Old Houses

I took my last surviving powered two wheeler for a spin after I sold my Vespa last week. The little electric Jetson Bolt is my circus-bear-on-a-unicycle look and it hauls me around at 9mph so I can get back to the office without being a  smelly sweating pedaling mess. It also fits easily on the back seat of the Fiat 500 which has become it's garage. I drive to work with the electric scooter always there and ready to run an errand. This old house is at Bill Butler Park:

I was meandering aimlessly enjoying the sun when it occurred to me I wanted to photograph old decrepit buildings. I recently posted a photo on Instagram of the new hole at Olivia and Emma where the old white house with the pink shutters used to be, in Bahama Village, across from the Douglass gym.  

I took the photo below in 2013 out walking the late Cheyenne and you can imagine that eight years later it was probably time for a change for the crumbling house. But I got to thinking...there are so many old houses in key West and soon they must all disappear. 

So, I thought to myself as I rode around photographically uninspired but enjoying the fresh air, why don't I round up a few pictures of places that might soon be gone, pieces of key West history, the city as it was? This next one I found on Johnson Lane, last photographed in 2008 LINK:

I grant you it is quite the cliché photographing old distressed buildings, and I adhered to that cliché by making the pictures in black and white. I think the fascination with the old buildings comes not just from how picturesque they look, but also because that look evokes feelings. Sometimes one is glad to see some undesirable thing collapsing and finally rotting away to be replaced by the fresh new version. For me in Key West these old homes are the vivid expression of memory, they are the manifestation of life lived. 

I grew up with shutters like these in the photo below, and I remember my mother throwing them open and yelling at me to come upstairs for lunch or for an unwanted siesta or some other intrusion into my summer vacation. So when I rode by on Olivia Street and saw this window I was compelled to stop. 

Obviously anyone who walks Old Town can allow themselves to fall in love with wooden homes and masses of greenery and narrow lanes and so forth. But these old things are on their way to extinction and when they are replaced externally they will have to adhere to historic code criteria while inside they will be modern and comfortable and livable as they should be.  For now they are monuments to the past awaiting inevitable transformation into modern practical expensive dwellings for winter visitors. 

This one on Olivia at Frances is lived in.

And if you were under any illusion that living cheek by jowl with your neighbors was easy there is a message here for you.

As unsightly as it is I guess it beats calling 911! (For the humor impaired I'm making a funny as I answer 911 in Key West and these are exactly the nuisance calls I deal with all day: trash parking and noise complaints). For some neighbors life in close quarters is very difficult and communication frequently breaks down.  

The other reason I like black and white is because I can paint a more modern lived-in home into an essay on old houses. Such is the architecture of Old Town. This conch cottage has survived the passage of time as a lived in home. It is a survivor.  

And so we come to end of my lunch break, a dead end as it were. Like this dry wall in The Meadows.

Mangroves Up Close

A collection of found objects captured with my camera on another Rusty walk. No words needed.

Clouds

I enjoy photographing clouds over the Florida Keys. They make up for the absence of mountains and valleys and lakes and rivers and other geographic features.

Usually I get to enjoy these huge piles of humidity in the summer months, the rainy season, but this winter has offered a large crop of cumulus from time to time.

Walking Rusty at the golden hour before sunset can yield amazing views of black horizons, mangroves in the shade and a sky filled with purples and pinks and in this case golden yellow, the color syrup.

I enjoy painting origami with my camera, folding leaves on spindly branches silhouetted by the dying sunlight.

Here I looked overhead and caught the blue directly above me. I do a lot of looking up when I am under clouds or in city streets.

 These pictures below I took on Blimp Road one overcast evening. 

I'm looking forward to enjoying daylight saving time now and having more daylight in the evening to walk Rusty after I get home at 6:30. I'll relieve my wife of that duty and enjoy more time with my dog.

I caught Fat Albert as the blimp hung among the scudding clouds, so it looked like the stationary observation platform really were flying along.

What a lovely evening we had together Rusty and I, him down sniffing me up staring.

Affordable Housing

The manager of the city of Key West has handed in his resignation and is off to the utility company to get a $70,000 pay raise in the number two position there for $250,000. The city commission who appointed Greg Veliz by acclaim one day has now decided to carry out an old fashioned candidate search to fill the position. Meanwhile city planning continues.

One  big deal moving to the forefront now that Truman Waterfront has been turned into a park is a long discussed plan to build affordable housing in Bahama Village. The three acre parcel between the Navy Base and Fort Street is being enjoyed these days as a soccer field, and very fine it is too.

However Fort Street is already home to several housing projects and the idea is to add possibly 120 units on the three ac re parcel. When the Navy handed 34 acres of waterfront land to the city decades ago the city promised Bahama Village some attention. It looks like the time has almost come to pass but there are some possibilities for delay.

Fort Street runs alongside the Navy base looking south and all there is at the moment is the parking lot. 

With a strong black fence behind it. The Bahama Village redevelopment agency wants to put the land development out to bid even though Affordable Housing of Monroe, a not for profit with an enviable track record of building affordable housing has an excellent proposal with funding plans for all affordable construction to rent and buy

This below is the Petronia Street side of the field where there used to be a very useful porta potty now gone. The weird humps in the background are part of old navy construction still on the base. So the request for proposals, none of which is expected to improve upon the sole bid from the local group, will hold up the process the newspaper says possibly until 2023.  

The wheels of development in Key West grind slow, but one hopes they will grind exceedingly effectively one day.