The Marler Bridge
Near Destin, Florida
The bridge carrying this highway over the East Pass has a name most drivers never notice. It is the Marler Bridge, honoring one of the founding families of Destin. For most of its history, this fishing village was almost an island, reachable easily only by boat, which is part of why it stayed small and remote for so long.
That changed when the first bridge across the pass opened in the nineteen thirties, along with the state road that connected to it. For the first time, you could simply drive to Destin. The original span was a modest structure, and by the nineteen seventies it could no longer handle the traffic pouring toward the beaches.
The current, much taller Marler Bridge was completed in the nineteen seventies. If you cross it on foot along the pedestrian walkway, you look straight down into the emerald water of the pass, out toward the Gulf on one side and the wide bay on the other, and you can watch charter boats threading the same channel that four men once opened with shovels. The bridge did more than carry cars.
It quietly ended Destin's isolation and opened the door to the resort town that grew up all around you.
