I am trying to think of this as a good practice run for hurricane high season which is upon us, but it still sucks. It's early for the Tropical Storm predictions to make much sense, but at the moment it looks as though we are bang in Fay's path with possible arrival Tuesday. Our fearless leaders will spend an anxious weekend trying to figure out what our response as a community should be. If they order a mandatory evacuation bang go the tourists and all their money with them...and if they don't order an evacuation someone will cry foul after the event.
We haven't had a storm warning since the gruesome 2005 season so this hopefully will be a preparatory run for everyone to remember what to do when the weather goes squirrely. I go to work my wife heads north. Sigh.
These papier mache things are everywhere around there, posed and staring fixedly into a future that will never come. It is bizarre, but at least some of the visitors think they are great fun:
And this guy isn't a statue at all, he just looks a bit like one owing to a slight lull in the flow of customers:
This next one looks like a New England purveyor of tinned seafood more than a rugged Key West Conch hunter. I don't suppose the punters really care one way or the other, it's just me being fussy:
And this one with his idiot's grin plastered forever on his vacuous face has overtones that dare not speak their name:
I am probably just too sensitive for this sort of thing. I needed something pure and innocent and traditional but the best I could come up with was this, though what the hell this little tableau is all about I have no idea:
And though it is decidedly traditional some critics argue the Pez Garden is not Art. It all defies definition if you ask me. The Pez Garden is the local name for the Sculpture Garden wherein some notable heads from Key West history are on display:
This is Commodore Porter who vanquished pirates and buccaneers from around Key West and set such a high moral tone locals petitioned the Department of the Navy to get him out of there:
He ended up a mercenary on the Barbary Coast helping North African governments deal with their own piracy problems. Which goes to show virtue is definitely not its own reward. I need to be invited to write school history textbooks, the little dears would get quite an eye opener.
And across Mallory Square, a young man was busy impressing a young woman:
Hemingway had his movable feast; I have my movable statue. Home James, and don't spare the horsepower! 
Or this one, walking in circles and frantically trying to get his point across:
I expect I can be forgiven for a being a phone curmudgeon bearing in mind my line of work, but I am generally slow to take up technology of the sake of it. Besides, I hate myself when I answer my home phone inadvertently by saying "Key West Police..." that's when I know work is interfering with my peace of mind. This dude takes indifference to a whole new level:
Part of me admires his indifference to societal disapproval but I guess everything gets blunted by the gut warmth of alcohol. This next guy I snapped on the fly. Street performers play to tourists in Key West and they are always looking around for someone to interact with, and that most definitely would not be me. I don't mind dropping a buck in the hat if they play well but I don't like interactive theater, thanks, so I hurry along:
On the subject of indifference I must confess I feel nothing about the Olympics in China. I am one of those who, lacking television reception finds it easy to block out the running around and discus hurling. Until I come across a small reminder, this one a trunk sticker on a statue outside the Museum of Art and History:
Ho hum says I, spotting something much more interesting up ahead. A crane, large and industrial no less:
It seems the Westin Hotel (nee Hilton) is expanding its garage. Either that or they are demolishing it, which is too much to hope for:
Across the street there used to be employee parking on a large gravelled lot. I used to leave my scooter there when the covered scooter parking was full. I was working as a boat captain in the Hilton marina and there was more space, now we have more housing bless us everyone, but it doesn't look like workforce housing to cynical old me:
My blood sugar was back to more or less normal by now and my headache was quite gone. That left me able to appreciate beauty once again and here is another of those weird fan palms I last saw on James Street. Now I notice them they are appearing everywhere:
And in closing, on the subject of parking, the lady and all her dogs was absent from her post on the street corner I usually see her at.
Perhaps she was having her blood drawn and hadn't quite recovered. 
Across the street is the Tropic Dive Shop and next to the police station is the other means of locomotion, the place with the big blue sign known as Duncan Autos:
When people want to meet at the police station I tell them we're next to the Ford dealership because that sign is easy to spot on the Boulevard. Duncan also sells Toyotas while Niles, further up the street sells GM and Nissan, and the "other" dealership is a Kia in between the two. Want to buy another kind of car? Head North...
There's a building that is supposedly undergoing refurbishment and every time I go by I see this raw, naked cement and it reminds me of third world semi-constructed buildings. It's occupied but has no plaster or paint on the exterior and it looks like an Albanian customs post, functional but graceless.
