By Scott Graber
It is Saturday, early, and I’m at my pine-planked, dining room table in Port Royal. The news this morning centers on the waterfront in Beaufort and in Port Royal.
Both, we learn, are about to change.
Port Royal will abandon its semi-industrial look for a waterfront featuring a sleek, recumbent population of white, fiberglass-hulled boats, patiently awaiting their weekend captains from Greenville and Atlanta. Beaufort’s waterfront may get a new, two and three-storied building with a rooftop bar.
I must say that I have memories of rooftop drinking and remember when one had to travel North (or West) for this privilege. In my case it was New York’s Rainbow Grill, high above Rockefeller Center, where one could buy an Old Fashioned, a small bowl of mixed nuts and a view for about $10.
After Susan and I landed at LaGuardia our first stop was always the Grill. In the early 70s we would board the Grill-dedicated elevator praying for a table with a view — a view then including the Chrysler Building and the newly built Twin Towers.
We did this for 5 years before being lured over to Campbell Apartment, a dark, semi-secret bar hidden above the Main Concourse at Grand Central.
For those of confined in Beaufort County there was the Crow’s Nest on Hilton Head that gave one a slightly elevated view of the Atlantic Ocean. But if one was willing to travel (to Atlanta) there was John Portman’s “Polaris” atop the Hyatt Regency.
Portman followed that revolving restaurant with “Sun Dial” at the Peachtree Plaza. I remember sitting in this hotel and admiring the tall, dark haired waitresses wearing slate gray skirts.
“John Portman designed those women as well” Jim Thomas said as we sipped our Dewars.
And who could resist a drive to South of the Border and a climb to the top of Pedro’s iconic sombrero? Those who made that trek were sometimes rewarded, depending on barometric pressure, with the distant lights of Dillon, S.C. But it wasn’t long after that ascent that Susan and I discovered the Pisgah Inn at Milepost 408.6 on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
The dining room at Pisgah, at elevation 5,000 ft., overlooks the soft-shouldered, oak, laurel and fir carpeted mountains just below its huge windows. It’s restaurant offers a variety of entrees, but one should not dismiss the trout which is filleted at one’s table.
But it’s the view, looking east into North and South Carolina, that makes this place magical. It is the unbroken, unimproved, unaltered view that, in those days, came with a dollop of fatigue — fabulous fatigue that came after an ascent up Black Balsam Knob and then up and over to Shining Rock. It was a fatigue that enveloped our small, fragile family sitting, if just for an hour, at the top of the world.
Some years later I found myself atop the M’Bamou Palace Hotel in Brazzaville. Their rooftop bar came with its view of Kinshasa just across the Zaire River. That bar featured Johnny Walker Black — flown in from Paris — and cohort of beautiful Black prostitutes. But the real draw was balcony seating for the civil war then underway in Zaire.
I remember sitting with a reporter from the Wall Street Journal talking about Mobutu Sese Seko and whether he would survive this mutiny. It seems that inflation finally made his money — bills featuring Mobutu’s imperial face and figure — worthless. The rebellious troops had left their barracks and found machine guns and tracer ammunition that lit up the nighttime sky.
More recently I found myself atop the Perry Lane Hotel in downtown Savannah. My son, his wife, Susan and I were watching the building-sized container ships squeeze under the Talmadge Bridge. I remember saying that the Savannah port people made their deal with China and Charleston’s customers were mostly in Europe.
The kids seemed distracted, frequently looking down at their cell phones. We would later discover that while we watched 100 of our friends were gathering below to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary.
Now it appears that Beaufort will have a choice of rooftop bars in which to do its drinking. Dick Stewart is building one on Port Republic Street; Graham Trask is putting his bar in place just off Bay Street. For those of us who once nursed our Mojitos at the John Cross Tavern — or traveled North and West — this is a future we could not imagine.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.
