Petronia

Driving up or down Simonton Street the big old lollipop shown below marks the turn for Petronia Street.

Walking on my lunch break enjoying an 87 degree Spring afternoon I figured a few photos of some Conch cottages might not come amiss.  Here's what I rounded up:

A common-or-garden modern apartment complex end sup with a touch of the exotic with date palms in the frame:

The Mad House:

Not your average Key West style:

A longer lunch break and I might have taken up residence:

Old Houses

I took my last surviving powered two wheeler for a spin after I sold my Vespa last week. The little electric Jetson Bolt is my circus-bear-on-a-unicycle look and it hauls me around at 9mph so I can get back to the office without being a  smelly sweating pedaling mess. It also fits easily on the back seat of the Fiat 500 which has become it's garage. I drive to work with the electric scooter always there and ready to run an errand. This old house is at Bill Butler Park:

I was meandering aimlessly enjoying the sun when it occurred to me I wanted to photograph old decrepit buildings. I recently posted a photo on Instagram of the new hole at Olivia and Emma where the old white house with the pink shutters used to be, in Bahama Village, across from the Douglass gym.  

I took the photo below in 2013 out walking the late Cheyenne and you can imagine that eight years later it was probably time for a change for the crumbling house. But I got to thinking...there are so many old houses in key West and soon they must all disappear. 

So, I thought to myself as I rode around photographically uninspired but enjoying the fresh air, why don't I round up a few pictures of places that might soon be gone, pieces of key West history, the city as it was? This next one I found on Johnson Lane, last photographed in 2008 LINK:

I grant you it is quite the cliché photographing old distressed buildings, and I adhered to that cliché by making the pictures in black and white. I think the fascination with the old buildings comes not just from how picturesque they look, but also because that look evokes feelings. Sometimes one is glad to see some undesirable thing collapsing and finally rotting away to be replaced by the fresh new version. For me in Key West these old homes are the vivid expression of memory, they are the manifestation of life lived. 

I grew up with shutters like these in the photo below, and I remember my mother throwing them open and yelling at me to come upstairs for lunch or for an unwanted siesta or some other intrusion into my summer vacation. So when I rode by on Olivia Street and saw this window I was compelled to stop. 

Obviously anyone who walks Old Town can allow themselves to fall in love with wooden homes and masses of greenery and narrow lanes and so forth. But these old things are on their way to extinction and when they are replaced externally they will have to adhere to historic code criteria while inside they will be modern and comfortable and livable as they should be.  For now they are monuments to the past awaiting inevitable transformation into modern practical expensive dwellings for winter visitors. 

This one on Olivia at Frances is lived in.

And if you were under any illusion that living cheek by jowl with your neighbors was easy there is a message here for you.

As unsightly as it is I guess it beats calling 911! (For the humor impaired I'm making a funny as I answer 911 in Key West and these are exactly the nuisance calls I deal with all day: trash parking and noise complaints). For some neighbors life in close quarters is very difficult and communication frequently breaks down.  

The other reason I like black and white is because I can paint a more modern lived-in home into an essay on old houses. Such is the architecture of Old Town. This conch cottage has survived the passage of time as a lived in home. It is a survivor.  

And so we come to end of my lunch break, a dead end as it were. Like this dry wall in The Meadows.

Conch Life

The title of these photos is a little tongue in cheek, Conchs no longer can afford this life. Everyone loves a Conch Cottage, a wooden home built decades ago filled with character and small spaces while devoid of modern conveniences usually. The story is much of Old Town Key West was built by ship's carpenters using ship's timbers which accounts for rather odd angles and lack of structural integrity. It sounds a bit made up to me, like the fact that the chickens came over from Cuba alongside the human refugees, but that's the urban legend. 

 The awful truth is these homes are monstrous expensive these days, more than half a million dollars for homes barely a thousand square feet with no off street parking or frequently no central air conditioning. They are charming of course but it seems to me the charm would wear off pretty damned quick if your neighbors are renting by the week and partying while in occupation of your residential neighborhood. Or if your neighbors are calling you in to the parking police to complain about your car parking habits and so forth. Most Americans have not been trained in the art of close quarter living, so faced with the prospect of living cheek by jowl with people they may not like very much they fool themselves into thinking that because they paid a king's ransom to buy, they have certain inalienable rights. They discover they don't and things deteriorate from there.

 All this neighborhood angst hits hardest between January and Easter and the rest of the year the Conch cottages get rented (illegally) for short term rentals or slumber unoccupied. Their former occupants, plumbers teachers and office workers live in the outer darkness of the Lower keys and commute. The original inhabitants, those who were trained from birth to live cheek by jowl may have a few family homes still in their possession but most Conchs (pronounced: Konks) chose to sell their dilapidated wooden homes in forgotten downtown Key West to a new breed of entrepreneur in the 70s and 80s, gay guest house owners, and moved out to where the action was in New Town.

New Town offered Conchs the chance to acquire their American Dream, ranchette homes with a little bit of land and conveniences like garages and pools and homes that weren't riddled with termites. It seemed like a deal but then, it may well still be a deal if you like living in Key West out of the tourist trails, close to the modern stores on the Boulevard and with easy access to Highway One.  

I like walking Old Town and over the eleven years of this blog I think I have proved that clearly enough but I do prefer living in the suburbs, on Cudjoe Key with my canal to swim in and living on stilts I get views and breezes from my upstairs porch. 