Times are hard and foreclosures lurk around every corner. Captain Runaground's floating restaurant is no more and I didn't even notice it's passing. I never ate there but it was there on Key West's industrial waterfront and now it is a a Thai restaurant, garrison Bight's second such restaurant:
The funky cover is gone with all the dangling bric-a-brac. My wife shrugged when I asked her if she knew about the change; "Of course," she said and I wonder how many other abrupt reversals have gone unnoticed by me. Some things don't change, bus stops as trash cans (drinking on buses is not allowed):
One of the great things about scooters is that you can always find some unnoticed spot to abandon them in. Here's one covered in dust, parked and forgotten, and likely only to be noticed if there is a fire in the neighborhood:
On my hour long lunch break I had intended to stroll all the way round the bight but such is the attraction of the unconsidered trifle I got about one third of the way round, as far as the light tackle charter fleet dock near the harbor master's hut:
Personally I prefer my fish alive and vital in the water but taxidermy is apparently alive and well and advertising in Key West:
I had a brief chat with the Security Guard in his golf cart and it was time to head back to the office and my computer screen. Ah, but before I go George Street is begging for a picture.
For some reason Key West streets manage to stretch to infinity. This must all be in the eye of the beholder (they aren't really infinitely long!) and I think it has something to do with the lack of land on all sides, and this knowledge inside my head makes what there is look longer. Which is of course the male human condition. Anyway that's George Street stretching south towards Havana at three fifty in the morning. 
A large concrete structure at the corner of Grinnell and James Streets does not seem like a very good subject at first glance for a blog essay but there is more to the Park and Ride than meets the eye. Parking in Key west is a nightmare for much of the year. In winter it gets desperate and in summer it gets better, but the issue of where to leave your cage is always on the mind of residents. Not for nothing I have noted previously that OSP is a valuable asset for home buyers to consider. Off Street Parking has become a premium item owing to the mad need for bigger homes and garage conversions that swept the city. Not everyone can bring themselves to ride motorcycles and the city has set aside some precious few scraps of land for parking. The Park and Ride is the big bad daddy of them all.
It is in many respects a conventional operation: drive in, collect ticket as you go, park and leave. Pay for parking on return, pick up car and drive out. $2 per hour, $13 a day, with a $100 per month option. Storing cars in the Park and Ride is strictly prohibited:
And the multi storey building is prime ground for parking when a hurricane threatens. Especially after Wilma drowned 10,000 cars in 2005. Some people park their classics here to collect dust:
The Park and Ride also offers that most Floridian commodity, shade:
If it occurs to you that this open cement area might be ideal for skateboarding you might be surprised to learn others have already thought of this and police officers take it upon themselves to patrol the parking garage at odd hours to keep it nuisance free. However the steps make an excellent spot to pass some time of a sunny July afternoon:
This philosopher surprised me by A) drinking tea not beer on the stairs and B) bemoaning his ex-wife and not asking me for money as I carried my camera to the top floor.
After I checked out the Fly Navy building (Bachelor Officers Quarters is the Navy's proper name for the building with the words Fly Navy! painted on the side) I noted someone had been rhapsodising on the garage walls:
Indeed you get quite the view from the third floor of the Park and Ride. Across the leafy streets of the city, towards Strunk Hardware:
At the entrance to the Coastguard Base at Trumbo Point:
At the luxury Steam Plant condos and the low income Railroad Condos in the foreground:
At Wisteria (Christmas Tree) Island in the background, with the Fort Myers ferry wending its way out of the Key West harbor:
And the Key West Bight laid out higgeldy piggeldy before me, a mass of masts and boats and water:
I was almost but not quite alone at the top, admiring the views:
It couldn't have been a brighter summer afternoon, but apparently not bright enough for the city to dim its parking lights, in these times of expensive energy:
The late afternoon sun, not the electric lights, gave my shadow a peculiar profile. I look as though I am dressed in sackcloth of a particularly bad fit:
I read in Joy Williams' excellent guide to the Florida Keys that there was a time people got married up here and I think I found the ideal location:
And this is where we broach that other particular secret. If you don't want to get married or go skateboarding you can still climb up here and have a sunset picnic, all to yourself most likely, and watch the famous Key West sunset from an almost unknown spot. Or you can mingle with the plebs at Mallory Square, but now you know you have a choice. Also we discover here the reason for the Park and Ride's peculiar name:
For the cost of a ticket you get to ride around town all day on the city buses. Cool deal indeed with your car safely in the shade. If you ride a two wheeler you don't need the Park and Ride; mine was in a free spot on James Street:
And as usual aircraft fly low overhead, especially low if you are on the top floor,
as they make their way to land at the airport across town. Downstairs being local has its privileges as the lower floor is currently reserved for Keys Energy employees whose headquarters is across the street:
Even though the Park and Ride doesn't solve Key West's parking issues it is a useful building. And if like me you are easily amused you can spend a happy hour here pootling around and enjoying the views...simple things for simple minds.