I don't know why this area of open space got a name but strictly speaking its a real Key West city street:
Calais Lane crosses three blocks, from Amelia to United streets and it is a real weirdo of a street. At the Amelia end it looks like this more or less:
The fashionable refurbished home with the pink shutters is on Amelia and so far the lane looks fairly normal. But here it follows its own outlandish pattern. 
The cyclist is actually riding on the bank parking lot and Calais Lane is hidden behind the low white wall, like this:
The First State Bank on Simonton Street has a large parking lot:
Calais Lane itself isn't really residential (someone will pop up and say that of course they spent most of the 70's on Calais Lane in a drug induced haze, just to prove me wrong!) but there are houses nearby:
They've also just built a new pocket park alongside the lane. These little gardens have been popping up all over town, but this one is still a little sparsely decorated:
The plan is for a facade of a cigar factory worker's home to be erected inside the park. This location was the site of worker housing for the nearby Gato cigar factory, which is now county offices on Simonton Street. This area was known as Gatoville thanks to the high proportion of Gato's dependants who lived here before the cigar factories decamped and went north to Tampa. I guess Key west was expensive even in those days. Who knows maybe a hundred years ago these two youngsters could have been cigar workers wending their way home down United Street: 
They aren't nearly as intriguing when you remember it's 2008 and they aren't sepia tinted curiosities, just your neighbors.
Calais Lane crosses three blocks, from Amelia to United streets and it is a real weirdo of a street. At the Amelia end it looks like this more or less:The fashionable refurbished home with the pink shutters is on Amelia and so far the lane looks fairly normal. But here it follows its own outlandish pattern. The cyclist is actually riding on the bank parking lot and Calais Lane is hidden behind the low white wall, like this:The First State Bank on Simonton Street has a large parking lot:Calais Lane itself isn't really residential (someone will pop up and say that of course they spent most of the 70's on Calais Lane in a drug induced haze, just to prove me wrong!) but there are houses nearby:They've also just built a new pocket park alongside the lane. These little gardens have been popping up all over town, but this one is still a little sparsely decorated:The plan is for a facade of a cigar factory worker's home to be erected inside the park. This location was the site of worker housing for the nearby Gato cigar factory, which is now county offices on Simonton Street. This area was known as Gatoville thanks to the high proportion of Gato's dependants who lived here before the cigar factories decamped and went north to Tampa. I guess Key west was expensive even in those days. Who knows maybe a hundred years ago these two youngsters could have been cigar workers wending their way home down United Street: 
They aren't nearly as intriguing when you remember it's 2008 and they aren't sepia tinted curiosities, just your neighbors.
2 comments:
How do you find these streets that I never heard of after living there for 8 years? I love it keep them coming.
William
Well, there's a challenge...
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