Dark Streets

I managed somehow to get to work early one recent morning and stopped on the way to take a few pictures of the serenity of the night. College Road is annexed to the city of Key West which uses it to house useful buildings including a school, a marina, a college, the SPCA, the bus facility, a hospital, a  rehab facility of no great repute (hence my own rehab in Miami) as well as the Jail and Sheriff's headquarters and a golf course with the original reason for the annexation: a housing development at the private golf course. None of that massive amount of useful activity shows at 5:20 in the morning. Nor, I dare say, should it.

I usually get up at 4:30 and take Rusty to "check the mail," a brief neighborhood walk to see what other dogs have been out and about in the twenty four hours preceding. I try to leave the house by 5:15 and generally fail spectacularly rushing down the stairs at I hope some time before 5:25, the absolute last minute not to look like a pill and arrive at work at exactly 6 am. The overnight shift as I know from long experience does not look cheerfully upon their morning relief if they show up technically on time but with none to spare.

It was a windy morning and I tried to catch the essence of the invisible air overhead. I'm not sure if it just looks smeared but anyway there was a fair bit of movement. It has been delightfully windy spring with lots of cool, not to say cold air blowing away insects and humidity. 

Moving on I took Flagler Avenue instead of the faster North Roosevelt as I wanted to save stopping and photographing the Boulevard another day. I had so much time in hand I could afford to hang around here and try to capture the night and the sense of emptiness in the middle of new Town.

These days looking at the roads I drive daily and have driven for two decades has an almost banal air to it, like those pictures one sees of daily life lived, except they are from a different era entirely. I have all too few pictures of my sixty years of daily banal living up to this point so in anticipation of things changing I have been trying to make a conscious effort to photograph the memories of daily life. Before the virus I was trying to capture the essence of my commute in pictures, trying to find a way to express the crowds, the traffic lights, the hold ups and the open roads without slipping into the obvious. It was much harder than I expected. These days these few pictures pretty much sum up my drive in to work. It is bizarre. 

Even at six o'clock in the evening when most people have gone home, the few that still have regular desk jobs, the road out of towns wide open. Even with the road work proceeding relentlessly slowly at the Triangle, the Cow Key Bridge as it is properly known, reflow quite smoothly through the winding traffic cones. How odd it is to find small pockets of advantage in the presence of this virus lock down. Empty streets that feel destined never to be filled again.

New Town Tour

Duck Avenue looking wets toward the setting sun, except there are no tourists here. They are all crowding Mallory Square, the beaches, odd roof tops and more familiar places. 

New Town is where the business of key West carries on, shopping, homes with yards hold workers who have a grip albeit tenuous on homes not desired by snowbirds who just love Key West. These streets are wide and straight and not at all historic.

Homeless dudes hang here with their bicycles and their bundles just like they do in Old Town. Some aspects of Key West don't change no matter the neighborhood.

New affordable housing is popping up here at Flagler and Eleventh. Half million dollar homes on stilts complete with parking, air conditioning, they are waterproof structures with windows that close. Features you cannot count on when you buy a million dollar cottage where the writers used to live when Key West was bohemian. 

Some people decided that stilts were a good idea after Hurricane Wilma flooded a third of the entire city. I've heard stilt homes derided in New Orleans as "olives on toothpicks." But dry in a flood.

Yes, not fashionable but practical if you don't like a car commute, New Town is within cycling distance of what you need in Key West.

Art Imitates Life In Key West

One  day I will inventory  every single convenience store in the city of Key West. Until then I will marvel how many of them there are and how do they all stay in business? Which is something that could also be said of coffee shops. This one, pictured below, was where I used to get coffee when I was living on my boat and doing laundry in Habana Plaza at the only public, air conditioned laundry (they claimed.) in the city. Back then it was an old dude serving Cuban coffee; now according to Yelp reviewers its not:

It's exactly what you'd expect from a Conch coffee place. There is a window and a lady behind the window. You place your order. There are chairs provided for you to sit and wait. Maybe there's an old guy reading the paper, or a lady on her way to work. Everyone is happy, but quiet, as it is still morning, and not time for a lot of talking just yet.

I took a picture really early in the morning after work as I needed the photo for an online scooter tag effort.

 If you want a local "cuban" coffee shop, than this is the spot where you can find the locals. It is in the corner spot of the little strip mall, and you can see the local cuban men sitting outside of this spot every morning talking, and laughing about current events, the old ways, and etc... 

This spot is locally know for their "Cafe Con Leche" and a few other items.

A Key West coffee shop without con leche would be odd;  some of them call it a latte,.Why this reviewer puts inverted commas around the word "cuban" I couldn't say. It's Cuban and so is the food. Key West's ethnic food. And gossip.

Word of mouth was that Chef was a movie wiorth seeing. Held over they said at the Tropic Cinema, because apparently people wanted to see Jon Favreau's funky little movie about a food truck.

My wife told me later that one of her friends had warned us off saying it was most likely too sentimental for hard core movie goers like us (or me more likely). I liked the movie, even though the plot was as thin and translucent as rice paper, a shortcoming made up for by the brazen good will and charm of all concerned. The Chef in question gets into a Twitter war with a food critic, he loses his job and gets a food truck. On the way he builds a relationship with his unfortunately named son Percy and his ex-wife a  Cuban fire cracker with a heart of gold. Cuban sandwiches and fried plantains save his career, his family, his friendships in linear and predictable fashion. You really should go and check it out, because not every movie this year will feature a road trip in a Grumman bread truck.

