Visitors in the 1800s would mostly come to the Pacetti Hotel, and Ponce Park, via the Halifax River. This is why the ‘front’ of the building actually faces the water rather than the ‘rear’ of the building that faces the driveway where visitors arrive today.
The original dock of the Pacetti Hotel did not lay directly in front of the building. It was instead located a few dozen feet closer to the inlet (towards the left if you are standing on the front porch and facing the water). This dock was an important part of the site’s early history. Since visitors usually arrived there, many early photographs of the building were taken from this historic dock.
By the 1920s, this dock had been demolished (or possibly destroyed in a storm) and a new dock was built directly in front of the steps leading up to the front porch of the Pacetti Hotel. In the years since this change, this dock was restored and rebuilt many times, but always in the same location. Owner Olivia Gamble restored the dock during her massive renovation of the site in the late 1930s. Then her nephew Louis Nippert oversaw a complete rebuild of the dock in the 1970s, featuring a boat slip topped with a thirteen-star American flag to commemorate the Bicentennial.
That 1970s dock held up until Hurricane Irma in 2017, when all that was left standing were the pilings that held the dock. In 2023, the dock was rebuilt and featuring a floating platform attached.
