I lived in Fairhope for a long time, and it is lovely! But it typically took us about an hour and 20 minutes to get to Pensacola.

Pensacola has a historic district.

I mean there are tons of beach towns with walkable central commercial areas to the west along 30A. Not historic though. Big vacation places for Texans and southerners.

We are moving to the Pensacola area for my husband's job. I like the idea of living in a single family home in a walkable area. To me, that would be within a 25 minute walk of a couple restaurants, a coffee shop, a nice park, etc. I'm not looking to live within walking distance of strip malls with chain stores and restaurants, I want the independently owned places.
We saw that just over the state line in Alabama, the cities of Daphne and Fairhope have this.
We've been looking for something like that in Florida but haven't found it. Is there some great community like this that we've just missed? We would consider anything within about a 1 hour drive of Pensacola (so Daphne and Fairhope are possibilities for us to move to, but there's not a lot on the market right now so we were hoping that adding another city or two to our search would help.)