Into Bahama Village

I took this picture in 2013 of the famous Octopus on Catherine Street heading towards Duval from mid town. I included Cheyenne sniffing around as she continued to do for the next three years.

In 2016 after she left and went to her reward making room for Rusty, I took time to photograph the old stump once again, not much changed. 

Last week things had changed drastically and I felt a great deal of regret. Things ain't what they used to be.

The turquoise attracted me...

The line of several "NO!" signs kept me and amused me.

I went by the Gato building named for the Gato family who built it a century ago as a cigar factory. That proved to be uneconomical when the Cuban factory owners discovered Tampa with all its cheap land and created Ybor City as the place to roll cigars. The usual story for over priced  Key West. 

Nowadays the Gato Building houses, most importantly the county department of health whence the authorities deal with coronavirus issues including vaccinations. 

Bahama Village has changed over the past couple of decades just like the rest of the city.  Gentrification has pushed into the village though the African American community remains as the largest segment of the population.

I used to read on forums years ago about nervous some tourists were at the thought of penetrating the Village, the rough neighborhood of Key West which struck me then as ludicrous and more so nowadays. There used to be drug dealers from Miami who meet Key West residents in the Village but even in those days if you were walking through someone might sidle up and ask if you were okay and when you said fine thank you, they scuttled off. Violent crime has always been quite rare in Key West.

The architecture is as interesting here as anywhere in Key West with lots of churches and former churches scattered about. A smattering of tourists too.

And a few restaurants of note, including Blue Heaven on Petronia. Still there still doing business.

And on the subject of times past and Bahama Village the  city commissioner for the neighborhood passed on the news of the death of a former resident of Chapman Lane, James Chapman. I took this picture in 2012 but the internet is littered with pictures of the man, the myth and his brightly colored tricycle.

He had been forced to move from Key West in a land grab that took away his home on the lane named for his family, a bitter fate that earned him a goodbye in the local paper:

The Blue Paper. 

Gato Village Pocket Park

I think this little pocket park behind the First State Bank on Simonton Street has been here for almost a decade. Time flies, it really does and yet the place, known as Gato Village Pocket Park, still looks pristine. 

That ugly jumble of cement across the street is the bank and the park is surrounded by a fence to resemble a garden in front of a cigar maker's cottage typical of what you might have seen a hundred or more years ago.

The wooden facade is built at one end of the park and offers  a pleasant spot to hide from rain or sun while enjoying the greenery.  Originally cigar workers came from Cuba when tobacco importers decided to bring raw leaves to Florida to avoid import duties on finished products. Key West was the closest port to Cuba so at first they came here. Gato in Spanish means cat...so here's the cat at the Gato Village Pocket Park! Very cool.

The whole thing is actually named for the family that ran the whole enterprise in Key West, and they built a factory on Simonton Street to process the tobacco and have the workers roll it into cigars.

Nowadays the Gato Building is owned by Monroe County and is home to several county offices including the department of public health. It is an imposing structure that hints at the value of the tobacco industry in Key West.

Eventually the same old bugaboo that haunts Key West today, the cost of doing business  on a small isolated island, caught up to the tobacco industry in the city. The people in charge figured they could have more land and cut costs by heading north to Tampa which is how Ybor City was born. All that is left is this representation of their famous Cuban  cigars:

This pocket park really is small and usually I find it quite empty. You can sit on the floor under the awning or on a bench among the flower beds. 

 Its a bit surprising to see it so well maintained after all these years!

I only know it's been here quite a long time as I unearthed this picture form January 2014 of Cheyenne resting on one of our walks through the area.

   

Rusty Four Years On

Four years ago today I drove up to the Homestead Petco around ten o'clock on what was  a Friday morning. This Is The Dog had put Rusty up for adoption twice before to no takers. My wife had heard from a  friend about this unwanted dog and as Cheyenne had laid down and died of her own volition just a week before  I surprised myself by being ready to adopt at once.  Not having to decide to give Cheyenne the needle made it infinitely easier to accept her death as it was on her own terms and at the time and place of her choosing. My last picture of her as she prepared to leave me:

Old age is merciless but she was generous to me to the last.

My plan was to get an unwanted older Labrador, the sort of dog that's hard to place as they are viewed with unwarranted suspicion by people who want "puppies." Cheyenne was once an expensive pedigree puppy dumped when her shitty family decided she was too old. But lucky for Rusty I wasn't looking for an expensive fashionable trophy dog. Lucky for me too as it turned out. As you can see when I first spotted the little runt I wasn't really focused on the people who saved him from the streets:

He was dumped in the Redlands of Homestead  where he led a pack of dogs that were killed off by angry farmers using shotguns and poison. When he was the last dog left he surrendered to the good people of This Is The Dog who had been following his progress for months, To this day he cannot stand fireworks or gunshots though he has learned not to run at the mere sight of a big dog and he pretty soon learned to sleep soundly with both eyes closed. This was a picture they posted of him on Facebook when he was a stray:

He whimpered a bit as I drove him away from the only people who had ever shown him any kindness but we stopped along the way and he sniffed the sidewalks and stretched his legs as he got used to riding in a  car. He wasn't overly impressed by this guy's overtures in Marathon:

I always get confused as to why people abandon their dogs. From early days Rusty did his best to please me and apart from a  couple of times when I lost my confidence and yelled at him we have had pretty smooth sailing most of the time.The times we didn't were down to me not having faith in myself which my friend Webb says I need to get over. Rusty agrees and by now we are like old friends and he understands me faster than I understand myself.

I have lived with some really excellent dogs who have put up with my eccentricities over the years but Rusty has attained a new level of understanding. Right from the start we bonded and when I was in the hospital in 2018 I worried he would forget me.

He never did of course and my wife told me he started whining when she turned onto the street leading to the hospital when she brought him to visit me. But right from the start he kept close like he knew this was it for him.. We tried to fence him in to keep him safely off the street but he put paid to that plan easily. In the end I figured he probably could handle our genteel Cudjoe neighborhood after dodging the angry farmers of the Redlands and surviving.

The start of a beautiful friendship.

We did negotiate the bumps, for instance we learned he much prefers curling up in a tight bed that supports him on all four sides. He reserves the couch and our bed for those rare occasions when he wants to stretch out and the open plan dog bed just wasn't for him. But we have had lots of time to learn the little Prince's quirks and to adapt to them.

Long may he last for we have much traveling to do.

Jack Watson Trail

Here's another place I haven't visited in a while, the nature trail on Big Pine Key, off Key Deer Boulevard.

 It's a large expanse of not too much, scrubby pines and rustling palm fronds, home to a gravel trail and a lot of informative signs:

 It's named for the first warden of Key Deer, the man responsible for saving them from hunting and extinction:

 Rusty could smella  few things going on away from the trail.

 It is a pleasant walk lacking only shade on a  July afternoon.

He is very patient o leash and doesn't tug or struggle with me. He could easily chew through it in seconds if he felt like it.

 A few years ago a controlled burn got out of control and burned more than a hundred acres, which is a lot around here and you can still see evidence of it:

 From the Monroe County website this reminder:

For the most part the vegetation has recovered even though there many dead pine trees as a reminder of that bizarre week of burning:

 The  old mosquito control, a fish trench populated with fish that eat mosquito larvae: 

 Known as gambusia trenches after the fish that were put in them:

 You are here, a thirty minute walk through the woods:

 The Mannillo trail was designed and built for people in wheelchairs. I last walked it in 2011 LINK.

 And we have  a nice paved parking lot:

 Key Deer Boulevard. A couple of miles down there is Big Pine's supermarket and traffic light.