Solares Hill

NB: I got a comment that the print size was too small and I increased it a bit. Is this noticeable? Helpful?

Apparently Solares Hill has been measured and the height given for the 21st century (sea level rise notwithstanding) is 18 feet, or five and a half Canadian feet. I always thought it was 14 feet, but apparently the dimple has grown. Or I wasn't paying attention.

I wrote about this spot in 2008 on this page and not much has changed. The Vespa pictured in 2008 looks the same but now has a new owner in Key West. The hill hasn't changed. The pictures on this page are bigger now I have a 20 million pixel camera instead of the 500,000 pixel HTC phone camera.

Looking west toward Simonton Street at the bottom of the hill, unhelpfully flattened by the camera optics, below. They have 100 million pixel cameras for sale nowadays and they still flatten hills. 

As I mentioned in 2008 there is no sign here that this is the highest spot in Key West. Everyone crowds around Mile Marker Zero as though touching that sign confers magical healing powers. Solares Hill crests somewhere near the red car in the picture below.  Not that anyone cares.

I've added a few more photos I took from the area. 



Solares Hill is the hump on the far right of the picture below:

Find the church and you've found the hill, a Caribbean look in bright winter sunlight.

Up The Hill On Petronia

An Italianate villa on Petronia just to remind us that architecture in Key West is as varied as anything.

I am not sure if Rusty has been holding out on me and can actually read.

Petronia Street looking west toward Duval.

If you look hard this place on the corner of Center Street isn't really that attractive but, aside from the closed off door-to-nowhere which gives it a slight air of mystery the greenery makes all pedestrian places look good.

Include a dog in your day to make it better if you ask me. Solares Hill climbed we caught our breaths 16 feet above sea level, Rusty and I. This church puts me in mind of the Caribbean not surprisingly.

Key West in a nutshell; modest home and two wheelers, powered and pedal. All you need:

Same again at the bottom of the hill on Elizabeth Street.

RIP Solares Hill

 

 

It is churlish I suppose to say that for some time now I haven't made it a practice to read Solares Hill, the weekly magazine wedged into the Sunday Citizen between the advertising fliers and the sports section. But to deny it would be a lie. I suppose it was inevitable that in a world of diminishing print news a weekly magazine owned by the daily newspaper would lose it's raison d'être in a circulation as small as that of even the entire Florida Keys. Mark Howell has been let go along with his assistant Nadja Hansen and even the venerable Sports Editor Ralph Morrow a fixture for 20 years in the main newspaper.

Mark Howell, the Welshman, is an excellent writer a great observer of humans in action and editing the newspaper was for him apparently a secondary skill and it seemed inevitable to me that when the newspaper lost its most interesting voice to editing and hunting advertising it became perforce less worthwhile.

 

There were contributors, Diane Roberts with her one note humor on the corrupt foibles of our leaders in Tallahassee, and C S Gilbert reviewing culture with a resolute eye, but so much of Solares Hill was given over to the chummy name dropping of the film reviewer and empty how to articles from the insider cliques I started just drifting through and over and past the few thin pages that lately seemed to lack trenchant political comment and critical thinking. I guess the owners got the message, for in their note mentioning the imminent demise of the magazine (last edition Sunday September 8th) they said it was lack of advertising income that did for the paper. I guess I feel lucky that despite any and all shortcomings a town as small as Key West still puts out a full daily newspaper that lands with a thud in my driveway every morning before dawn. Can you say as much where you live?

The Key West Citizen will cease publishing the Solares Hill, The Citizen's Sunday magazine section, as of the Sept. 8 edition.

Publisher Paul A Clarin made the announcement to the Citizen staff on Wednesday.

"Over the past few weeks, we made the difficult decision to stop publishing Solares Hill," he said. "As with many publications these days, there simply has not been enough advertiser support to sustain the feature-rich section."

Clarin said, "Solares Hill was quite popular with Citizen readers and has always added a unique voice to the paper. From insightful observations of our town and the Florida Keys to our links to the Bay of Pigs training sites, the editor and writers of Solares Hill always looked beyond the obvious and dug a little deeper. It's a tragic fact these days that reader interest does not guarantee the financial success of a publication."

