More changes are planned for the city of Key West according to the newspaper. One of them I find particularly odd but there again none of these improvements should be unexpected. This city has voted to limit cruise ships, their sizes and the number of people that can land in the city. The city has a plan to reinforce and repair and enlarge cruise ship docking facilities to the tune of $3.4 million. Which allows one to imagine that grants and so forth had been appropriated long before last year's vote. Nevertheless I find myself perplexed.
I thought the armory on White Street was looking quite toothsome in the weak winter sunlight a few days ago so I made a couple of pictures. I like how Key West looks and I shall look forward to seeing what shade contraptions are envisioned for Mallory Square. After 190 years without them the time is come to shade the square, the place where people go to see the sun go down.
And the newspaper reports that North Roosevelt Boulevard is up for a facelift. It is not attractive while being the main entry to the city. Can't argue with that, as the Boulevard is as ugly as sin and always has been. The incredibly disruptive work that was carried out to drain the road has been equally incredibly effective and I wish some important person would stand up and thank the State for the work because North Roosevelt no longer floods. I don't suppose the work will last forever given the effects of sea level rise but for now the Boulevard is easy to drive in heavy rain.
Meanwhile the pesky Boulevard (North Roosevelt's familiar name) looks ugly. The city wanted to remove the high maintenance coconut palms lining the seawall but residents got up in arms about that. No one wanted native palmettos or similar coconut free palms. I can hardly begin to imagine what confusion will be generated by a requests for ideas from residents for a nicer looking Boulevard.
A few years ago consultants, bless their active little hearts, suggesting cutting down South Roosevelt Boulevard along Smathers Beach to one lane with an expansive median and other visual delights. That beautification scheme went over like the proverbial lead balloon as the speed limit is useful inasmuch as slow pokes can hold 30 or 35 in one lane and gatherers of speeding tickets can speed in the other lane. I would bet more speeding tickets are handed out on South Roosevelt than any other street just because people don't realize the fastest way out of town is the Boulevard no matter how fast you take the beach road. . I drive there because I want to enjoy the view but that puts me firmly in the dithering visitor category so two lanes suits me fine and I let the fine hungry speeders try their luck..
Key West is a conundrum. This is a town with flashes of brilliance and tons of disagreements and occasional bad ideas. I am holding out for a pedestrian Duval Street with pleasant stores, places to sit, flower beds creating a lovely peaceful open space downtown. I can see in my mind's eye a downtown worth visiting, not a place for vapid shopping and drinking. Why not enjoy beautiful architecture currently wasted, perfect weather invisible in the darkened recesses of bars, why not eat outside, go to the movies in the evening and hang out to meet friends without the need to explain yourself.
I have no doubt Old Town will look the same more or less. If you check Key West in the state archives you can recognize landmarks and often streets and buildings on them from a hundred years ago. It's that sense of timelessness that is at risk whenever focus groups get bogged down in suggesting change. I suppose to some extent we are all afraid of change and of making things worse.
On the one hand you have to admire the Mayor for taking the mandate for change and running with it, on the other you have to hope for the best. She has been totally hard core with the mask mandate which riles a bunch of people up but she has stuck to her guns: masks are required.
I have a sneaking feeling eventually one might wonder how people ever got by without sun shades at Mallory Square because as we know the nature of humans is to get used to whatever requirement you set down before them. And in one sentence I suppose that sums up the greatest irritation of the virus: if it hasn't killed or maimed you it has inconvenienced your routine and what could be worse than that? I'm reaching the point that not wearing a mask feels weird on the streets of Key West...I'm glad no one will be asking my opinion about changes to the city topography because I have no idea what to think anymore.
