenue, a haunt of Tallahassee artists and journalists. Ology means a subject of study, a branch of knowledge. Booze is, after all, chemistry, an art and a science reaching back thousands of years to Egypt and Mesopotamia. The brewery and distillery makes beers with names like Sensory Overload and Spa Goggles, plus their own vodka, gin and birthday cake-flavored cream liqueur. You can park yourself here all day: they do coffee (I’m partial to the Cardy B, a latte with black pepper and cardamom) and if you’re hungry, you don’t even need to get up—the excellent pizza place next door will deliver one to your table. Ology, Gaines Street Pies and Battle Pony (a small whisky bar lit like a 1940s mystery movie) collectively occupy a space once home to Lucy Ho’s Bamboo Garden, Tallahassee’s first Chinese restaurant. When it opened, the town rejoiced. We’d all been raised on fried chicken and green bean casserole, so sweet-and-sour pork and fried rice seemed positively miraculous. Sitting in Ology, I could almost smell the pineapple juice and rice vinegar, though it could have just been another of their aromatic ales. 

Late one spring afternoon I found myself sitting in Bar 1903, staring into the amber heart of a Sazerac, thinking about what I might order next. The title page of 1903’s cocktail menu says, “Atheneum,” declaring itself “an institution for the promotion of literary or scientific learning.” They’re not joking: cocktails are listed chronologically, from pre-1880 (the Sazerac was invented in 1838 by a New Orleans apothecary named Antoine Peychaud) up through the 20th century and into the 21st. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the building is a jewel box of rosy brick and tall windows, heart pine floors and graceful balustrades. The bar calls itself a “Library of Cocktails,” and quite right, too: it was built 122 years ago as Tallahassee’s first public library. Somehow it escaped being razed in the name of “downtown improvement.” 

By the 1960s, it was no longer a library, but the headquarters of Springtime Tallahassee, a civic group that organizes an annual festival held on either the last Saturday in March or the first Saturday in April. I remember going in there once with my mother, marveling at the dim, dusty shelves and a large, ornate, rather dirty chair in one corner, allegedly once the property of Prince Achille Murat, a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, who descended on North Florida in the 1820s to run a cotton plantation. In 2020, a local restaurateur rescued the building and turned it into this beautiful—if tiny—bar: it only holds 36 customers. Sitting by the window, eating some of 1903’s fancy deviled eggs, I looked out onto Bloxham Park with its old oak trees and big white houses lining the street. I can’t see the huge, hideous glass building that squats next to the bar or the ugly condo tower a block away. This is the Tallahassee of my childhood—only with good booze.

My attachment to bars began when I was a high school junior. Believe it or not, kids, Florida’s drinking age in those ancient times was 18, not 21. Therefore, along with my best friends Juanda and Mary Sue, we made a point of drinking at 17 at the Subway on Tennessee Street near FSU. Now, when I say drinking, I don’t mean we got drunk. We were terrified of getting caught. Sometimes we shared two salty dogs between the three of us and ate several slices of pepperoni pizza to cover any possible smell. Breaking the Florida laws and defying our parents made us feel sophisticated. 

We weren’t sophisticated, of course, but bars can make you feel urbane and worldly and smarter than you actually are. In college, The Grand Finale, successor to Subway, was my favorite and not just because on Thursday nights you got four drinks for the price of one. Finale’s (as everyone called it) was the house bar for the Florida Flambeau, the independent newspaper I wrote for. Louis the bartender would see me coming and get a gin and tonic (on the weak side, extra lime, no ice) ready. The education I received there was probably as good as what I got.

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For more columns by Diane Roberts, click here.

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