Going to photograph a residential street in New Town at around five in the afternoon is a trial for a shy person like me. It's absolutely the wrong time of day as residents are returning from a day at work and the street is starting to bustle with evening activity. And then a stranger on a scooter shows up with a camera pointing it in all sorts of odd places.
It's that time of year again, when the Christmas lights go up and a self conscious man on a motorcycle (or his wife's scooter) starts to plan some night photographs of Christmas decorations in a town where frost is a stranger. Thank God.
One thinks of Key West when one is shovelling snow somewhere else and one thinks of narrow streets and piled up wooden houses and bars and crowds and all that stuff. But the backbone of the city are those streets where the downtown conchs retreated last century when they sold off their Old Town Conch cottages to
arrivistes with too much money and too little sense. Out here they found wide open spaces, room to build a multi bedroom house with land to spare for a yard and a place to park a car or two. All modern conveniences.
Pretty they aren't by architectural standards but they are much easier to live in than some of the more picturesque homes downtown:
But landscaping and especially palm trees can give a concrete block home all the charm you need:
Some of the homes have a decidedly Caribbean air, pastel colors, whitewashed walls and they wouldn't be out of place in the Antilles. Perhaps the shutters indicate a snowbird reluctant apparently to fly south but undoubtedly they will be back soon enough:
This section of Patterson Avenue lies between a mangrove lined canal which extends from the Riviera Canal to the bight north of the island and splits New Town down the middle more or less, alongside Tenth Street here:
The canal could be quite attractive but it is what it is, which is a dump unhappily:
At the eastern end of these two blocks Patterson dead ends into the Professional Building, a Stalinist lump that was thrown up as an Awful Warning I suppose, to people anxious to avoid Key West's modern height restrictions:
I shouldn't grumble,my eye doctor lives in there and a very nice man he is too. He got displaced for a while when Wilma wrecked this massive impenetrable lump by pouring rain through the roof and melting the entire palazzo inside out. I was astonished it was such a feeble thing. Just like the old Soviet Union, impressive facades but feeble underneath the bluff exterior. I hope it was rebuilt properly because losing one's eye doctor to a hurricane is annoying and I doubt he'd stay on the job after a second drenching. But I digress. Patterson Avenue in these blocks is an extraordinarily convenient area to live in. Years ago we tried to rent a cottage out here when we decided to get off the boat and give our elderly Labrador a home ashore at last.
Behind the sound proof fence, more or less, lie the loading docks of Overseas Market, which can be an annoyance as trucks like to idle their engines here and waste valuable fuel for some reason.
However for those that like to walk, Winn Dixie, the Post Office and a pharmacy are close by, not to mention neighboring Key Plaza which houses Albertsons, K Mart and Radio Shack not to mention restaurants bars and a video rental. All the mod cons (modern conveniences). Also the gap in the fence has its unintended consequences:
The mangrove bushes that flourish around here provide homes to the stubborn outdoors types who prefer freedom to the restrictions of the homeless shelter on Stock Island:
They just melt out of sight into the bushes as the people on the lowest runs of social ladders everywhere tend to do.The smart ones don't get loud, don't start fires and pack their trash, but there are those that like to draw attention to themselves. Look on the bright side, parking is easier in New Town and homes are bigger, traffic is lighter as there are fewer visitors and strange men on scooters bearing camera only rarely disturb the urban peace:
Of what is essentially an empty residential street. Perfectly placed in my geographic opinion.
Eating out is a certified sport in the Keys, second only to drinking and getting pie faced as a recognized activity. People talk about restaurants and hold strong opinions and don't hold back. Myself, I've learned not to be so opinionated, not least because it's easy to have a bad day in any local business. A chef who's lost his apartment, or who's boyfriend has kicked her out or who may just have a neck wringing hangover may not be in the best mood to cook. So I offer up two new restaurants with some trepidation. On the other hand they both, though very different offer similar recession busting menus.The first place has a peculiar name and an eye popping color scheme. Help Yourself is a command to the customers to do themselves a favor by eating right and not adding to the Styrofoam waste stream. I think that's what it means. 
