Old Harris School

This building used to be Key West's school and many people still alive got their education here. Nowadays the parking lot is used as a private pay-to-park space and the grounds are barely maintained, in a manner that seems more designed to avoid complaints than to actually officer any beauty in landscaping.  I found an article on the school from two years ago in Keys Weekly. The magazine is online and I find it as dependable as any publication and I rather enjoy the fact that Key West still has a weekly publication printed on paper in best 20th century style. The depth of this story will I hope induce you to give it a look.

by Hays Blinkman 2018:

It’s a cautionary tale for all, about big decisions made by elected officials. Let’s go back 12 years to 2006, when the Monroe County School Board decided to sell the historic Harris School at 812 Southard St. to a private owner. Leading up to the decision was a contentious 2004 school board race, when John Padget, gubernatorially appointed school superintendent, lost the election to Randy Acevedo. During his tenure, Padget facilitated a deal to sell the property to the Rodel Foundation for $6 million to create the now popular Studios of Key West. Rodel would have also contributed another $6 million toward renovation of 812 Southard, laden with asbestos and in disrepair. Long story short, the property would look very different than it does today if the newly elected officials had considered the outgoing superintendent’s plan more carefully.

Instead, in 2006, the school board voted against the Rodel deal because the offer required the creation of affordable housing for teachers (seems terribly ironic now). While the housing market fluctuated in ’06, the school board accepted a private offer from owner Peter Brawn for $4.5 million – $1.5 million less – and a very different future began for the majestic property.

So what does the property look like today? Littered with scooters, a jet ski, a large Lu La Roe trailer, and work trucks, it’s used as a monthly parking lot, and just recently, a daily parking lot, as advertised by the large plywood, homemade signs decorating the lot. Owner Brawn was issued a Business Tax receipt permit in 2009 to operate a commercial parking lot, as well as a Property Management license. Essentially, the property has become a functioning inner city parking lot in the heart of Old Town. But all has not gone smoothly for Brawn, as the property has been cited multiple times for code violations. According to Code Compliance Director Jim Young, the property has been cited 39 times since 2000 (although Brawn took possession in ’06) and 19 times since 2013. The complaints include overgrown lots, operating unlicensed business, trash and obstruction of traffic.

In May 2017, there was a formal code hearing for “Failure to cut overgrown weeds around subject property,” which was dismissed with no fines. And in April 2018, the city received complaints about business being conducted from a tractor trailer parked at the property. But the neighbors have much more to say about the old school than what’s on paper.

“We’re not sure what’s going on,” said resident Glen Kingsbury. “I’ve seen more miscellaneous things in the past five years. I have seen sex acts in the parking lot, loitering, people coming in and out of the building day and night.” There is no Certificate of Occupancy, meaning no one can live on the property, although the satellite dish atop the building could suggest otherwise.

“Neighbors did not have a problem with using it for huge event parking,” said Kingsbury, “but there was overnight parking, littering and dumping and we hope not other illegal activity.”

There is the misconception that the property is in Commissioner Jimmy Weekley’s district, but he is just a resident of the neighborhood. “I am constantly getting complaints about the school. It’s not hard to tell there are derelict vehicles everywhere and to see the trash. At least we stopped the RV parking on the fields and got the commercial lot only to park on the blacktop pavement.”

The school is in Commissioner Clayton Lopez’s district, who said, “If residents spoke up enough, I would listen; it’s all our neighborhood and of course, I want to help.” The commercial parking license expires in September but a simple payment by Brawn will keep his business license operational. Lopez may be hearing from his constituents unless the property sells before then for its $15 million asking price.

“The African Kapok tree used to be one of the most photographed trees in town; now it is covered by weeds, seedlings and surrounded by scooters,” said resident Don Dotzauer. He would like to see the neighborhood maintained and kept beautiful, noting that many residents have spent a great deal of time renovating old properties surrounding the Harris School. “I don’t thrive on conflict, but we just want everyone to be good neighbors and just do the right thing.”

I'd love to see an update but the Old Harris School as lovely as ever sits there and is home to parked cars. Too bad really but at least it hasn't crumbled into the ground. There are so many memories on this block of Southard Street. 

