There is a funky area next to key West High School and it's name is Duncombe Street. Which sounds like it should be
Done-comb Street, as in "I'm
done putting a
comb through my hair." Because this is Key West, that is not the case. Duncombe was, according to J Wills Burke a prominent man in Key West a century ago, but left no clue as far as I know how to pronounce his name.
So the little street off Flagler next to the High School is pronounced
Dun-comm-bee with the usual Key West flair for getting the job done. Any time I have to dispatch an officer to Dun-comb (juvenile mischief? It is next to the High School!) I set my teeth on edge when I say Dun-comm-bee instead. But I do because no one knows it by any other pronunciation. In any case this street is easily missed even though it is next to the landmark thrift store on Flagler Avenue:
Duncombe is a utilitarian street and serves to connect the main avenue to the high school, but it certainly isn't all pretty:
There are a handful of dwellings along the west side of the street before it ends at the new High School campus after a block. The right turn at that point becomes the strangely named Venetia Street. The campus is no longer so new but it did replace in spectacular fashion, like a phoenix, the old run down collection of buildings that used to be the high school:
The auditorium is where I get to go each winter to enjoy productions the school puts on, and the excuse is to see offspring of friends but the truth is I enjoy the energy of the campus. Unlike so many high schools in cities across the US, the Key West campus is open and unfenced which I take to be a measure of the civility of the city. Perhaps too I enjoy the evident irony of the school's mascot, standing proud, and oversized in the parking lot:
"Key West High School, Home of the Fighting Conchs." I have spent many happy hours observing the antics of pacifist conch as they trundle across the sea floor in the shallow waters of Bahama islands, and the mollusc's rate of progress through the sand, under the gin clear waters is remarkable, considering how laborious is their means of locomotion. They get where they are going but the have all the speed and the agility of stoned tortoises, which makes a "fighting" conch a contradictory image in my over active mind. Nevertheless this is the island of conchs so the mascot has to be just that.
Oh and the campus is, for safety reasons, located right under the main flight path to the airport across the salt ponds (east winds prevail around here so aircraft land into them by flying across the city). Luckily they are mostly propeller aircraft feathering their way to earth so they tend to sound like ducks farting loudly overhead which is quieter than the occasional jet but noise, in my opinion is noise and I'd rather live with less of it. Perhaps the residents of Duncombe might agree, but there aren't too many of them. A block of flats:
And a couple of well loved and pretty little cottages:
And as the sun sets across Key West illuminating the happy hordes no doubt at Mallory Square a couple of miles away, this little corner of New Town is seeing the sun out of sight but doing what residential neighborhoods do every where in the side streets off mighty Flagler Avenue:
Same old, same old away from the tourist and drinking centers; dinner, bed, and up and at 'em in the morning. And I have to get the wife's Vespa back to her workplace before she notices it was gone.
