New Town is not the part of Key West visitors flock to but wasn't I surprised to spot a Conch train last Wednesday taking a handful of tourists up Kennedy Drive in the heart of the Conchs' Key West. I guess I'm not paying attention because I had no idea they cruised the middle of New Town. I know they have their depot, what they call a "roundhouse" in railroad parlance, on Flagler at George Streets, but that's for mechanics and bean counters, not riders:
The thing about New Town is that even though it isn't a hundred years old, even though it isn't historic it still manages to exude a Key West air by including odd architectural details or decorative motifs that don't belong in just any American suburb. New Town is where the Conchs fled after they sold their nasty wooden huts near the harbor to a bunch of crazy (gay) outsiders who overpaid badly for those cramped little homes. So, with the advent of cheap air conditioning the old timers built nice modern (soulless?) shopping malls and built themselves some ranchette style American Dream homes nearby and lined them up alongside straight wide streets, similar in all respects to Staples Avenue:
And now, fifty years later New Town is old and has its funky corners just like before. Its where one goes to escape the crowding of Duval Street. Staples Avenue Bridge, a footpath and bicycle route only, which crosses the 10th Street Canal, is deserted predictably enough at 3 am, except for my Vespa. The city promised this bridge for years to cyclists who wanted a way over the canal that avoided the heavy traffic of Flagler Avenue. Predictably the city took a long while to get around to it. The best part was some dude who kept writing in to the Citizen's Voice every month sarcastically reminding the city of it's failure to come through. After the bridge was built, the Doubting Thomas was never heard from again, not even aword of thanks, but his place in the newspaper column was taken by the neighbors whining endlessly about the "dangerous" increase in bicycle traffic along Staples Avenue. Predictably enough everyone is used to the bridge and all whining has stopped:
For some reason I was moved to peer over the edge of the bridge at the ghostly mangrove roots waving in the air as they sought an anchor in the mud of the fetid canal waters. It takes a middle of the night lunch break to make bland New Town look creepy?
When the creature from the black lagoon failed to materialise I got on the wife's ET4 Vespa, filling in for the bald-tired Triumph this week, and crossed Flagler Avenue for a look at a few places that seem to gain depth, as it were, at night. The Presbyterian Peace Covenant church is another of those vaguely Polynesian looking buildings that seem to have been favored in the 1950s and '60s around here:
This place shouldn't be confused with the soup kitchen at Grace Lutheran up the street where they feed the poor who have a regrettable tendency to squabble while supping. The soup kitchen got whacked pretty badly by Hurricane Wilma in 2005 and their church collapsed like a wet house of cards after the storm. Which illustrates another thing about New Town. This place used to be uninhabited because the early settlers snagged that part of the island more impervious to what forecasters delight in labelling "weather events." Old sometimes is better, especially when faced with the prospect of a citywide hurricane flood. Across the street is a large billboard that I find rather intrusive on Flagler Avenue, big yellow and in your face every time you ride by:
Is it wrong to giggle at a podiatrist who makes welcome "emergencies and walk-ins" ? Hop-ins should it be perhaps, or limp-ins?
On a less facetious note, the new High School still looks magnificent especially by night fronted by miles of open parking lot. This is home to the Fighting Conchs, which if you've ever seen a Conch laboriously crawling across a sea floor, gives the term "fighting" a whole new, less bellicose meaning. School sports in the Keys are followed with rapt and ferocious attention by parents(who complain all the time about the Citizen's coverage of their events) and the three high schools in the islands take each other on rather in the manner of Sparta versus Athens; To The Death.
I know little about school shenanigans but the Auditorium is a great new addition to Key West's list of locales to see concerts and attend performances in winter when Culture rears its head on the island. Personally I find the High School, open and unfenced, to be the perfect symbol of small town Key West. I hear big city schools rejoice in the use of scanning machines and security devices to check admission to campus, procedures sure to instill self respect and trust among the student body. Even in this town people complain (in the Voice!) about kids and their manners all the time but I find Key's kids to be polite and respectful almost universally. Another old fashioned pleasure of living here.
Around the corner I found another Conch statue this time in a rather less, shall I say wholesome locale? The Conch shell is barely visible in the window under the awning. I parked my scooter in the middle of the street for about ten uninterrupted minutes to use it as a stand to take this and a few other pictures. Not a single vehicle came by to interrupt me. Is this a great town or what?
This is where the juvenile wastrels burn their pocket money on candy (not liquor, one hopes) and whatever it is one wastes one's teenage allowance on, in the 21st century. While across the street (this is Bertha Street by the way) residents, tired of the blandness of New Town apartment living livened up their home with colored lights. Palm trees and colored lights, such extravagance this could be Los Angeles! I guess they aren't worried about the six percent fee increase announced by Keys Energy.
Very festive. Next to the corner store there is a mysterious building which I have never ever seen open, not even when I had the misfortune to drive a congenitally defective VW Microbus. This building does no business that I know of, yet has never been taken over or altered through the decades of mad development. Spooky, or possibly encouraging:
And because the little hand is at 40 and the big hand is heading towards the four its time to get back to the star ship and take up the business of dispatching police once again. Hop on the Vespa, take a left at the green light and a right on Leon Street a few blocks down Flagler:
Me and my bad ass ride- I own New Town at three in the morning and don't you forget it.
2 comments:
Lol...that big ole sign from the Foot and Ankle Specialists ended up in my yard over on Staples (by the bridge) after Wilma. I had hoped that they would replace it with something a little nicer but the new one is almost identical.
I suppose one should give them a break. It can't be fun waking up each day anticipating another raft of mangled feet to look at. But there again thats no reason to display such a gruesome blight of a sign as inducement to spend time with them.
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