What We Lost When Waterworks Closed
There's a specific kind of grief reserved for a bar that was never just a bar. Waterworks — the palm-frond-canopied tiki hideaway that ran the Midtown night for 32 years before going dark in January 2024 — was that kind of place. You didn't go to Waterworks to get a drink. You went to be surprised.
Two and a half years on, the surprise still lands as loss. So let's do this the right way: as an oral history's worth of gratitude, offered a little late but felt fully.
Start with the bones of it. The building had a past life as Kent's Lounge, the legendary Tallahassee room that hosted The Replacements, Alex Chilton, and Bill Wharton back when Midtown was still figuring out what it wanted to be. When Don Quarello took the space over, he did the hardest thing a new owner can do: he kept the best part of what was there and built something stranger on top of it. Quarello, as Flamingo magazine put it, was "a Miami boy with a taste for tropical decor," and he poured that taste into every square foot — the fronds overhead, the dim tiki glow, the sense that you'd wandered into a bar that existed slightly outside of Leon County's ordinary hours.
But the decor was the least of it. Waterworks was where Tallahassee went to be smart in public. The bar's "Science Salons" pulled FSU and FAMU researchers up to hold court on particle physics and fire-ant colonies while patrons nursed rum drinks — a genuinely bizarre and beautiful idea that treated a Midtown watering hole like a lecture hall with better lighting. There was an annual toast to Dr. John B. Gorrie, the Florida physician who helped invent mechanical refrigeration and air conditioning, which is exactly the sort of hyper-local, hyper-nerdy ritual a real neighborhood institution invents for itself.
And then there was Jungo. Waterworks ran bingo hosted, per Flamingo, by "a guy in a gorilla suit who called himself Jungo." That single detail tells you more about the place than a paragraph of adjectives could. This was a bar that understood the assignment of nightlife better than most rooms twice its size: give people a reason to tell the story tomorrow.
The music mattered too. Jazz nights and live sets kept the room breathing, part of the connective tissue that made Midtown a place you could walk between sets, between bars, between decades of the town's musical memory. Waterworks was a node in that network — not the biggest, not the loudest, but the one with the most personality.
Why does a tiki bar's closing still sting in 2026? Because rooms like this don't get replaced; they get mourned. You can build a new bar. You cannot manufacture 32 years of accumulated weirdness, the trust a neighborhood places in a space that has earned the right to be eccentric. When Waterworks closed, Tallahassee lost a piece of its own strangeness — and strangeness, in a college town, is a renewable resource only until it isn't.
Quarello said it best, and without a hint of bitterness. "We've had 32 years of ridiculously amusing times," he wrote on Facebook when he announced the end. "It's a good time to wrap it up and we did, last Saturday."
Ridiculously amusing. That's the epitaph, and it's the right one. Pour one out under an imaginary palm frond. Somewhere, a man in a gorilla suit is calling B-12.
Sources: A Toast to Tallahassee's Tiki-Hut Haven — Flamingo