Impromptu Dog Park

My wife said "There's a dog park there as we walked by with Rusty. So there was; who knew?

 I don't know who had the initiative to close off this piece of open space by chaining a couple of gates closed but the result is a place for dogs to play very close to the heart of the city.

Key West is a strange town where travel of even a mile or two is considered "far" consequently there tend to be two of everything of note to allow successful businesses to reap customers deep in Old Town and further out as well.

The idea of transporting one's dog to the south end of White Street might seem too much to a city resident hovering near the north shore of the city. The question is: how long will this delightful space stay open?

The rather expensive Steam Plant Condos overlook the shaggy antics field and one wonders how long they will tolerate plebs disporting themselves with gay abandon in this dog field...Besides which open space like this within sight of salt water might be worth more to some people as cement and industry rather than just as a place for dogs to play. Hard to imagine I know.

Rusty quite enjoyed himself to my surprise. He is not fan of packs of dogs running around in a dog park. Cheyenne wasn't either but she defended herself. Rusty gets overwhelmed.

 It kept him entertained enough for him to need to use the facilities thoughtfully provided:

There is clearly a group of happy dog owners here ready to equip the place for their beasts:

And across the street the Ferry Terminal, still known to some as the Buquebus in remembrance of the Argentine ferry service that got the place built for them and then failed to make money on the boat service. Key West Express is the furthest boat while the smaller closer boat is the ferry for the Dry Tortugas day trips.

I played the the shadows and light in the body of water known as the Key West Bight. This corner used to be known as the Toxic Triangle when the Steamplant used to generate electricity and spew noxious outflow here. I used to have a friend who tied up his boat here for free on the seawall a long time ago. With a name like that I guess no one had the heart to charge a fee to live here. These days its valuable real estate.

 It used to look like this from on top of the Steamplant power station:

The good old days of a commercial fishing fleet, a noxious power plant and a toxic brew in the seawater they said. All grist for the developers' mill today.

Night Key West

The evening started out well. My wife rode downtown from her classroom to meet me at the Tropic Cinema. We went to see the third in the series of movies set in Sweden called the Millennium series. We found The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest excessively talky and the least enjoyable of the series. I felt like walking out I was so bored but I didn't want to miss out on the ending of the series...I parked Cheyenne in the multi story parking lot on Grinnell Street. She wasn't the only animal left in a car.When I came back to the car night had fallen and the parking structure had become a playground for a couple of active youngsters on their skateboards. My camera couldn't catch their determined features as they flashed by in the half light.This corner of Key West looks like the high rise part of the island, with the Steam Plant apartments rising out of the gloom. Such is the state of the economy that the $3.2 million luxury apartments are being offered at half price by developer Ed Swift. Private parking and rooftop pools and all.We parked our vehicles at the School District lot off Trumbo Road and went for a night time walk.The Coastguard Station across the water. In the old days, when the Steam Plant was an active electrical generating station the harbor waters here were so polluted they called this spot the Toxic Triangle.Nowadays it's much cleaner and thus also more commercial. Where once boats tied up informally to the seawall today we see modern marinas in Key West Bight- from shrimp docks to pleasure boat docks in one generation. This is the Galleon across the water.Beyond the school district parking lot the Coastguard station is always ready.From the madness of the big city, relatively speaking, Cheyenne and I soon found ourselves out enjoying the relative peace and quiet of the outer islands. In this case I figured Cheyenne could use an "extra walk" under the glorious almost full moon. I pulled into the park behind Baby's Coffee on Bay Point (Mile Marker 15).It was a splendid warm evening and we both enjoyed strolling around under the ridiculously bright lights illuminating an empty tennis court. Cheyenne trundled back and forth, nose to the ground, making up for the time she spent snoozing in the car in Key West. I played with the camera and enjoyed the contrast between the black night sky and the highly illuminated world around us.

Looking north there was nothing but blackness, the blinking red lights of the radio station towers and the red tail lights of cars streaming by through the long exposure of my camera.

Standing around in my shorts at the end of November is no bad way to spend a winter night outdoors. Not a snowflake in sight, thank goodness.

Steam Plant

Developer Ed Swift's masterpiece, an electricity generating station, long abandoned and turned into expensive apartments. The only thing is he missed the gold rush by a couple of years and some of these splendid units at Caroline and Grinnell are still for sale, while some anxious purchases have filed suit according to The Citizen, accusing him of failing to meet completion deadlines. You'd think alls well that ends well as occupancy permits were issued last week, also according to the paper.