This essay is from 2014 and refers to the Bernie Madoff scandal that destroyed the foundation that had hoped to create an artist's colony here:

Old Harris School 2014

Afternoon Sunlight

My sister offered to use her surplus airline miles to buy my wife and I tickets to visit her in post-Brexit Britain next Spring. She lives in Scotland and is an ardent separatist wishing an independent Scotland were back in the European Union for her children's futures. She is living through tough times as farming subsidies vanish and practices sustained by the EU are withdrawn and her neighbors find their backs to the wall as the markets for their products are in a state of total uncertainty. Yet she found time to figure out with my wife how we can get back for a visit next Spring Break. I look forward to it.

My own future is filled with certain uncertainty and where I look forward to that my sisters, all three of them, live lives of measured certainty. I  was always the wanderer which leads me to conclude there is a great deal of nature in us overriding the nurture. But that is an argument I leave to geneticists to sort out; I have a life to live.  For the first time in twelve years of posting on this page I find myself running into a mental block as i thresh out my situation in my own mind while trying to maintain an outward even keel on the page.

My relationship to Key West is changing even though my feelings for this town, and my very generous employer haven't changed. For a nomad like me to find myself able to describe Key West as home is a special thing, and as much as I struggled to think of Santa Cruz as home during my decades in California, the relationship never jelled for me. I grew up there and became an adult even though I arrived in town at age 23 and was properly an adult in body if not in attitude when I left Europe for the last time as a resident. I know my feelings for Key West will evolve into the most nauseating nostalgia after we take off until we eventually return to the reality of this place and a cabin in the sun in a grossly overpriced marina. And then the complaints about Key West's shortcomings will resume. It's what you do when you live here.

I suffer also from a slightly obsessive personality, producing a daily blog for a dozen years hints at that condition, so now my mind is focused on the future. My wife is pondering living options in the van we are staring to design which will be built in the Spring while I am contemplating maps and routes and distances and costs and photos. Too much of my life has slipped by the era of film and I have few photos of my life in the 20th century. I was born as the first human built satellite circled the Earth and i grew up in a world promising technological wonders always  "...by the year 2000." That landmark came and went and sure we have astonishing technology but not the flying cars and body transplants they promised when I was a child. I'll happily take the Internet and satellite communications in the meantime, thanks.

Digital photography has become my blessing and my curse. I cannot see an immediate future on two wheels. If I were single and dog free I would take off on a motorcycle to see the world but as I am encumbered with two sidekicks a motorcycle even with sidecar is not going to work. And let's be honest, the comfort of a van and a home on wheels wherein I can close out the world has its appeal. My friend Webb who loves an ascetic life in a small sailboat acknowledges he could make a comfortable home in a  box on wheels equipped as it will be with kitchen toilet shower (after a fashion) and heat and cold. To him 72 square feet of living is luxurious but for most people living in a shoe box would be a severe inconvenience. For me now a motorcycle is surplus.

That is where I can now focus my intensity: digital photography is difficult to master I have discovered and nowadays the technology is superb and free! The modern digital camera has outpaced me. If you look at early entries in this blog when I conceived the idea of documenting this wondrous happy place I had landed in you can see I had some good photography ideas in between the cliches but the machinery i held in my hands, an HEC smartphone was sorely lacking. Especially as I had no idea how to bend digital photography to my will.

I am attempting to remedy those deficiencies by taking on a course of photographic learning with all the intensity I applied to learning to ride a motorcycle in my teenage years when the only tools I had were magazines and books and trial and error. I have one ankle that still aches occasionally from the time I dropped my motorcycle on it when practicing a slow turn I read about in a magazine interview on how to ride better!

I ride my scooter to work and I find, much to my surprise I feel no fear after my spectacular wreck a year ago. I am extremely cautious around distracted drivers or people pulling out of side streets but riding still gives me pleasure. However I am really focussed on my desire to have an interest in something that I can enjoy with my immediate family on the road. Photography will have the added benefit of moving the story of my life forward in a creative way I hope and leave behind a few mementoes for my distant family members who want to remember the black sheep of the family who left them for the New World. Jack London isn't in it!

So I have undertaken to teach myself photography and the blessings of Youtube make this possible along with my preferred written word form of communication. I expect I shall have to get involved in video at some point, my wife thinks the future is something I should come to grips with even as I struggle to adapt to the digital present...Carrying a camera is a solitary pursuit but I can look around even when I am not alone and I enjoy the process of learning to  notice what previously was only seen.

