I like working nights, no administrators in the police department, no callers needing to be transferred, no wandering office workers clutching sheaves of papers, no detectives bursting into dispatch with important background checks that have to be done now! The Chief tucked up at home and his captains too. There's just the officers on road patrol and the three dispatchers and the city, supposedly dormant but more often than not heaving with drama.Lots of the nighttime drama comes from the bars, occasionally before they close but frequently between 2am when some of the slower establishments shut down for the night and 4am when city ordinances require that all boozers quit for the night. The Green Parrot was looking pretty dead when I took my lunch break mid week, around 11:30pm.
I don't go out to bars much, unless dragged by a friend, but I couldn't help noticing how many people were thronging the sidewalk with little black boxes poked in their ears. What did people do before there were cell phones? Bad enough that people drive with them on all the time, but you can't even hang out in a bar without yakking on them too? 
I just liked the looked of the sidewalk outside, a warm night in February, what a luxury. Just up the street from the Green Parrot is the corner of Whitehead and Fleming, which doesn't sound like a particularly enticing intersection, but I couldn't resist standing in the middle of Whitehead Street, pointing the camera at the Mile Marker Zero sign and recording my moment at the end of the road.
For all that its slightly fuzzy I too am a tourist and my motorcycle is there to prove it!
A quick left at Fleming Street and there is the old jail, no longer used to house people, but it reminds me of the movie "In The Heat Of The Night" with Sidney Poitier going home and getting involved in crime detection among the good ole boys.
And just across Fleming from the county building lies the symbol of Federal munificence, the Post Office which was looking particularly toothsome that night.
I find the main post office very evocative, built of brick and looking permanent in its majesty with a huge parking lot and yet it is welcoming too with its long portico and open access to the P O Boxes. I love ducking into the walkway on rainy summer afternoons and watching the water pound the feeble lawn in front of the building.Round the corner from the Post Office we have a back entrance to Truman Annex, a massive development that causes nothing but headaches in the city. Old timers hate the Annex because it represents apartness, the gated community mentality that has sprung up all across the US. This gate says NO ENTRY loud and clear in defiance of the Keys' easy going tolerance.
I like the symbolism of the gate across the city street, the reflectors, the whole "Keep Out!" message reminds me of Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin where I stood in 1981 on my first trip around the world. 
I struggle to differentiate the fake "Conch Houses" inside the Annex from the soulless Stalinist blocks of apartments you can see in East Berlin just beyond the Allied Check Point. West Berlin was a vibrant crazy place, much more so than Key West today, and it too was an island, though surrounded by dour do-gooders of the most oppressive sort. East Berlin was ghastly. I just feel bad for the limp retirees who mope around the Annex, and simply want to ignore Key West's middle class naughtiness; they would do better to let down the barricades, just as the East Germans eventually did.There's another fenced in community in Key West and it looks good by night, evocative in its own way, a place where the inmates make great neighbors, they never take the time to bitch about anything.
One of their (living) neighbors on Windsor Lane made the effort to illuminate their flourishing palm:
And across the street is Poor House Lane which leads to Bill Butler Park nestled deep in this residential neighborhood It takes on a mysterious, unwarranted gloom in the middle of the night.
Sloppy Joe's is ambling along and there aren't the huge lumpen crowds on Duval's sidewalks I was hoping to photograph. It always amazes me how people imagine Hemingway ever would have been caught dead, drinking in this sloppy neon studded music bar. I think Sloppy Joe Russell would be astonished how his name has taken off! The two of them must be laughing like drains in the Great Beyond.
The San Carlos stands all but ignored, day and night, on the 500 block of Duval. This theater is generally credited with being the place where a speech by Jose Marti set fire to the Cuban revolution that ultimately saw Spain abandon its Cuban colony. And yet today the restored theater stands as a monument to the exile Cuban community's total inability to think of anything to do with this historic building. It could be a fabulous museum relating the story of generations of Cuban migrants to South Florida. Instead its pretty much ignored.
What a tremendous waste; another reason I have little time for the Miami Mafia as Fidel Castro calls them. I stopped to snap a picture on Petronia Street and a man walking his dogs popped out of Shavers Lane wondering what I was doing. "Oh," I said, " just recording the passing of my life." And he looked around trying to figure out what drew my camera to this section of the street.
All I can say in my defense is that it probably won't look the same in twenty or thirty years time...It looks quite pretty to me right now, and entirely worthy of a picture.
On Front Street I paused to snap these two police cars, parked while their drivers patroled downtown on bicycles.
That was when Kelly and Nick pedalled up and we started a long discussion about motorcycles and Triumphs and Harleys and their relative merits and Kelly had to drool over the Triumph. Silly man he has his own splendid H-D Road King to gloat over.
And then my lunch break was done and I buzzed off back to the police station where I put my headset on and proceeded to send Kelly and Nick to break up a fight and before I knew it I was no longer an observer but a participant in maintaining order and calm in the city by night.
"Bike Team Two, physical altercation at Southard and Duval. Caller advised four women and two men in a brawl in front of Bank of America. No weapons seen...."
I really do enjoy working nights, silly me.
