“Mama, will you buy Aqua back?”
Jill McDonald shook her head and laughed wryly, recalling the May text message that upended the retirement life she and her partner, Sandy Thomas, were enjoying in Venice, Florida.
The text brought the pair back to Key West and immersed them in the construction chaos that surrounded her last week at the nightclub she created in 2002.
“I was in Venice watching a true crime murder, when I got the text from Mark Watson,” McDonald said, referring to her longtime Key West friend who had worked for her as a bartender at Aqua Nightclub, 711 Duval St., which she owned and operated from 2002 to 2011, when she sold it to local businessman Michael Ingram.
“I thought Mark was just kidding and checking in, so I wrote back,’Sure,’” McDonald said, assuming that was the end of the exchange. “But then Mark texted Sandy and asked, ‘Will you let Jill buy back Aqua?’”
Then things got serious and the couple started catching up on the drama that had enveloped — and ultimately shuttered — Aqua Nightclub.
The details are a complex web of financial and legal problems involving the two men who had bought the nightclub from Ingram in 2023.
“We started doing some research and learned that paychecks had been bouncing, rent wasn’t being paid and staff wasn’t being paid,” said McDonald, who has been in the bar business for 40 years. After selling Aqua to Ingram, she and Thomas had built, opened and co-owned Hang Five, a wildly successful restaurant in Panama City Beach that she later sold to the Señor Frogs international restaurant group.
“I know Jill, and she’s someone who always needs a project,” Mark Watson, of the text message infamy, told the Keys Weekly on Oct. 13. “She’s uneasy when she doesn’t have something to do, and I knew she had sold Hang 5, so I knew they had some Señor Frogs money rumbling around.”
Watson and others had been hearing of serious financial and legal difficulties surrounding Aqua’s Orlando-based ownership group, Pride Holdings Group, which had bought the Key West drag cabaret and nightclub from Michael Ingram in 2023.
Aqua ultimately closed on July 6, prompting an outpouring of emotional online tributes from Key West locals and visitors.
To make a long story short, McDonald returned to Key West and to the club she created and still loved.
“Sandy and I talked a lot, and I said, ‘I think I can do it one more time,’”, she said, referring to one more bar business.
“I walked in and was embarrassed at what the place had become,” she said. “My love for the Aqua family and for this town convinced us to do this.”
But it’s not going smoothly.
In addition to the unexpected expenses that McDonald long ago learned to anticipate, the building needed a new roof, which pushed the reopening until after Fantasy Fest.
This week, things got worse. The construction project got red-tagged with a stop-work order from the city’s building department.
“The building owner (Joseph Cohen) told the city he was unaware of what was happening on the property, which is untrue, and that he needs to be the one signing for permits,
McDonald said. “Although he bought the building a few years ago, there’s a 99-year lease on the property that’s held by the Farrington family, and the city already decided that the master lease holder should sign for the permits.”
McDonald has been in touch with the Farringtons, who are aware of the permits she has obtained and paid for.
“Now that I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his building, he shuts me down after the city gave me five permits that I paid for, that were authorized by the master lease holder,” a dejected McDonald said this week, unsure of what comes next as she awaits confirmation from city officials that the permits were properly authorized and work can resume.
Shortly before press time, the Keys Weekly contacted Cohen’s attorney Bart Smith, who previously did legal work for McDonald, she said. Smith said he would contact Cohen to see if he wanted to comment. As of press time, Cohen had not responded, but stay tuned to keysweekly.com for updates.
Meanwhile, McDonald is stuck in a holding pattern, unsure of her next move. One thing that is certain, though, she’s holding Watson responsible for the text message that started it all.