I have taken to reading Internet forums on photography and I find the participants as cruel and nasty and opinionated as participants on any other specialized forum. This however is not 2010 anymore and with a decade's experience under our belts we recognize and avoid people "vexatious to the spirit." Easily done, though I have to say I was naively quite surprised to find rabid people posting on a forum ona subject as pacific as photography. Webb tells me sailors do the same thing and god knows I've seen them discussing motorcycles tearing each other to shreds. I ain't got no time for that.

So I try to find the knowledge I seek and the opinions I might try to trust elsewhere. I have not much interest in gear as I like my modest undervalued fixed lense camera. I like the pictures I get from my Panasonic FZ1000  and it comes complete with image stabilization and total manual control as I want it and a zoom lense that isn't great all the way but it goes a long way out and produces decent pictures in  a package that fits in my hand just about (!) and cost me $360 lightly used on e-bay. I think the camera has been on the market for five years and it has only recently been updated slightly for improved video recording. The original version is sold brand new for six hundred dollars. In the same way I want to travel by banal two wheel drive van where more driven people want to rock hop in their four wheel drive homes, I plan to keep the photographic recording department simple with my Panasonic and a smaller Panasonic camera for back up in case of failure. I have my eye on an almost pocketable camera  for unobtrusive street photography and as it has a wide aperture it could be handy in low light situations. At this stage I am reluctant to go all National Geographic with piles of lenses and big heavy cameras and bush jackets and all that stuff. I don't really like using a  tripod much as I find it cumbersome and modern image stabilization is astonishing.

Of course there are proponents of photography who only use Canon or Nikon or Sony equipment and others who only use tripods and others who...blah blah blah. I just hope to get through this adventure with some decent pictures to post here and and on Instagram. Those and some words and perhaps the occasional video will I hope tell the story and make a proper electronic diary for me to look back on when I am in an armchair in a nursing home a surprisingly few years from now. Unless I fall to a violent death failing to negotiate Bolivia's Highway of Death in the meantime.

And one final note on this work in progress, I am leaning away from my previous title for this page after I got some grief not least from Webb for thinking a homage to Steinbeck might be in order with Travels with Rusty. Especially as, upon mature reflection Rusty's time is finite and he may not outlive the blog title. I wanted it to be snappy so my current tentative title which I came up with after searching Domain Names on GoDaddy is just that, and impersonal says Webb. For the price of $12 I bought ArmchairTrekker.com which if you type it into your browser will land you back on this page. Webb still doesn't fancy this name but I  like it as it's easy to remember it expresses my desire for a rugged journey undertaken in some comfort and it will make it easy for people we meet along the way to connect online. Conchscooter.blogpsot.com is a bit of a mouthful and let's be honest "conshscooter"  is the common mispronunciation and it has the same effect on me as nails on a blackboard. The cool thing about that name given to me on a motorcycle forum fifteen years ago is when someone says they know Key West and they can't pronounce "Conch" you know them for the poseurs they are. 

Yeah and I'm never going to fall in love with wild chickens either. Give me a nice quiet clean well behaved native Ibis any day.

Key West Harris School

The poor old Harris School on Southard Street continues to be abandoned and unloved with fresh for sale signs hanging off its tired structure. Years ago the Rodel Foundation wanted to buy it and create an artist's colony here, but that idea was way too cool for the School District whose board fluffed the sale and ended up in 2009 (after Bernie Madoff brought down the Rodel Foundation) selling it for $4.25 million to a developer who never announced his plans for the building.

Well, here we are in 2014 and the place is for sale on one realtor's website for a cool $12.5 million dollars. Not a bad return for doing nothing with the property but sit through a financial crisis. This week's election took no notice this sale of "six lots" to break up Key West's first school and will thus lose another piece of the city's heritage. Craig Cates' next term will be taken up with the new city hall construction I have no doubt. At least he got that right at Glynn Archer School on White Street.

But the architecture created by accident and which has survived largely by accident will prevail, one hopes.

I wonder what they were thinking when they built these homes. Was it pure practicality? Did they imagine their posterity admiring their handiwork and considering themselves lucky to live among these livable monuments?