The Solares Hill Editor and Associate Editor's positions have been eliminated. Mark Howell and Nadja Hansen will be leaving the company.

In other Citizen newsroom reorganization, the Sports Editor position has been eliminated and editor Ralph Morrow will be leaving The Citizen.

"As we move forward, we will merge some of the Solares Hill columns and features into our Sunday newspaper. This will be an evolving process over the next few weeks, part of our continuing efforts to keep The Key West Citizen a strong, financially successful publication," Clarin said.

 

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Solares Hill 2008

So here we are, the last day of Key West Diary and I couldn't let my beloved blog fade away without some pictures of the iconic hill in the middle of the city that I am pleased to call home, even though I live in the suburbs.
There are people that delight in thinking Florida is flat which in point of fact is not true at all. Solares Hill, a couple of blocks east of Duval Street is variously reported to be between 14 and 18 feet above sea level. I take the middle ground and call it sixteen feet (about five meters in new money) which is, I think, a good height for a hill to be. For instance if you were planning a fishing trip on your bicycle and came this way, west on Angela Street, you could free wheel a block:There is another hill in Key West, on Elizabeth Street near Eaton, and it, though unnamed is labeled by the presence of the Hilltop Laundry. But Solares Hill takes pride of place, by virtue of the fact that this is Key West's own Mount Everest, the top, the highest peak of all. You may even see people climbing the hill without the aid of supplemental oxygen. These hardy souls looked like visitors staying at Courtney's Place located on the South Col, just off the Hill itself:Solares Hill isn't a straight climb. The road dips on its way up from City Hall at the corner of Simonton Street:What makes this place odd is that in a town notorious for labelling every little non event in its tumultuous history, the highest point gets no marker. Here there is no souvenir stand, seashell vendor or tout with postcards. For the ardent labeller it is a do-it-yourself spot, and in that spirit I label this Key West's tallest house, the home with the front porch highest above the lapping waters of the Straits of Florida, one short mile to the south:It could as easily be this imposing home across the street:But I prefer the more modest Conch proportions of the little white house with it's sky blue trim and every time I pass I salute it as Key West's highest foundation.

The other thing about Solares Hill is that it comes from nowhere and leads nowhere. It is just another street, another way to get out of town, and once you pass the crown of the hill the street levels off:It becomes, momentarily, a modest little plaza that is actually an intersection where four roads join. At night the pink house with the drooping cantilevered extension looks quite a bit different, more imposing perhaps and a lurid shade of yellow in my viewfinder:The lights in the distance mark Angela and Simonton Streets, the bright lights of downtown, but up here on the hill where every breath costs a climber effort, the lay of the land is much more peaceful, by day......and by night:In that last picture I caught the trifecta of Key West wheels; the convertible, the scooter, and the shopping cart, something for everyone. From the intersection one can turn left onto Elizabeth and head towards the Fleming/Southard corridor, or keep going straight, down the hill towards the cemetery:Or, if turning right one gets to freewheel a little bit back towards Truman Avenue and the main street out of Key West:Or you could be like me and wander the hill at 4:30 in the morning and find a bunch of little alleyways, evocative and secret that I shall have to come back to check out in the cold light of day. I keep thinking I know this town and then there is a fifty yard strip of cement lined with laundry, sleeping cats and tile decorations that make a liar out of me. How provoking.

Who Killed Kennedy

Solares Hill, the free weekly paper subsumed into the Key West Citizen's empire has not been my favorite paper for a while. I used to enjoy the Thursday read when Nancy Klingener used to edit the paper. She was the best to come after David Ethridge got tired of running the paper and faded away to retire someplace Up North. These days I feel the paper is being edited by a reporter, and to me that's not a great thing. A good reporter isn't necessarily a good editor and it shows in the weak articles Solares Hill seems to be ready to settle for. there are those who will tell it was only great decades ago when everything in key west was great and it has all been polluted mercilessly by outsiders and people of low morals from elsewhere.Be that as it may Solares Hill has been off on a bizarre tangent all it's own lately, reporting sporadically on the Key west links to the John F Kennedy assassination in Dallas lo those many years ago. This past week (Solares Hill appears nowadays as a supplement to the Sunday Citizen)the paper offered a solution to the enduring mystery of who killed the President in 1963. In various articles over the past couple of years the paper has woven an incredibly complex tale drawing in various Cuban exiles and anti-Castro personalities in South Florida and the Keys, including the training on No Name Key of the potential Bay of Pigs invaders and it talked at some length about the CIA front company operating on Stock Island to monitor Cuba and infiltrate agents onto the island. The articles are numerous and the links are incredibly complex.