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Looking towards the Coastguard Station at three in the morning, and yes that would be my restored Bonneville parked on the yellow line:The art deco theme works quite well for what used to be Key West's premier industrial plant. It was an electricity generating station built in the style of architecture that it seems to me was favored by Soviet state artists, all massive and geometric. At night it looks like the set off a Batman movie:The front part of the building may look pretty much done, as far as construction goes, never mind the sales of the actual apartments...The back part though, the part overlooking the Coastguard Station and the waters of the Toxic Triangle doesn't look at all finished:

The notion that someone might want to wander the construction area is unthinkable:In a palazzo offering individual elevators to each apartment from each parking stall, so owners can ascend in stately solitude, this appears to be the trades men's entrance. A sort of communal entrance where ordinary people hustle on up, currently not ready for prime time judging by the wrapping tape on the hand rails:
The Steam Plant created the name Toxic Triangle for the waters that abut Trumbo Road, an awkwardly shaped body of water heavily polluted by the chemical effluents for the power plant. Nowadays the generator is become almost a garden:Each line of approach, each door, has a sign reminding passersby that the good life is available for a modest, if necessary payment. The begging is carried out in grand style on the main billboard:The side of the building that faces downtown Key West, and more immediately Caroline Street and the ferry terminal also looks out over the landscaped garden surrounded by its black spiky fence:There is something thoroughly dorky about all these fences and security and the main gate, complete with gate code, is wide open and totally unlocked:
And there it sits all imposing and massive, rather like an iceberg, dominating Trumbo Road:If you happen to have around three million dollars (21 million yuan) going spare, a piece of this could be yours. Who're ya gonna call?

Toxic Triangle

There are some low income apartments for sale to qualified Monroe County residents, and they are close to the waterfront off Trumbo Road. If the developer were to tell people the apartments were at Key West's Toxic Triangle it might make for a hard sell, but luckily for Ed Swift there are only a few of us that remember that designation for the waters off Trumbo Road.They are nice enough units offering garage space underneath and a price tag I believe of around $180,000 for a one bedroom. They are part of a luxury deal because this isn't a charity operation. The larger development is called the Steam Plant, because that is what it was before they decided to build apartments:The low cost units look like quite a deal to me, but the Steam Plant luxury apartments are supposed to sell for several millions each and they have all the penthouse bells and whistles, including I'm told individual elevators from the garages. Its quite the lump, which isn't surprising when you know that this was actually a power plant supplying the city of Key West with life enhancing energy.And that, in the long version, is where the term Toxic Triangle comes from. The power plant had to spew its effluent somewhere and there is tidal water nearby, across the street actually.There was a time, not so long ago that people lived on pleasure boats tied up along this waterfront, and it didn't cost a thing. Of course there were no amenities but inasmuch as the basin is protected from wind and wave to the south by downtown Key West , and to the north by the Coastguard Base it was a good place to tie up out of the rougher waters of the main harbor. It still is for the few commercial boats that continue to tie up there. Behind them lies the US Coastguard Base where the coasties keep their cutters:
The base entrance is at the end of Trumbo Road:The Toxic Triangle isn't locked in everyone's memory as a foul blot on Key West's history, not at all. I spoke with Carol, a colleague of my wife's and she remembers coming down here for picnics and to go swimming. She thinks of this sylvan spot as a sort of public swimming pool, crystal clear waters and a good spot to relax.This is also the spot whence the Sunset Key landing craft takes off to haul moving vans and garbage trucks and delivery vehicles across to the luxury island. I actually took the trip over there a few years ago helping to deliver furniture. The development of Sunset Key generated its own controversy when the city took control of the Navy's old Tank Island, so called because of the (unused) fuel storage tanks on the deserted fill island, and sold the island and the mainland waterfront to the Hilton developer for all of eleven million dollars . When the landing craft was being serviced in the boat yard to take over haulage duties for the new and exclusive development the yard workers baptized the vessel and painted a new name on its bulky stern. "Tank Island Whore" was what they painted to express their disdain for the resort. Apparently the name was spotted by the new owner of the island and there was unhappiness all round. Nevertheless when I see the craft plowing across the harbor in a welter of foam, the unfortunate name keeps popping, unbidden, into my mind.

The Toxic Triangle is also home to the School Board headquarters, on the inland side of Trumbo Road:

And it seems likely that the School District may soon give up this land, with its bus yard and elderly ex-military buildings. The land is waterfront and valuable and could be sold for money enough for the district to design a purpose built headquarters somewhere less developmentally desirable. The buildings themselves have benefited from a lick of paint or two since their use by the military:

Its hard to imagine anything other than yet another development of expensive homes taking the School District's place and that will be something else for us to look forward to. Meanwhile the big yellow buses come and go. And across the way is a development that sprang up almost a decade ago, as far as I can remember. It was an Argentine company of all things that put in a bid to develop a ferry terminal in Key West and on the riverfront in downtown Fort Myers on Florida's West Coast. The company, called Buquebus collapsed inevitably in the great financial meltdown that wrecked Argentina. and its legacy is two ferry terminals that are still known to some people by that peculiar name (pronounced: boo-kay-bus). The one in Fort Myers isn't used anymore as it is more efficient for the ferry to dock at Fort Myers beach as the Caloosahatchee River is a slow speed zone for 20 miles to downtown Fort Myers. The Key West Ferry Terminal is a surprisingly modern facility, all steel and glass and light, though a bit of a hike to get to Duval Street if you are elderly and loaded with luggage, after your three hour ride from Fort Myers Beach. And across from the Ferry terminal is a monument to the man who first enabled easy mass tourism in Key West, Henry Flagler himself: In the background you can see the panels painted by local youngsters to mask the construction detritus along Trumbo Road. Of course they reflect local conditions to some extent, though where the notion arose that a shark might nab a cat dockside, I'm sure I don't know:Another day at the Toxic Triangle as it faces a fresh new incarnation, condos for all.