Robert and Dolly had it all planned and they instructed us to meet them for dinner at Mattheessens 4th of July where we had burgers fries and ice cream. Mattheesens on White Street is a replica of a restaurant dear to the heart of post World War Two Conchs who remember the original restaurant in the city and this one apparently does a creditable job of imitating it with a soda fountain and the ice cream and so forth. We heard about Robert's brush with death on a modest ski slope wherein he dislocated his shoulder five minutes after trying to launch himself on his skis, and like any self respecting Key Wester he retired from the fray to self medicate and wish for warmer climes."At least he got to see snow," Dolly said as though that were a good thing. Robert really must love her a lot as she is quite fond of Utah's ski slopes... and they will reappear in their future together.
The Armory on White Street is no longer used to drill the home guard or anything like that. The big cream colored building is devoted to Art and is home to a collection of artistic endeavors and actual artists, eleven of them apparently, in a group calling itself The Studios of Key West. I checked their website tskw.org which is irritatingly short of useful information but they have big plans and have all the usual suspects in the high profile/small pond artistic patronage department of the Southernmost City behind them so hopefully they will be around for a while. They probably had a jamboree opening last year and I failed to notice because artistic stuff comes and goes like lightning strikes in an expensive desirable little town like Key West. I'm going back for more next year when the snowbirds are back and demanding Culture, because TSKW, however awkward their acronym, put on a good show. The place was packed by the time we got to kick off at 8pm.
According to one of the presenters organizers had blanketed the guest houses around town for the event and people turned out in droves to see this singer of whom I had never heard. This tactic may have looked successful from the stage but it was a disaster for me. Imagine the two loudest most drunk heckler sin the room happened to take the chairs right behind mine. Now I'm pretty sure one of the witches was a big fan of his because she kept caterwauling at the artists to perform a song called "Burgundy" such that before the last song he politely told her it wasn't part of his repertoire and she grunted like a stuck pig. So did I, but heroically, under my breath. I am one of those obnoxious people who will come up to you if you are talking in a movie and will stare in your face and not very politely ask you to 
It was a pity because this Wilcox character is quite the performer. He sings, plays the guitar, tunes it endlessly between songs like a nervous oboe-ist in an orchestra, and packs his songs with imagery and allusions such that one has to really listen to get the most of it. "Did you stay awake?" Stephanie, a friend we happened upon at the performance, asked from the seat in front. I explained I was struggling to listen and she smirked. I think she enjoyed the fact I was sitting right in front of the harridan with the alcohol problem. I took a picture of Stephanie's rather fetching hat:
There was another dude with a cool hat outside on the street waiting for the concert to begin, and I snapped his picture before the light went away. Just for something to do you understand:
It was a fine concert and I'm sure Wilcox is all over the Internet where he will be seen and heard if like me, you have no idea who he is. One of his songs considered the problem of Jerusalem (!) and he allegorised the issue as three brothers getting a shared inheritance which was very thought provoking.In another song he compared our plunging economy to another opportunity to re-open the frontier, for us all to become pioneers, to open up to risk and adventure which was an image I plan to hold close in the months ahead. He also, in a tour-de-force asked an audience member to speak upon a subject of importance and he would write a song. That notion agitated the drunk behind me, I can tell you, and before she could get her oar in a woman across the room told a brave story about her therapist falling in love with her. Wilcox strummed his guitar (the drunk settled into a loud accompanying burble) and came up with a remarkable image of a man on the banks of a river filled with a log jam and his inappropriate love drowning him in the stream.I hate audience participation, I'd rather castrate myself than participate, but this effort was surprisingly effective. This was part of the auditorium in the intermission. Wilcox sang for more than two hours.
I don't doubt a more competent review than mine will appear in Solares Hill this Sunday as it's editor Mark Howell, sat next to me for the first half of the concert. Unhappily he wasn't there for the second half with the participatory composition which was a highlight for me. Howell spoke briefly to me and expounded on his Welsh ancestry (identifying me on the fly as a member of the English oppressor class, as well as a fellow immigrant- all in one!). He scribbled notes frantically in the dark reminding me happily of my former days of journalism as I luxuriated in the music, and the mental images of slow painful deaths I could dream up for the howling dypsomaniac in the row behind me.