Look carefully at the picture below, one I took before my Valentine's Day break and you can see a long standing and thus successful liquor outlet with trash piled high ready for pickup before the city's tourists wake from the night before. By the time they come out to frolic all this will be gone. For now the Garden of Eden high atop the Bull bar will be there and yes you can sit nekkid on a towel at the bar and be served by a naked employee. And no, I can assure you, if I've never bothered to have a drink at Sloppy Joe's or the Bull I have never gone north to the Whistle or to the titillating Garden of Eden. I've sent ambulances up there when it all got too much for a customer or two over the years. Luckily it's clothing optional so first responders retain their dignity.
The Porter House on the other side of Caroline Street has a couple of bars on the ground floor and I did visit that one at first until it got too youthful and filled with bitter craft beer for me but drinking in a Victorian mansion is not always unpleasant. There's a theme here. Drinking on Duval is a popular pastime and now they tell us the summer of 2021 could be approaching normal in our first world country filled with vaccine and hope that the wretched virus will wander off to hurt poorer people around the world.
So the question then becomes how much do you like Duval the way it is? Do you care that the city commission has hired KCI to spout platitudes about revitalization and public input while they figure out how to create a wildly exciting "experience" on the new Duval Street? Or do you prefer the current version, shabby down at heel smelling of beer and urine occupied by people shuffling up and down in the heat trying to figure where the famous non conformist Key West of legend has vanished to? Check out Mandy Miles' article in Keys Weekly if you haven't already: Keys Weekly on Duval.
“The goal of the project is to renovate and revitalize Duval Street,” the city’s RFQ states, “to increase opportunities for public use as an iconic civic space for leisure, commerce and tourism; address the infrastructure which will allow for reasonable maintenance frequency and reduce costs to businesses and taxpayers; improve safety for pedestrians and vehicles; and maintain mobility for desired transit operations for all users.”
But on the other hand their preliminary illustrations seem to indicate a move toward a pedestrian Duval with they say, shade and "hanging art" (the mind boggles slightly) and of course lots of lovely public input in a town where five people gathered have six opinions on any subject. You can tell this is going to go well especially as Facebook already has naysayers attaching themselves to the notion of a redesign of Duval Street. I understand negativity for the sake of it but I doubt many people who will suddenly form opinions on the design process will actually spend any time voluntarily on the much derided Duval Street.
My own feeling is the time is long since overdue for Key West to lurch into modern urban planning and create a downtown attractive to residents with a flourishing local scene attractive to tourists and once again I will quote my favorite such example in Church Street of Burlington Vermont fame. The trouble is I don't see how that kind of third space (My "third space" explanation Here from 2008!) can develop in a town with massively high rents, out of control cost of housing which are two prime factors that kill off creativity and the artistic impulse. You can't be an artist on a wing and a prayer when you can't pay rent on your rabbit hutch home or your sliver of street front for your selling space. You can beautify Duval all you want but at this rate all you will have is a shady walkway with hanging art surrounded by dreary chain stores of no interest to anyone not needing sugar or a t-shirt.
The mayor got a huge mandate to go ahead and clean up downtown Key West, to attract upscale tourism on a more modest scale and of higher net worth and I will be curious to come back and see how it went after I run the wheels off my van. Key West has the capacity to surprise the skeptical and there is a chance the beery droopy, stupid t-shirt of present day Duval Street can be transformed into a vibrant attraction for a wide spectrum of people. I'd guess they need to draw in the vibrant people too but maybe there is a secret weapon the city will deploy to make Key West weird and quirky once again. I'd like that.
Imagine, Duval a pedestrian zone, sidewalk coffee shops and restaurants, one way streets with parking and bike lanes on Whitehead and Simonton and locals making plans to go downtown for a pleasant summer evening out, year round in the tropics. It will be nice if you can afford to live here.
5 comments:
I imagine the current lack of those massive cruise ships coming into the harbor quite possibily have given an opening to the opportunity in hopefully ridding downtown Duval of the seedy, cheap tourist look in lieu of something more upscale. No more hordes of hourly tourists being vomited onshore, allowed only to wander a few blocks to see little else but t-shirt shops and shelves full of cheap tourist trinkets before being summoned like cattle at the obnoxious blare of a earsplitting foghorn from the cruise ship mast.
Those ships were impressive coming and going, but did nothing to bring anything upscale to Duval. At least nothing I could discern. I do know from conversations with locals who lived in the more upscale sections of Key West that they had little or nothing to do with Duval morning, evening, or otherwise. Many a time I rode my bike down Duval at night to see the crowds, and then in the early dawn to see the trashed aftermath being cleaned up and swept under the carpet, ready for a fresh dose of "frat party" once the sun went down at Mallory Square.
I've been told (by a few living there full time) the pandemic's change in regards to the lack of crowds, lack of cruise ships, lack of what used to pass for "drunken revelry normal", has resulted in a welcoming peace and quiet.
It would be interesting to see if the vague talking points you quoted ever amount to anything constructive. Or if the retreating pandemic will retreat too fast before the council can enact a new game plan for the party end of the island.
I can't believe the city planning commission would consider putting a modern structure on Duval street (as shown in your link) for shade in historic old town! I have been coming to the Key's and Key West regularly since the early 80's, my wife & I spent our honeymoon there and already have a reservation to celebrate our 30th anniversary there early next year. I hope the powers that be keep the old school tropical ambiance as they are already loosing the people who make Key West interesting through gentrification...
It is possible to modernize downtowns in such a way as to keep the historic character, but it’s a lot easier to cookie-cutter it and make it look like every other modernization the contractor has done. Up here in the DMV, Rockville Town Center looks just like Kentlands Square looks just like Reston Town Center looks just like the Villages up in Columbia looks just like the new Urbana development. Some of these developments were built on literal cornfields, so no one really cares what they end up looking like. But a city like Frederick, which has been rehabbing its downtown after several floods took out a lot of buildings, has been very careful about retaining as many structures as it can and not letting new buildings look too modern. (It also helps that half the downtown is on the National Register; developers are limited in the changes they can make.)
There are certainly ways to modernize Duval, but someone’s going to have to ride herd on the contractors to make sure they don't make the place look like some planned community that just popped up in the last ten years.
From these thoughtful comments we can hope others will be monitoring the plans closely and will be able to offer useful advice that people in charge may listen to. I think Key West's style in the 21st century will be decided in the next five years and that responsibility will I hope cause people in power to pause and think and be courageous. I am not hopeful but I am ready to be surprised.
Hopefully KW's unique American geography and the obstinate will of its residents will allow KW to retain its 19th century look & feel. A modern "looks like anywhere" facade that removes the historical feel most now take for granted would be an unnecessary death to the living history that survives.
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