Miracle Strip: Florida's First Roller Coaster

For four decades the skyline of the beach strip was crowned by a wooden roller coaster called the Starliner. It belonged to Miracle Strip Amusement Park, which opened on the twenty fifth of May, nineteen sixty three, and it left a mark on the whole state. A group of Panama City Beach men, led by James Lark Senior, pooled their money at the end of nineteen sixty two and began building.

When the Starliner opened, it was the very first roller coaster ever built in Florida, an out and back wooden design by the noted coaster engineer John Allen. The park grew up around that ride through the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties, adding attraction after attraction as Panama City Beach boomed, and generations of families remember the rattling climb and drop of the Starliner over the Gulf breeze. Then tourism softened.

After a slump in the early two thousands, the owners announced the park would close, and it ran its final day on the fifth of September, two thousand four. The beloved Starliner was taken apart and relocated to another Florida park. Miracle Strip is gone now, but for older visitors its memory still defines this stretch of beach, and the name lives on in a smaller revival park that keeps the spirit alive.