If I have it right Solares Hill suggests that Cuban exiles posing as Communist sympathizers of Castro hoodwinked Lee Harvey Oswald to murder the President, and they were planning in spiriting him away after the assassination, a plan thwarted by Oswald's early arrest. Apparently the murder involved Cuban exiles who were angry about Kennedy's lack of enthusiasm for an invasion of Cuba and hoped to pin the murder on Castro, thus prompting an all out retaliation by the US. They were apparently backed up (this is a complicated long drawn out story and I may be missing some key points here) by members of the mob who were also keen to get back to Cuba to pick up where they had been forced to leave off by the fall of the Batista government.

One can well imagine the Mob doing the deed and saying nothing, but it's harder to imagine the Cuban exile keeping their mouths shut about such a monumental thing. It appears word did leak out, but I suppose the Anglo press in the US isn't going to pick up the hints and rumors that Solares Hill's correspondents have managed. I find the story fascinating, I confess, even as I wish Solares Hill would give this sort of coverage to the daily dramas of the Keys, more consistently and more forthrightly than they have lately. Nevertheless I also hope they get recognition for this crazy plausible tale of who it actually might have been that organized the unsolved mystery of who killed Kennedy.

Solares Hill

There are people that delight in thinking Florida is flat which in point of fact is not true at all. Solares Hill, a couple of blocks east of Duval Street is variously reported to be between 14 and 18 feet above sea level. I take the middle ground and call it sixteen feet (about five meters in new money) which is, I think, a good height for a hill to be. For instance if you were planning a fishing trip on your bicycle and came this way, west on Angela Street, you could free wheel a block:There is another hill in Key West, on Elizabeth Street near Eaton, and it, though unnamed is labeled by the presence of the Hilltop Laundry. But Solares Hill takes pride of place, by virtue of the fact that this is Key West's own Mount Everest, the top, the highest peak of all. You may even see people climbing the hill without the aid of supplemental oxygen. These hardy souls looked like visitors staying at Courtney's Place located on the South Col, just off the Hill itself:Solares Hill isn't a straight climb. The road dips on its way up from City Hall at the corner of Simonton Street:What makes this place odd is that in a town notorious for labelling every little non event in its tumultuous history, the highest point gets no marker. Here there is no souvenir stand, seashell vendor or tout with postcards. For the ardent labeller it is a do-it-yourself spot, and in that spirit I label this Key West's tallest house, the home with the front porch highest above the lapping waters of the Straits of Florida, one short mile to the south:It could as easily be this imposing home across the street:But I prefer the more modest Conch proportions of the little white house with it's sky blue trim and every time I pass I salute it as Key West's highest foundation.

The other thing about Solares Hill is that it comes from nowhere and leads nowhere. It is just another street, another way to get out of town, and once you pass the crown of the hill the street levels off:It becomes, momentarily, a modest little plaza that is actually an intersection where four roads join. At night the pink house with the drooping cantilevered extension looks quite a bit different, more imposing perhaps and a lurid shade of yellow in my viewfinder:The lights in the distance mark Angela and Simonton Streets, the bright lights of downtown, but up here on the hill where every breath costs a climber effort, the lay of the land is much more peaceful, by day......and by night:In that last picture I caught the trifecta of Key West wheels; the convertible, the scooter, and the shopping cart, something for everyone. From the intersection one can turn left onto Elizabeth and head towards the Fleming/Southard corridor, or keep going straight, down the hill towards the cemetery:Or, if turning right one gets to freewheel a little bit back towards Truman Avenue and the main street out of Key West:Or you could be like me and wander the hill at 4:30 in the morning and find a bunch of little alleyways, evocative and secret that I shall have to come back to check out in the cold light of day. I keep thinking I know this town and then there is a fifty yard strip of cement lined with laundry, sleeping cats and tile decorations that make a liar out of me. How provoking.