I saw this guy sitting on the bench in front of Mangia Mangia, a peculiar pseudo Italian restaurant on Southard Street, a place I sometimes like to sit and people watch of a morning. I watched him for a few minutes reading the newspaper. Then my dog dragged me on.

And round the corner and back we came, Cheyenne and I. Good morning we said, a pet on Cheyenne's head and off again. Sometimes she seems to be in a hurry, other days not.

I've seen this tree lots of times and its appeared here on this page before. It is still doing well, still silly on Margaret Street, still enjoyable to see.

And so back round to the old school, and from the library this picture of the cafeteria in 1959 when I was barely two, and 3,000 miles away.

All to be lost soon enough. I hope the big old trees will survive, but Key West has a poor track record on that front also.

Cheyenne sometimes makes for a poor conversational companion, as absorbed as she gets by...garbage. I guess she sees little difference between my muted garbage and the stuff she finds under the dumpsters. I end up standing around admiring the architectural quirks of this endlessly absorbing city.

And so we left town, I did some light shopping, herself passed out on the back seat in the air conditioning and on the way home we stopped to admire the waters we try never to take for granted.

Then, by the time we got home there was that other kind of water that was about to land on us from above. This has been a summer of heat, and storms and weather drama of the manageable kind so far.

 

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Around The Harris School

This time of year it's hard to convince myself living in the Lower Keys is a more enjoyable life than living in Old Town, but in a couple of months the situation will reverse itself like the tides and the flow of people into the city for the winter will flood the streets with vehicles people and noise. But for now one can sit on a street corner for five minutes and see nothing more than this:


The only sound the creaking of a bicycle chain screaming for lubrication. To sit on the edge of the Old Harris School on Southard Street is to be on the edge of the Earth, comfortable in the shade, and looking into the abyss of lives slipping through the fingers of their owners and tumbling into the whirlpool of alcoholism.


In the land of exasperated "self reliance" and "individualism" these characters are left on the streets with their misery and mental afflictions to shuffle past our well ordered middle class lives, pissing and shitting in the streets, collapsing on the sidewalks and passing out on private porches in a toxic haze. That's when the "self reliant" those who hate paying taxes call the government and ask us to deal with them and bitch about the absence of a permanent solution to the unsightly problem that will drive away the cash cows known as visitors. God forbid a bleeding heart suggest the creation of mental hospitals and drug clinics and treatment. Better spend the money blowing up brown people and wasting more money trying to make police officers into a pale semblance of social workers. I call this circular contradiction job security and ponder Christ's Beatitudes.


But back to the point: Harris School


It's still the the Harris School empty and useless, not a school, not a cultural center as envisioned by the Rodel Foundation, whose good works were wrecked by Bernie Madoff and his legions of the greedy. It won't be a new city hall so in the end I expect it will grind into obscurity as a collection of "professional offices" housing paper pushers who will neither know nor care what the old building was nor what it signified to the history of this little town.


Whether or not the school is a white elephant sitting in the middle of a residential neighborhood, a walk around it's perimeter well outside the "No Trespassing" signs is always worthwhile, I find.


Traveler's palms framed by gray roof and blue sky, a well netted porch with a hammock safe from buzzing invaders. These are Key West images to make a person dream, as winter starts to encroach.


I am told car heaters are being taken out of mothballs Up North, and the morning air has a touch of the crisp freshness of Fall in the temperate latitudes.


Down here construction work continues apace in the torrid heat of September in the Keys. This is high hurricane season, going well so far, and this year heat and humidity are tempered by a persistent breeze which has made the hottest time of year relatively bearable for those of us used to the stifling heat.


Winds blow leaves into the unpeopled streets, but the debris will be cleared soon. Fantasy Fest starts to impinge on the imaginations of those of us who rely on visitors for income as this is also the quietest time of year and uncertain incomes falter in September and October.


Fantasy Fest is a nuisance for a retiring type like me when middle aged jollity takes it's clothes off in the streets and alcohol rules.


Except this brand of alcoholism is a temporary escape for most of the revelers and they drink and vomit and then go home Up North to resume their lives of propriety and censure tut tutting at those grody unwashed shuffling figures who populate the dark corners of Key West and bring tourism into disrepute.



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