Pass-a-Grille — Old Florida Preserved By Its Own Zoning Overlay

What Actually Sets Pass-a-Grille Apart From the Rest of the Island

Start with the legal reality, because it trips up a lot of buyers: Pass-a-Grille has not had its own town government since July 9, 1957, when it merged with three neighboring communities to become what is now the City of St. Pete Beach. There is no separate Pass-a-Grille city hall, no separate Pass-a-Grille property tax bill, and no separate Pass-a-Grille police department -- all of that runs through St. Pete Beach and Pinellas County today, exactly as it does for the rest of Long Key. What does make Pass-a-Grille functionally distinct, more than 65 years after that merger, is a specific piece of St. Pete Beach's own zoning code: the Pass-A-Grille Overlay District, codified in Division 20 of the city's Land Development Code, which caps most residential construction in the district's THD, RU-2, RLM-2, and RM zones at roughly 28 feet to the midpoint of a sloped roof (32 feet at the peak), well below what's buildable elsewhere on the island, and pairs that cap with tighter setback rules. That overlay -- reviewed and periodically extended by the city's preservation board -- is the concrete zoning mechanism behind the low-rise, cottage-scale streetscape that separates this end of the island from the mid-rise condo corridor running north along Gulf Boulevard, not just an informal reputation for staying small.

The place itself predates that zoning fight by more than a century. Zephaniah Phillips became the first documented permanent homesteader here in 1886, and his home still stands near today's public beach park. Development picked up through the 1880s-90s as Tampa investors Roy Hanna and cigar magnate Selwyn Morey began platting lots and running a ferry service, and by 1901 French travel agent George Henri Lizotte had opened the Bonhomie, Pass-a-Grille's first hotel. The community formally incorporated as its own town in 1911, and by the time it joined the 1957 consolidation vote that created St. Petersburg Beach (later shortened to St. Pete Beach by a 1994 referendum), it counted roughly 800 residents. Its architectural legacy from that era earned it a place on the National Register of Historic Places as the Pass-a-Grille Historic District on October 19, 1989, initially covering 97 buildings bounded roughly by 12th Avenue, Gulf Boulevard, 4th Avenue, and Gulf Avenue; a September 15, 2003 expansion added 354 more contributing structures across a wider area bounded by Pass-a-Grille Way, 1st Avenue, Gulf Way, Sunset Way, and 32nd Avenue, bringing the total past 450 -- among the largest concentrations of historic buildings on Florida's Gulf Coast.

The neighborhood's working landmark, as opposed to its residential streetscape, is Merry Pier -- a fishing and boat-charter dock at the island's southern tip named for Captain Kenneth B. Merry, a Pass-a-Grille resident from 1900 whose family opened a bait-and-tackle general store on the dock in 1902, making it the first store on any of Pinellas County's Gulf beaches. The pier got a roughly $1 million renovation in 2022 (new decking, pilings, and utilities) before Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit it hard again just over two years later. Recovery has come in two distinct phases: the pier structure itself reopened February 10, 2025 after about four months of rebuilding, but the storm-damaged bait shack -- the same 123-year-old retail building the Merry family opened in 1902 -- took considerably longer to fund. The City Commission didn't approve its rebuild until January 2026, budgeting more than $144,000 after insurance valued the structure at roughly $75,000, initial repair estimates came in near $96,000, and the city's actual insurance payout landed around $62,000 -- a real gap between what a historic structure is insured for and what it costs to rebuild in 2026, and a concrete illustration of how slowly a small city's storm recovery can move even for a beloved, low-cost landmark.

That same storm season left its mark well beyond one pier. Hurricane Helene's storm surge on September 26-27, 2024 reportedly flooded the intersection of Pass-a-Grille Way and 12th Avenue directly, burying cars in sand and damaging beachside businesses, even though Helene's actual landfall was well north in Florida's Big Bend region -- a reminder that surge damage on this coast doesn't require a direct hit. Hurricane Milton arrived twelve days later, compounding erosion and debris that hadn't yet been cleared. Separately, and for reasons unrelated to either storm, Long Key -- the barrier island Pass-a-Grille sits on -- had already been locked out of the Army Corps of Engineers' federal beach-renourishment cost-share program for years, after a dispute over public-access easements required of beachfront owners caused funding to lapse after 2018; a May 2026 agreement is reported to have restored that federal funding. Anyone evaluating property here should treat both storylines -- the 2024 storm damage and the multi-year renourishment funding gap -- as real, current, and only partly resolved rather than settled history.

A few things this page does not treat as confirmed fact: an official, current-year population count specific to Pass-a-Grille as distinct from St. Pete Beach as a whole (Pass-a-Grille has not been separately counted by the Census since the 1957 merger, so no reliable current figure exists to cite); a parcel-by-parcel accounting of which Pass-a-Grille structures crossed FEMA's substantial-damage threshold during the 2024 storms; and a current, address-specific shoreline erosion rate. Confirm all of that directly with the City of St. Pete Beach, the Pinellas County Property Appraiser, and FEMA's Flood Map Service Center before making a purchase decision.

Dining, the Beach Itself, and What There Is to Do

Pass-a-Grille's best-known restaurant is the Hurricane Seafood Restaurant, a family-owned spot at 809 Gulf Way that's been serving black grouper and other Gulf seafood since it opened in July 1977; its three-story building includes a rooftop bar with a 360-degree sunset view that's become a local institution in its own right. Paradise Grille, right on the beach itself, runs a lower-key breakfast-lunch-dinner menu and hosts a nightly local tradition: a volunteer rings a bell as the sun drops below the Gulf horizon. That sunset ritual is possible because of a genuine geographic quirk -- Pass-a-Grille's beach faces almost due west, giving it an unusually open, unobstructed sightline over open water for sunset-watching compared with many other Gulf-facing beaches on this stretch of coast.

Beyond the restaurant strip on Gulf Way, the neighborhood's public spaces are small and genuinely local rather than resort-scale: Pass-a-Grille Park offers shuffleboard courts and shaded lawns; Colonel Frank T. Hurley Park, on 16th Avenue, has a dog park, tennis and basketball courts, a baseball diamond, and public restrooms and showers; and the Gulf Beaches Historical Museum Park on 10th Avenue pairs a small local-history museum with a gazebo and picnic area. Merry Pier itself remains a working fishing and boat-charter dock rather than a boardwalk attraction -- rod rentals, bait, and charter-boat departures, not amusements. The neighborhood's real draw for most visitors and residents alike is simply walking it: a compact, roughly one-mile-long, two-block-wide grid of alleys and cottage-lined streets running from the open Gulf to the Intracoastal Waterway, closer in feel to Key West's historic core than to the rest of St. Pete Beach's Gulf Boulevard corridor.