Key West continues, inexorably to change. The changes aren't sudden and God knows they are planned far enough in advance, but the paving of paradise continues apace, like it or not. Its Old Town that takes the brunt of the cement attacks, focused on two stretches of waterfront. The old Atlantic Shores resort at the southern tip of Simonton Street is a large hole in the ground at the moment. It used to be a pretty cool place, straight friendly, dog friendly offering open air movies every Thursday night with free popcorn. Next door the old Sands beach resort is also gone, paving the way for some new monstrosity. That's the bad news on South Beach, and more on that later.
The focus of controversy I rode by earlier this week is around Waterfront Market an overpriced food store offering key West's widest selection of organics (Publix is in close second place). The owner of the Waterfront wants to quit but locals want the institution to remain so there is a move afoot to sell shares and keep the place going as a coop. Buco Pantelis was notorious for low low wages and its hard to imagine a coop will be able to pay the sort of money that will keep experienced staff.
Just next door to the Waterfront Market is an older Key West institution that may also survive as a public entity. Historic Tours of America abruptly fired the crew and put the schooner Western Union up for sale last summer. With hurricane season over (notwithstanding Caribbean islands getting a drenching from Hurricane Olga this week), some civic minded citizens popped up and decided to try to sell shares for the Western Onion and raise 1.5 million to keep it on the Key West waterfront. So far so good. But I did think it odd when organisers showed Deep Water as a fundraiser to save the boat. The film is about the suicidal Donald Crowhurst and his doomed attempt to sail around the world in the 1968 Golden Globe race. But I went to the Tropic Cinema anyway and yielded my $25 to watch one boat flounder to save the other.
These public minded attempts at preservation are bookended by two major housing developments that bode little good for the mostly city owned waterfront. To the north is the old Steam Plant, the electrical generating station that spewed its effluent into the harbor at the "toxic triangle" off Trumbo Road. That thing sat unused for decades, a brooding castle of Transylvanian proportions, that has now been reborn as 3 million dollar exclusive apartments (one left!) with a dozen affordable units built in its shadow (none left!).
Once Ed Swift, owner of Historic Tours of America, is done with the Steam Plant we will shortly thereafter witness the birth of another set of condos popping up on top of the old Jabors RV park which sat across the street from the Waterfront Market. This development is being created by another development company that is convinced this is the best way to make Key West a hot tourist destination. Despite the glut of condos in south Florida these ultra expensive units, also on offer at around $3 million, are selling briskly. Everyone wants a slice of "Old Key West" even if they kill it in the process of buying it. The Watermark took a lot of effort to permit as the developers wanted to violate just about every zoning regulation but steady citizen opposition got it within city zoning requirements and now construction has begun.
Watermark, a name discredited by the zoning fiasco is known as Harbor Condominiums in its latest incarnation, and will soon tower over the little bar that likes to call itself "the last little piece of old Key West," Schooner Wharf Bar. Bar aficionados are sounding the death knell of the funky, musically off beat and always loud joint, even though current plans call for the Schooner Wharf to be treated as a charming attraction, for the multi gazillionaires who plan to live next door. I doubt that will last. All new residents bitch when they start to reside here, about the funky charm that attracted them here in the first place.
And this has been going on for decades in the Keys. Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum, and we just can't find any decent local leaders to elect who will change our headlong course into middle class mediocrity.
It surprises me but I like Christmas in the Keys, not least because there is, against the odds, a community down here and holidays are holidays and if your's is Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, its all the same thing. Key West is the first place I've lived where tolerance and diversity make halfway decent bedfellows, so if someone else's Christmas tree is my wife's Hanukkah bush that's okay too. 
Of course this is America so the consumer frenzy that is modern Christmas is in full swing, catalogues worn thin by thumbing, UPS desperately looking for fill-in help, all the usual high stress rubbish. For some of us its a great time to have a second childhood, and make it a really good one this time around. Happy Holidays to the mainland under snow ice and drizzle, but I've got to go ride my Bonneville.
Duck Key sits south of Highway One at Mile marker 61, across a short causeway decorated with columns and signs that don't actually say Keep Out but that's the theme. You can't keep a good Bonneville out.
Duck Key was the creation of Pritam Singh, the hobo turned Sikh developer born in Boston and settled in Key West who famously drove himself broke buying the Navy Base that became Truman Annex. He made a fortune ultimately and turned his hand to making Duck Key just north of Marathon, Paradise in the Middle Keys, as it were.
This wide spot in the Highway is a shared paradise, half occupied by a mixture of elderly cement homes, in the raised style of the sixties. 
These are being taken over by Money and turned into Palm Beach by the Keys. 
I love these massively expensive homes tiled with Mediterranean roof tiles that'll blow halfway to Tampa in a hurricane. Actually these objects of conspicuous consumption irk me to death. I see no value in making expensive exurbia of a Florida Key, a place traditionally reserved for scrounging a living, not lounging a living. I suppose a traditionally inclined Conch sponge fisherman might sneer equally at my level of indulgent living, a weatherproof home equipped to excess with air conditioning, running water and a low flush water closet. The height of bourgeois excess no doubt. My little island has no Mickey Mouse bridges across the canals.
On the other hand Duck Key, the half that isn't Singh's exclusive Hawk Cay Resort, could never be described as plebeian. 