Tropic Cinema is a beacon of light in Key West, not that the city is a cultural black hole or anything like that. But the Tropic, like the daily paper is a stand out physical survivor in a world gone digital. I mean if you wait a while Chef will appear on Netflix on disc or streaming so technically you could just stay home. But with a theater like this why would you?

So, how cool is it to live close by  real Cuban coffee and real Cuban sandwiches mixed in with real Cuban gossip, m'bubba, while at the same time  having a first rate actual live action movie theater thriving in town which allows you to go and see a movie about a Cuban food truck. Actually it turned out to be a pain in the ass as I had to sit through two hours of delicious food prep only to get up and go to work. I am quite proud of myself for not breaking down and ordering a Cuban and a con leche for a midnight meal from Sandy's that night. 

 I really like this picture of Cheyenne settling in to the new home while I'm at work. So I'm posting it again.

Posted with Blogsy

Key West- You STINK!

From captkeywest, known to me as Robert, this poem about our favorite city. Robert moved to key West in the year of the bicentennial and has enjoyed living here ever since. He is the man who has introduced me to hidden Key West over the years after we first crossed paths sailing our boats through the Bahamas. He posted this poem as a comment yesterday on my Brigadoon essay, along with a joke which I used as my very first essay in June 2007 on this blog.

"In 1997 this poem was reported to have been found in a trunk at a storage area on the Navy Base. Author unknown, this poem was written by a serviceman stationed in Key West during the War. When the brand new Sculpture Garden at Mallory Square was dedicated in late 1997 a time capsule was buried at the Sculpture Garden containing information info about what political issues were happening (Standard Time Capsule Stuff).Included was a copy of this poem and if they open the time capsule as planned in 100 years, people will again get to enjoy this authors work, Dated 1942."

Beloved Key West

Key West, oh Key West you moth eaten town,
Your unpainted houses should all be torn down.
Your winters are damp and your summers too are hot,
The air is humid with mildew and rot.
The land of bad colds, of sore throats and flu.
Of stiff aching muscles, pneumonia too,
Your people dull witted and God, what a bore.Your streets are filthy as spring now approaches,
This materially adds to your crop of cockroaches.
The home of side porches and bumpy thoroughfares,
With slovenly girls and their awful bland stares.You live among roaches and don't mind the rats,
And all seem to thrive on mosquitoes and gnats,
You don't speak English, you talk Cubanese:

Inhaling sewer gas which you think is the breeze.
You make us pay double for all that you sell,But after this war you can go straight to Hell!
And when you reach Hades and Satan greets you,
You'll feel right at home, for he's a Key Wester too!
Yes, Key West. oh Key West, it isn't all gravy,
To be plunked at your feet by Uncle Sam's Navy.Have you ever wondered why none of us grieve?
Why all of us welcome the first chance to leave.

The worst of it all is you think you are swell,
You think that you are perfect - that gripes like Hell.
You're rotten, you're dead, and you think you're alive.,You think you're a place - instead you're a dive.
You're not worth this paper, you're not worth this ink,
You can take it from me dear old Key West, YOU STINK!

Flagler Dawn

Fire Station Three looks like the Alamo as the sun comes up around six in the morning. We are approaching the longest day and photo opportunities must be snagged now if they appear on the ride home. So I stopped my headlong flight home and took the time to get the picture I had seen in my head for the past week. In summer I usually use Flagler Avenue to get into and out of town. When traffic is lighter there are just a couple of traffic lights on this street as opposed to the crappy surface and numerous lights on North Roosevelt Boulevard. In winter Flagler seems to get as crowded as North Roosevelt and the advantage of long empty ride through town gets lost. Tourists take North or South Roosevelt when they come to town, to head either to Duval (North) or the beaches (South) but you can't hide a thoroughfare like Flagler from the snowbirds, so in winter it gets crowded...The back side of the fire station, facing Flagler is just another blank wall. Forget the Alamo comparison! Habana Plaza got an art deco type face light after Hurricane Wilma flooded the place from the ground up and through the roof and since then the owner has apparently gone bust according to the paper. I don't mind at all how this strip mall looks. My wife and I used to use the air conditioned laundromat here when we lived on our boat in Key West and we'd wander down to the end of the strip to get a con leche while we waited. The guy who operated the Riviera Café was a grump to beat the band and we used to amuse ourselves seeing how many grunts we could extract in one transaction. I need to go back with Chuck on Guam to break the ice, as he's the man for that. On the other hand perhaps we should leave one coffee outlet to the Conchs who need respite from outsiders.My imagination works overtime because when I ride past this place it looks North African or Middle eastern to me, the arched arcade, the rather cool outdoor seating arrangements and so forth. Rick's Café I'd call it if I wanted to get the title of world's grumpiest barista. I would make a terrible host.It's absurd isn't it? Here's my wife's scooter parked on a main thoroughfare through New Town......and I think it looks lovely. What a town.