Walk to the corner of 1st Street and Harbor Drive and you'll find a hand-lettered sign nailed above a bait cooler. It reads "Sity Hall." It is not a misspelling anyone has ever bothered to fix, and it is not entirely a joke either. If something happens on Gasparilla Island, the story is that you'll hear about it at Whidden's Marina before you hear it anywhere else, including from the county.
This month that claim gets tested against a full century. Sam Whidden opened what became the marina in 1926, and the Boca Beacon is marking the anniversary with a centennial special edition landing August 28. The paper has spent the past few weeks asking residents and visitors to send in their own Whidden's memories, a fishing trip, a fun visit, whatever comes to mind, before the issue goes to print.
Most retrospectives on a hundred-year-old business settle into one of two moods: nostalgic or reverent. Neither fits here. The more interesting fact about Whidden's isn't that it survived a century. It's that it survived by refusing to become anything nicer, in a neighborhood that spent the same century getting steadily nicer around it.
A Pool Hall, a Handshake, and No Down Payment
Sam Whidden was a Grove City native who came home from World War II and opened a pool hall near 4th Street and Railroad Avenue. He also worked as a hunting and fishing guide for Francis Crowninshield, husband of Louise du Pont Crowninshield, part of the same wave of northern money that filled the Gasparilla Inn's train cars and croquet lawns. Boca Grande in that era was already sorting itself into two crowds: the socialites arriving by rail to play croquet and watch the sunset, and the working waterfront that fed, fueled, and guided them.
In 1926, a man named Joe Spadaro bought the land where an old operation called the Red Gill Fish House sat, and leased it to Sam on a handshake. No paperwork, no down payment, just an agreement between two men who knew each other's word was good. That handshake is the actual founding document of what's now a National Register property, which tells you something about how casually the island's most enduring institutions sometimes start.
Sam's daughters, Isabelle and Barbara Ann, were born in 1934 and 1935, while their mother helped run a seafood market and, later, a restaurant with a jukebox and a soda fountain that Sam had built onto the property. For a stretch in the 1930s, it was reportedly the liveliest room on the island after dark. Fishermen came before sunrise, lunch crowds came for soft-shell crab, and the dinner crowd stayed late enough to dance.
Two Sisters Who Kept Saying No
Sam died in 1978, and his daughters kept the marina going. By the 1990s the property was sliding into disrepair, the tax bill was rising faster than the income, and offers to buy the land, by then worth far more than the business sitting on it, kept arriving. Isabelle and Barbara said no every time.
The path they eventually found, with help from the community and Lee County, was to fold the site into a nonprofit museum rather than sell it off. On December 28, 2000, the date happened to be what would have been Sam's 100th birthday, Whidden's Marina was added to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. The buildings were repaired, and in 2001 the Gasparilla Island Maritime Museum opened its doors on the same footprint as the bait shop.
Here's the timeline in short:
- 1926 — Sam Whidden leases the Red Gill Fish House on a handshake and opens what becomes Whidden's.
- 1934–1935 — Daughters Isabelle and Barbara Ann are born on the property.
- 1978 — Sam dies. His daughters take over full time.
- 1990s — Back taxes and deferred repairs nearly force a sale.
- December 28, 2000 — Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, on what would have been Sam's 100th birthday.
- 2001 — The Gasparilla Island Maritime Museum opens on-site.
- Today — Isabelle's daughter, Melissa Joiner Steyer, and her husband Sam Steyer run the marina, part of what a local broker once described as five generations of the family's legacy on that same corner.
One sign still bolted to the property advertises "Cold Beer, Soda, Ice, Gas, Live Bait, Boat Ramp, Boat Ways, Dockage, Tackle. Since 1925." That's a year off from the record. Nobody at Whidden's has ever seemed especially bothered by the discrepancy, which tracks for a place that has never been precious about getting its own paperwork straight.
What's Actually Inside
Push past the register and the barnyard, goats, ducks, the occasional pig, and Whidden's opens into the Gasparilla Island Maritime Museum, three small rooms packed floor to ceiling with the island's working history. Gill nets, buoys, a room of Sam's own boatbuilding tools, a sperm whale skull. Two mahogany fighting chairs, donated by wood boat builder George Luzier, once belonged to Ernest Hemingway and Zane Grey.
None of it has been curated into something sleek. The gift shop still sells candy, chips, and flowers from a small nursery run by Melissa. Old moonshine jugs sit on the windowsills, and regulars will tell you the sticky rings underneath are decades old. It's the kind of clutter that a design-forward renovation would clear out in an afternoon. At Whidden's, it's the point.
Everyone Else Sold. They Haven't.
Waterfront working marinas are not a growth category in Southwest Florida. Across the region, the pattern has been consistent: aging docks and bait shops get bought, cleared, and replaced with condominiums or high-end resort marinas built for a different kind of customer. In early 2025, the twelve-acre Eldred's Marina in nearby Placida was on the market too, one of two legacy marinas in the area listed for sale at the same time.
Whidden's itself was listed in February 2025 for $17.5 million, a number that reflects how much waterfront a hundred years of accumulated goodwill can sit on once someone finally puts a price tag on it. As of that spring, the listing was still active, and nothing in the public record since suggests the property has changed hands. What hasn't changed regardless is the day-to-day. The Steyers keep running the marina exactly as it was, dockage, fuel, bait, museum tours, while whatever happens with the sale plays out on its own schedule. It's a strange kind of holding pattern: a piece of property valuable enough to interest institutional buyers, operated in the meantime by the same family that's run it since a handshake deal in 1926.
Still Doing the Job at 100
The marina hasn't coasted on nostalgia to get here. A few years back, the museum's board, which includes family member Kacy Cheske, rebuilt its programming from the ground up, adding a spring exposition honoring the Whidden sisters' legacy, live music, a food truck, local art vendors, and museum tours in a single afternoon. The board has since kept adding to the calendar, including an annual fundraiser called Howl at the Moon and a revived fishing competition called the Back Bay Tournament.
This past April, the Boca Grande Fishing Guides Association held its tarpon season kickoff party at Whidden's, drawing roughly 200 people, longtime island families mixed in with a few visitors who'd heard about it secondhand. That's the "Sity Hall" function working exactly as advertised: word gets out, and it gets out from the dock, not from a press release.
Now the Beacon's centennial edition arrives August 28, built entirely from resident submissions, memories of fishing trips, first visits, the particular smell of the place at low tide. It's a fitting way to mark a hundred years for a business that was never trying to be a landmark. It just kept opening every morning, on the same corner, run by the same family, while the Village around it learned to be something closer to polished.
That contrast is the actual story here. The Village has spent a century adding restaurants with reservation lists, condos with elevators, and a bike path residents now navigate around three-hour parking limits. Whidden's spent the same century adding goats.
If you already live near this corner of the island, you don't need convincing that places like Whidden's are what make the Village feel like itself rather than a well-maintained postcard. If you're weighing whether the Village is where you'd want to put down roots yourself, this is the kind of detail that doesn't show up in a listing sheet. Rich Taylor has been working this island since 1995 and can talk you through what daily life here actually feels like, corner by corner. Reach out to Onbocagrande to request a private consultation.