I mean, one has to wonder a little bit about this opulence doesn't one? Especially considering that most of these homes are unoccupied. These are the homes of people who show up a week or four every year, and the rest of the time they are the domain of electricians and plumbers, gardeners 
and Mexican weed whackers. Some idle people fish off the canals, for fun:
but that's too close to life in the rest of the Keys, I think. So the anglers are a lone breed far from the majority of elderly housebound millionaires, yet hardly close to the world of commercial fishing.
We have met the enemy and he is us. My kind of Socialism I suppose.
This is a town with narrow streets and way too many cars already so for up to 8 months out of the year finding parking is a drag and people shove and squeeze their cars into excessively small spaces in an effort to create a space where one might reasonably be assumed not to exist. In New Town, the more expansive outer two thirds of the island, parking spaces are more reasonably proportioned by collective madness seems to take over local drivers and they ding and bang each other's cars as though they were in the narrow confines of Old Town. 
The net result of all this mainland attitude meeting the island reality of limited space means that there just isn't a really good reason to own a cage unless you have off street parking and like to drive to the mainland from time to time (I qualify in both categories). Nevertheless when seventy percent of the cars on the island drowned following the Wilma inundations of 2005, almost everyone I can think off went out and bought new SUVs to replace their lost transport. The net result is crowded streets, as badly clogged as ever.
My mainland vehicle is a 5 year old Nissan Maxima and it has its share of scratches and scrapes, though it runs perfectly and is a fine 3.5 liter machine for passing slow pokes on Highway One. My wife is girding her loins to replace it, as it approaches the 100,000 mile mark, with a convertible. She's hesitant partly because she hates spending the money (she doesn't mind buying me a motorcycle though- women!) and partly because she knows that if she gets a glossy Sebring or a Solara it stands an excellent chance of getting dinged- bright clean cars attract scratches in Key West's Old Town. By contrast our "Conch cruiser" a ten year old scarlet Geo Metro is crisp and clean and completely scratch free. I figure its just too modest a car to attract the attention of the sociopaths who feel compelled to put scratches on strangers' cars. 
I guess if I lived in the city I would not bother with a car, its easy enough to rent one, and off street parking is rare as hen's teeth in Old Town. Even in New Town, land of suburban styled American homes, garages are usually converted to living space, so cars end up where kids can egg them, drunk drivers can sideswipe them and disgruntled pedestrians can key them. But you can't separate most Americans, even emigres to island living from their cars. Its a tribute I suppose that around one third of city residents have chosen to deprive themselves of their cars. 
I doubt the Autoridad in charge these days would be too impressed were we to return and expect a transit for our 34-foot catamaran through the canal. These days its a self funding operation and every transit has to pay for itself and sailboats are very low on the totem pole. Our buddy Anna rode through with us to check out how she and her husband Ian were going to cope with their boat Joss. We had a minor crash later when the tug we tied up to left us in the lurch and we were slightly beaten up as we were dragged through the lock sideways by the currents. Damage was minor but we stared death in the face for a few awful minutes.
Days later Joss made it through fine, though I was always worrying about what had happened to us as we locked through on their trip. Ian confided in me later that he couldn't get the image out of his mind of Miki G swirling helplessly through the lock like a leaf down a drain. 
Miki G moored for several weeks at the now defunct Pedro Miguel Boat Club, next to the Pedro Miguel locks on Lake Miraflores. The marina used to be a Canal Zone perk, but during the US Administration it was also an excellent place to tie upto make repairs and rest from the culturally arduous business of cruising Latin America. Pedro Miguel was an English speaking, boater friendly, oasis even in the years after the Zone was ended and Americans only stayed on to help transition to Panamanian Administration. However the Autoridad del Canal de Panama has shut the place down after a long legal battle and pictures such as this can no longer be taken because the club is gone (plus we sold the boat to a friend in Key West who isn't interested in cruising right now!). One of these days I'm going to write an entry about all the place I've been that no longer exist. A depressingly long list, indicating an excessively long and well traveled life I think, even though the places themselves weren't that great; the USSR and East Germany high on the lackluster destinations I Have Known. 
I keep this picture framed in my office to remind me of our mad cap adventures trying to find places to walk the dogs away from the prying eyes of the officious Customs agent who was determined to enforce Panama's 'no pets ashore' rule. Emma, our Labrador stuck close to me while Debs, our Husky dived into the bushes like the little explorer he always was. Everyone in the rest of the country ignored the quarantine rule and we took the dogs everywhere with us, into Panama City, into Darien by rental car, and up into the mountains in the middle of the country.
After we got through the Canal we spent several more idylic weeks in the more famous San Blas islands on the Caribbean side of Panama. These Kuna indian islanders practice a low tech medieval lifestyle in their own autonomous province known to them as their Kuna Yala, with their own system of justice and social pecking order, similar to, but more idylic than, a US Indian Reservation. These islands resembled the Keys somewhat, in as much as they had coconuts, narrow sandy beaches and lots of scrub vegetation. We sailors gathered in calm anchorages and hung out barbequing under the stars, telling stories, swimming and playing cards until our supplies ran out and we had a private plane fly us out the fixings for a massive Thanksgiving dinner in November 1999. Believe me, we were absolutely bulging with thanks that memorable desert island holiday.
Teaching kids to pet the dogs (with treats of course!) on the Rio Diablo/Corazon de Jesus footbridge in the Kuna Yala. Kids are kids in the most remote places and Labradors do like their treats.