Key West has always been a military kind of town. Even today though you hardly see any sailors in uniform on the streets there are seven bases. In the 19th century brick was the military building material of choice. In addition to Forts Jefferson and Taylor there are two coastal watchtowers in Key West.
A man called Martello invented them in England where they are common enough along the south coast. Here in the US these are the only ones I have seen labelled Martello Towers. The West Martello Tower at Higgs beach houses the garden club and the brickwork is deteriorated as the Army used it (unbelievably!) as a target to exercise their gunnery skills. This one near the airport is pretty solid.
Rusty was bound and determined to walk round the tower and this is a dog not fond of traffic. He strutted off on the grass right next to South Roosevelt Boulevard and I tottered along behind. The tower is quite photogenic, let's face it, so I was not entirely unhappy with my dog's decision.
Even from ground level the view due south is quite pleasant. The roof of the tower is available to the public when the museum is open and that gives you an expanded view:
In the rear we butted up against modern reality of the parking structure for the departure lounge. A trivia question you could win a bet on: What's the name of the lane that runs between the parking structure and the martello tower which allows traffic to turn back to the airport entrance without going out to South Roosevelt Boulevard? Why that would be Nancy Cherry Way. It's a street we dispatchers use to test new officers' geography. We send them to do an area check of Nancy Cherry Way and a few minutes later we get a frantic telephone call asking us where it is. No one knows. She was a dedicated city employee who got a street, albeit an obscure one, named for her.
The tower is getting some work done so one hopes it will come back better than ever.
I dropped a fiver in the donation box and went for a walk. The library in the tower felt like a brick lined reading room at an old English club. My old man was a member of the Athenaeum in London and it felt rather like this, in a very broad sense.
Beach alert! 
Higgs Beach outside and quiet wending paths inside.
Beach view: 
Flower view:
And from a previous essay on this martello, this was how I saw West Martello by night: 
This year Sculpture Key West was split into three locations, an idea that didn't do much for me, but I guess everyone wants a piece of the successful show, so one share of the exhibits was on display here:
The East Martello Museum, of which I wrote previously, has a wing devoted to local artists, and of those two in particular struck my fancy. Stanley Papio lived in the Upper Keys and settled there after he had a career as a welder. His artwork developed from his passion for found objects and he took a fancy to welding them together to create objects of whimsy:
The story goes that Papio's neighbors were none too excited about his welded junk lining the Highway, but he didn't much care it seems.
And the way these things go, before too long the welder became an icon:
And the East Martello has a number of these "culturally important artworks" in it's collection:
The other artist on permanent display is Mario Sanchez who died in 2005 and who, like Papio came to his art later in life. Sanchez took to making wood carvings, intaglios, of Key West life. Including a picnic at the East Martello Tower:
He carved street scenes from memory, and made three dimensional the Key West of his childhood, remembering the merchants, the buildings and the activities of Key West long ago. These wood blocks are much more vibrant and immediate than the posed stiff black and white photographs of the era:
Funnily enough Sanchez himself springs to life out of a simple black and white photo:
He drew his ideas on old paper bags before committing them to wood:
And then he went to town with all the finely carved details, like this scene from a cigar factory:
I particularly liked the caption on the wall: "...in Spanish English or Bahamian..." The mind boggles, and ponders the life and times of Mario Sanchez.
There is a fee to get in, but all I noticed was that with the local's discount I paid five bucks so I'm guessing an out of town visitor might pay $6. It's well worth it, as the museum has been spruced up quite a bit since last I was there a few years ago. Fred the cat patrols the front desk area and gift shop:
The first stop was a diorama of the lighthouse with some of it's history but as I've already written about that delightful point of interest I limited myself to recording this gruesome instrument of torture, which previously I had only ever seen in the movies:
No museum worth it's salt in Key West will skip the desperate love affair that Karl Tanzler enjoyed with a young Cuban woman:
The German X-Ray technician employed at the naval hospital looked paternal enough but he conceived a most vivid love for the young Cuban woman called Elena depicted while alive just above Tanzler's shoulder. He promoted himself to Count Von Cosell and lived in a hut on the beach, whence he repaired with the unfortunate young Elena and played the pipe organ to celebrate their love. The only glitch was she had died of tuberculosis and he had been forced to dig up her body and repair the ravages of the grave as best he could. This ghastly parody of love went on for about seven years and when he was finally busted it was the 1940s and there are people alive today who remember Elena's waxy remains on display in the city:
That story never fails to give me the creeps and Ben Harrison's biography Undying Love spares no gruesome details. East Martello is also host to another of Key west's weirder characters, known simply as Robert the Doll. It is traditional to respectfully ask permission of the doll prior to taking a photograph, and you'd better believe I did.
The story goes that a servant in the Otto family gave the son and heir Gene this doll in 1896, and because the Otto's treated their servants so badly the servant put a voodoo hex on the doll which became Gene's constant companion. The adult Gene set Robert in a room overlooking Eaton Street and such was the doll's reputation people were afraid to walk past it. Even today there is a wall at the Martello Tower dedicated to letters from people thanking the doll and apologizing to the doll asking for their bad luck to be lifted:
In the interests of my own good fortune I have no comment. There are others who had bad luck but of the meteorological kind, namely Cuban rafters. There is one such machine,if it can be called that, in the corridor of the East Martello, dating back to the 1960s. It was basically a collection of saplings bound together, found with three ID cards, and the fate of their owners remains unknown:
The sign behind the raft says, Could the last person to leave Cuba turn out the light... Before the US decided to embargo Cuba there was a long history of exchange, both cultural and economic between Key West and Havana. That exchange was typified by the cigar industry which settled in Key West for a while before moving north to the wide open spaces of Tampa and Ybor City. The Key West era is marked in the museum:
The first international flight left from Key West in 1913, and took two hours to reach Havana 90miles (150 kilometers) to the south. Cuban Domingo Rosillo was at the controls of his featherweight monoplane: 
Augustine Parla, another Cuban aviator was the second person to make the flight a while later. Pan Am started mail flights between the two cities in 1927. 
And aside from all those splendid lawns there is a viewing platform at the top of the central tower, reached by climbing three narrow flights of an iron spiral staircase. From the top one gets a view across the Straits of Florida.
A pleasant afternoon at the Martello Tower.