It offers noodles wraps and a mix-and-match array of ingredients that makes my head spin so I went for the eight dollar Ecuadorian soup made of vegetables (turnip? Who cooks with turnips?) and quinoa a fashionable legume of some sort, pronounced kwin-wah, full of nutritious Aztec nutritiousness and little grainy balls that get wedged in your teeth. The soup was quite good actually though next time I'm coming with my own bottle of hot sauce to give its some zip. Of course I had my own reusable utensils:
The kitchen at Help Yourself has been in use as a restaurant for a long time and the past couple of most recent incarnations didn't survive for whatever reason. This one bursts with energy and industriousness so I'm hoping they make it:
There again I liked the Monsoon Cafe, eclectic Indian food, that was operated by an opinionated Englishman who wasn't very find of motorcycles, unlike this lot who have the bumper sticker displayed at the top of the essay. The tough times for this location come in the summer when it rains and it gets hot and sticky and people eating out do like a little air conditioning. This time of year the outdoor tables are excellent in the weak winter sun:
The restaurant's street address is 829 Fleming but I still think of this location next to the laundromat as being "across from Flaming Maggie's" which was the gay/lesbian bookstore across the street named after the intersection, more or less, and which was killed they said by the Internet:
The other al fresco dining establishment that has popped up recently is a bit further up the Keys in a location that suits me perfectly on my way home, but with a very different menu:
Mad Dawg'z took over a defunct garden center at Mile Marker 21.5 on Cudjoe Key and turned it into a garden restaurant:
It's a brilliantly simple idea really, stick a trailer in the garden center, make the place look nice and sell excellent barbecue:
We took our half rack of pork ribs with two sides to go for $12 and my wife split the food onto two plates as there was plenty for both of us. This was my share (I took the picture at home. I don't carry my own Deruta pottery around for meals to go):
Barbecue is another of those touchy subjects that everyone has an opinion on, and I have enough experience of this as my wife's family lives in North Carolina, land of the endless debate with South Carolina over vinegar versus tomato. I liked the Mad Dawg'z version, not too sweet, tomato based but with a vinegar bite.
You can buy meat by the pound for twelve bucks, and they also encourage bring-your-own-bottle if you want to eat on the spot. If you forgot to BYOB there is the Kickin' Back store just across Highway One. All other considerations aside they like dogs here and that makes them all right in my book, Barbecue controversy notwithstanding:
And they offer sandwiches for just seven bucks apiece with one side. I'm thinking that some day when my wife's not looking a brisket sandwich with peach cobbler would make a man sized lunch. 
And on the other side of the street a guest house marks the corner with a particular paint scheme and plants:
I took these pictures on my recent early morning ramble around Key West so the sunlight was streaming low across the city and it gave a particularly lovely light to the street.
Conch housing in all its splendid variety, old and new, wood and stone. And the more modern styles, the 1960s or 1970s perhaps? With those splendid car ports:
And of course there are the picturesquely dilapidated next to the Yuppie renovated:
But there again if one walks the streets of Key West there are tons of things to see, homes dart boards and...feet?
These feet definitely weren't made for walking, but I like walking the streets of Key West.
I set off back into town from El Mocho where we had breakfast not quite sure where to go, so I gravitated south and took the scenic route along Smathers Beach. It was the obvious place to go if I was in search of a sunrise, and I noted some keen and well equipped photographers lining Dead Man's Curve on South Roosevelt. I left the tripods and massive telephotos behind and pulled over a bit further along unsure what I was chasing. And then I saw planes, pedestrians, cars cyclists and ships all coming together in one shot:
The big white blob steaming in the harbor channel means lots of people wandering Lower Duval later in the morning bringing, one hopes, lots of money into town. I was still seeking a higher purpose than mere commerce. All manner of things presented themselves, an expanse of deep blue sky, but the brown smear was actually a butterfly, I think:
Birds huddled along the seashore apparently waiting for the sun to get a move on and warm them up:
And a busy human being bustled by with a hand glued firmly to his head shouting apparently at himself:
The seasonably un-Key West clothing was prompted by a nasty cold front that swept through town and is supposedly going to keep on sweeping all week long.I can only imagine how cold it is in upstate New York or Wisconsin or wherever this holy terror entered the country from the frozen wastes of Canada:
Sixty degrees (15C) makes for a cold start in a town where local zero is measured at 70 degrees (21C). The beauty of winter in south Florida (45 degrees in Miami! 7C) is even though it can get cold,by local standards, this is not the rainy season. Cold fronts bring some rain with them, but on the whole it tends to be sunny and dry when these cold blasts hit. The rising sun bathed the pink block of Key West By The Sea condos:
Smathers Beach is where many of Key West's active population goes to exercise; they run, they bike, they roller skate and usually they do it in shorts and t-shirts, but this is a little too frigid for most people:
For some people the cold snap makes getting to work a trial:
And when the winds are honking out of the north, as they do in a cold front the fishing fleet ducks into the shallow waters south of Key West, waiting for things to get back to normal:
The boats lower their trawling booms to reduce the rolling effect of the sea and from a distance they look, to my naked eye unaided by the telephoto lense, like bison grazing the ocean as they sit and wait for milder weather. For me, riding the Bonneville is more of a trial than i might like but I console myself with the thought that at least its dry cold, and the sting of cold air under my helmet is a change from the many months of summer heat and humidity:
It was indeed a brisk ride home, though I didn't risk hypothermia and it didn't even really wake me up because when I finally rolled into bed at 8:30 I went out like a light, and it felt good.