Most Viewed Stories
Lights out at Nightown: Owner evaluating options
It may be closed for now, but the sun hasn’t set on Nightown yet, the owner says.
Spring breakers looking to dance in Destin have had to forgo the area hot spot this season. And visitors to the Nightown Web site are greeted by a message that states: “Thanks for a great 30 years ... The party is still going at the Swamp at the Boardwalk on Okaloosa Island.”
Bob Bonezzi, a managing partner of R&B Amusements, which owns The Swamp and Howl at the Moon, said he doesn’t consider the night club closed.
“It’s closed but I haven’t figured out what I want to do yet. We are looking at all our options and trying to make the wisest decision for a grand old lady,” he said. “It just makes those other businesses busier. So really, financially, this isn’t any kind of big deal.”
He said the timing of the hiatus just made sense.
“For a while, dance bars got real urban, but now we are in a kind of music flux, and so we are deciding what format to take when we do something different,” he said. “Or maybe we’ll find new blood.”
But finding new blood in the form of a new owner would be difficult for a man who still calls Nightown “his baby” because it was his first business. Bonezzi said Nightown opened the same year as fellow Destin icons The Donut Hole and Harbor Docks.
The club opened July 1, 1979, “before disco died” in a building that used to be a lumber yard called Wee-Wood, said longtime Destin resident Cyron Marler.
He and his friends sometimes called it “fightown,” but he said it was mostly a “nice hopping place.”
It’s also a piece of history.
“It is one of the longest-running, same-ownership, same-named clubs east of the Mississippi. Thirty years in this business is unheard of,” Bonezzi said.
Although the club’s future is unclear, it’s getting a facelift in the meantime. About a month ago, the night spot was closed for renovations.
Bonezzi said they remodeled the main room and redid the lighting and sound and put in new carpet and stools. Now they are in the process of rehabbing the smaller bar.
