Going to photograph a residential street in New Town at around five in the afternoon is a trial for a shy person like me. It's absolutely the wrong time of day as residents are returning from a day at work and the street is starting to bustle with evening activity. And then a stranger on a scooter shows up with a camera pointing it in all sorts of odd places.
It's that time of year again, when the Christmas lights go up and a self conscious man on a motorcycle (or his wife's scooter) starts to plan some night photographs of Christmas decorations in a town where frost is a stranger. Thank God.
One thinks of Key West when one is shovelling snow somewhere else and one thinks of narrow streets and piled up wooden houses and bars and crowds and all that stuff. But the backbone of the city are those streets where the downtown conchs retreated last century when they sold off their Old Town Conch cottages to
arrivistes with too much money and too little sense. Out here they found wide open spaces, room to build a multi bedroom house with land to spare for a yard and a place to park a car or two. All modern conveniences.
Pretty they aren't by architectural standards but they are much easier to live in than some of the more picturesque homes downtown:
But landscaping and especially palm trees can give a concrete block home all the charm you need:
Some of the homes have a decidedly Caribbean air, pastel colors, whitewashed walls and they wouldn't be out of place in the Antilles. Perhaps the shutters indicate a snowbird reluctant apparently to fly south but undoubtedly they will be back soon enough:
This section of Patterson Avenue lies between a mangrove lined canal which extends from the Riviera Canal to the bight north of the island and splits New Town down the middle more or less, alongside Tenth Street here:
The canal could be quite attractive but it is what it is, which is a dump unhappily:
At the eastern end of these two blocks Patterson dead ends into the Professional Building, a Stalinist lump that was thrown up as an Awful Warning I suppose, to people anxious to avoid Key West's modern height restrictions:
I shouldn't grumble,my eye doctor lives in there and a very nice man he is too. He got displaced for a while when Wilma wrecked this massive impenetrable lump by pouring rain through the roof and melting the entire palazzo inside out. I was astonished it was such a feeble thing. Just like the old Soviet Union, impressive facades but feeble underneath the bluff exterior. I hope it was rebuilt properly because losing one's eye doctor to a hurricane is annoying and I doubt he'd stay on the job after a second drenching. But I digress. Patterson Avenue in these blocks is an extraordinarily convenient area to live in. Years ago we tried to rent a cottage out here when we decided to get off the boat and give our elderly Labrador a home ashore at last.
Behind the sound proof fence, more or less, lie the loading docks of Overseas Market, which can be an annoyance as trucks like to idle their engines here and waste valuable fuel for some reason.
However for those that like to walk, Winn Dixie, the Post Office and a pharmacy are close by, not to mention neighboring Key Plaza which houses Albertsons, K Mart and Radio Shack not to mention restaurants bars and a video rental. All the mod cons (modern conveniences). Also the gap in the fence has its unintended consequences:
The mangrove bushes that flourish around here provide homes to the stubborn outdoors types who prefer freedom to the restrictions of the homeless shelter on Stock Island:
They just melt out of sight into the bushes as the people on the lowest runs of social ladders everywhere tend to do.The smart ones don't get loud, don't start fires and pack their trash, but there are those that like to draw attention to themselves. Look on the bright side, parking is easier in New Town and homes are bigger, traffic is lighter as there are fewer visitors and strange men on scooters bearing camera only rarely disturb the urban peace:
Of what is essentially an empty residential street. Perfectly placed in my geographic opinion.