For me the half hour commute gives me a chance to ride my motorcycle, and will again after I recover completely, and living out of town gives me easy access to the trails and open spaces Rusty and I enjoy so much. It's true we are also further from activities happening in town but I find the amount of time spent working overtime impacts my ability to enjoy my time off more fully. I keep hoping we will get fully staffed soon in dispatch. 

 Meanwhile as I get the use of my legs back I have a ten minute commute and easy access to streets and views downtown as I start to get used to restoring my life to what it was before my accident last August.

And no, most people don't have chimneys in their homes. Perhaps it is a function of climate change but I don't recall weather cold enough for a fire in the last decade at least.

Overhead the planes keep coming bringing more eager tourists ready to enjoy winter paradise on the island that is a peninsula, in the sub-tropics not the tropics, at eye watering first world prices with unfortunately third world service much of the time owing to the lack of continuity in staffing as finding a place to live sucks up all your income and requires more than one job leaving very little free time to enjoy life in paradise as a worker. So after a while you get fed up and leave. What an awkward circle of life. I'm lucky I have the job I have and every day I am grateful it allows me to live in paradise. 

Conch Cottage Walk

I have been spending some time in Key West this winter and the city has been quite pleasant. As I live 23 miles out my view of the state of Key West daily life is gleaned from the comments of friends and a few of my own observations.

It does seem like visitors this year are either not keeping rentals during their stay or not bringing cars to the city as parking has not seemed to be the usual crazy hassle. Plus the Citizen's Voice anonymous column in the newspaper seems to be carrying fewer parking complaints which is nice. 

Complaints instead have focused on the Tree Commission always they say trigger happy about cutting trees it's supposed to protect. Then there was the giant storm in a tea cup when Commissioner Jimmy Weekly a former mayor suspected of seeking that office again decided to write a sanctuary city ordinance. As reported by Gwen Filosa in the Keys News, the local outlet of the Miami Herald:

“I would like to see us declare ourselves a sanctuary city,” said Commissioner Jimmy Weekley. “I would like to see us do that, really send a message out: We’re going to protect everyone.”

Weekley, who was mayor when the One Human Family motto was adopted in 2000, said he is working on a proposal to outlaw so-called gay-to-straight conversion therapy of children in the city.

Key West leaders have often taken up national and world issues by issuing official opinions, such as an April 2015 resolution calling for a ban on city-paid travel to Indiana in light of the state’s “religious freedom” law backed by then-Gov. Mike Pence, who is the now vice president-elect.

You can see where Weekley was coming from as the Trump Administration starts working through it's human rights agenda on the all the tired old social agenda items of the religious right, abortion, gays etc etc...In the ordinary course of things the rather harmless sanctuary notion wouldn't raise a ripple in Key West but this no longer is a town of bohemians and artists and livers of alternative lives... The monied classes are in town in winter and they don't like this notion of sanctuary when illegal immigration is soon to be the target of the Trump sweep. So they all got up on their hind legs and started raising Cain about this peculiar little eccentricity of Weekley's.

When I lived in the People's Republic of Santa Cruz, the California town was a sanctuary which meant not too much of a practical nature even for those without papers as far as I could tell and I was a reporter back then. I have no idea what being a sanctuary city will do for Key West. For now the Trump hasn't said anything about Cuba so migrant landings will now require the rafters to be detained for repatriation. I doubt they will get a free pass from the city.

I also read with relief this time that the city engineers are recommending no change to South Roosevelt and state DOT plans to build elaborate medians and turning lanes are not going to be approved. I salute their common sense. 

Key West Homes

After all these years I still get pleasure from looking at the massive diversity of construction in this small town. 

As we gear up for the holiday and give thanks for this and that, it may time to give thanks you don't have to deal with these monstrously over priced cottages. Just because they cost half a million or more doesn't mean they are properly built or maintained, or even dare I mention it properly equipped.

It takes paint to fight the salt air and powerful sun.

In the old days they used wooden shutters and secured them for hurricanes. The wooden shutters still used today that open forward from a hinge at the top are called Bahama shutters. 

And in a town that has never seen frost the winter holiday season brings out illuminated fake icicles:

A sloping tin roof, broad overhangs and lots of vegetation add up to classic Key West:

Local commercial fishing boats have a driving position at the front of the boat like this:

Buttoned up until someone comes to live here:

And something somewhere is always for sale.

I noticed the Fantasy Fest beads below next to the ugly sign and I was reminded that Fantasy Fest may take a different turn next year. The current organizer has retired and made  a point of telling the paper she made a fortune in real estate since the 1970s and was not forced out of running Fantasy Fest by the deluge of negative press this year.

Lots of Fantasy Fest beads remind me of the week that's best forgotten. Hopefully whoever organizes the festival next year can clean it up a bit. That would be nice.

Homes

This essay was photographed on the Fleming and Southard corridor and it was prompted by this interesting way to store a strap: 

 

The neighborhood is full of architectural gems from another era:

 

Some are restored like this classic eyebrow home with the overhanging eaves:

 

And some are simply well preserved:

 

Some homes have quite the decorative motif:

 

The former Albury House is fully equipped these days with its own historic marker. 

 

This little church puts me in mind of the whitewashed chapels fitting the Caribbean: 

For me it's the architecture for Rusty it's... I'm not exactly sure:

Scoot commute:

The other you have to look for is the weird little stickers and signs which amuse me endlessly. 

Sunrise:

 

 More gentrification. Renovation doesn't come cheap:

 

The white picket fence life:

My favorite Harley, the 1200R Sportster, here being allowed to entropy into compost: 

 

Rusty seems to be incapable of relaxing when there is even the chance of a walk! 

 

We were at my work waiting for the ride home.