Miami's iconic bar and smoked-fish house, Jimbo's, is finally closing in mid-April, according to a letter from owner James E. Luznar to Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado.
"…I am no longer able to be at this site on a day-to-day basis, I would like to give the site back to the City of Miami to become a city park for public use," 85-year-old Jimbo writes in the letter.
The shrimp shack and open-air dive bar opened in 1954 after Luznar's shrimp company was kicked out of the area that now houses the Miami Herald. In return, he was given a rent-free lease on Virginia Key in Key Biscayne -- a patch of land next to a sewage treatment plant, according to Miami New Times.
In the March 14 letter, Jimbo asks the mayor for 30 days to wrap up their business and for some sort of remembrance to be kept on the site to keep the Jimbo's Place memory alive.
In the mid-60s, Flipper was filmed at Jimbo's and the dolphin lived in a cove behind the shrimp shack. The outpost's strange rustic/beautiful vibe has inspired many photo shoots and film sets over its 6 decades. Recently, its colorful shacks and burned-out cars served as the backdrop for Dexter.
Last year, swank men's magazine Esquire voted it one of the best bars in America, saying "Tucked among mangrove trees beside a lagoon on an island in the middle of Biscayne Bay, it's not just in Miami but of it."
Long before the condo boom and South Beach glamour days, Miami was often seen as a frontier -- both morally and geographical. It was a destination for enterprising oddballs hoping to live beyond modern-day rules and expectations.
It's this same spirit that drives locals to be protective of Islandia, a weird little non-city off Miami's coast that lacks any glimpse of modern development.
And it's this Miami that inspired author Karen Russell to pen the novel Swamplandia!. The Coral Gables-born author admitted that her childhood here made it always feel like she had a "pretty short commute to strangeness."
And with Jimbo's closing, that commute to the weird and wonderful will get miles longer. Old Miami -- that is, the wild, steamy, unchecked Miami -- is fading even further into the shadows of WalMarts, Trump Towers, and Pollo Tropicals.
HuffPost salutes Jimbo's -- the place and the man -- with the 10 best descriptions of his legendary swamp shack. Tweet your own ode to Jimbo's with the hashtag, #OdeToJimbos.
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