Aerial Bight

I do from time to time drive to the top of the parking garage at 300 Grinnell and I look down upon the city spread before me. The great thing here is it is free, plus you don't have to pant to get up there.

This picture is looking north more or less, mentioned previously on this page showing inexpensive and behind them very expensive condos.

Across Caroline Street the Conch Train has a stop at the Flagler museum.

Properly masked and striding purposefully:

The loop bus for tourists used to be free and frequent, then they decided to charge a buck per ride, not the best idea probably to encourage riders, and now it is just "frequent."

Trumbo Road with at the top the Coastguard base gates, then school district administrative offices and then the dog park (obviously!) and someone camping in their van. Disgraceful behavior!

I keep hoping gaining height will be more interesting than it turns out to be. If you want to earn a view, and one that is slightly better than this one, pay to climb the many steps to the top of the Lighthouse on Whitehead Street. Or drive to the top of the Park and Ride garage and prepare not to be impressed even though as I said, it is free.

Old Harris School

This building used to be Key West's school and many people still alive got their education here. Nowadays the parking lot is used as a private pay-to-park space and the grounds are barely maintained, in a manner that seems more designed to avoid complaints than to actually officer any beauty in landscaping.  I found an article on the school from two years ago in Keys Weekly. The magazine is online and I find it as dependable as any publication and I rather enjoy the fact that Key West still has a weekly publication printed on paper in best 20th century style. The depth of this story will I hope induce you to give it a look.

by Hays Blinkman 2018:

It’s a cautionary tale for all, about big decisions made by elected officials. Let’s go back 12 years to 2006, when the Monroe County School Board decided to sell the historic Harris School at 812 Southard St. to a private owner. Leading up to the decision was a contentious 2004 school board race, when John Padget, gubernatorially appointed school superintendent, lost the election to Randy Acevedo. During his tenure, Padget facilitated a deal to sell the property to the Rodel Foundation for $6 million to create the now popular Studios of Key West. Rodel would have also contributed another $6 million toward renovation of 812 Southard, laden with asbestos and in disrepair. Long story short, the property would look very different than it does today if the newly elected officials had considered the outgoing superintendent’s plan more carefully.

Instead, in 2006, the school board voted against the Rodel deal because the offer required the creation of affordable housing for teachers (seems terribly ironic now). While the housing market fluctuated in ’06, the school board accepted a private offer from owner Peter Brawn for $4.5 million – $1.5 million less – and a very different future began for the majestic property.

So what does the property look like today? Littered with scooters, a jet ski, a large Lu La Roe trailer, and work trucks, it’s used as a monthly parking lot, and just recently, a daily parking lot, as advertised by the large plywood, homemade signs decorating the lot. Owner Brawn was issued a Business Tax receipt permit in 2009 to operate a commercial parking lot, as well as a Property Management license. Essentially, the property has become a functioning inner city parking lot in the heart of Old Town. But all has not gone smoothly for Brawn, as the property has been cited multiple times for code violations. According to Code Compliance Director Jim Young, the property has been cited 39 times since 2000 (although Brawn took possession in ’06) and 19 times since 2013. The complaints include overgrown lots, operating unlicensed business, trash and obstruction of traffic.

In May 2017, there was a formal code hearing for “Failure to cut overgrown weeds around subject property,” which was dismissed with no fines. And in April 2018, the city received complaints about business being conducted from a tractor trailer parked at the property. But the neighbors have much more to say about the old school than what’s on paper.

“We’re not sure what’s going on,” said resident Glen Kingsbury. “I’ve seen more miscellaneous things in the past five years. I have seen sex acts in the parking lot, loitering, people coming in and out of the building day and night.” There is no Certificate of Occupancy, meaning no one can live on the property, although the satellite dish atop the building could suggest otherwise.

“Neighbors did not have a problem with using it for huge event parking,” said Kingsbury, “but there was overnight parking, littering and dumping and we hope not other illegal activity.”

There is the misconception that the property is in Commissioner Jimmy Weekley’s district, but he is just a resident of the neighborhood. “I am constantly getting complaints about the school. It’s not hard to tell there are derelict vehicles everywhere and to see the trash. At least we stopped the RV parking on the fields and got the commercial lot only to park on the blacktop pavement.”

The school is in Commissioner Clayton Lopez’s district, who said, “If residents spoke up enough, I would listen; it’s all our neighborhood and of course, I want to help.” The commercial parking license expires in September but a simple payment by Brawn will keep his business license operational. Lopez may be hearing from his constituents unless the property sells before then for its $15 million asking price.

“The African Kapok tree used to be one of the most photographed trees in town; now it is covered by weeds, seedlings and surrounded by scooters,” said resident Don Dotzauer. He would like to see the neighborhood maintained and kept beautiful, noting that many residents have spent a great deal of time renovating old properties surrounding the Harris School. “I don’t thrive on conflict, but we just want everyone to be good neighbors and just do the right thing.”

I'd love to see an update but the Old Harris School as lovely as ever sits there and is home to parked cars. Too bad really but at least it hasn't crumbled into the ground. There are so many memories on this block of Southard Street. 

This essay is from 2014 and refers to the Bernie Madoff scandal that destroyed the foundation that had hoped to create an artist's colony here:

Old Harris School 2014

Night Walk

Ann Street at four in the morning, almost empty of people and full of atmosphere.

The back of the Curry Mansion, a beehive of steps and landings and doors and rooms. there is nothing straightforward about Old Town architecture.

I looked in at Sloppy Joe's, closed at last and getting cleaned.  The lookalike contest will be back soon enough, to keep summers busy in Key West:

It surprises me how durable the Hemingway myth has remained.

Light and darkness, I tend to walk around looking up to see what shows against the pitch black tropical night sky.

Photographers call it negative space, the darkness or light that surrounds the object of the picture. Here below the Key West Harbor is the actual empty space.

One day I shall look back in wonder at these ubiquitous signs that seem so critical now and will one day be a faint memory. Did we really..? I photograph as many as I see to keep the memory fresh of what we had to do.

More negative space above El Meson de Pepe...

And surrounding the playhouse next door:

I hope live theater comes back before too long. 

Hogs Breath Bar  and store advertising below. Pirates and mermaids and other myths.

Duval Street was renovated once before when the city was led by the man who famously water skied to Cuba. That renovation feels as distant as the Bicentennial it helped to celebrate.

Inspirational wood plaques taken in for safety during the night leaving a sign open to interpretation.

Simonton

Looking north up Simonton Street one sunny afternoon:

Harry Truman came speeding up the street just like the good old days.

I stood on the sidewalk enjoying the sun and the blue sky and the usual wooden architecture.

And the scooter riders buzzing by in what you might think is the bicycle lane.

Florida encourages bicycles to share the lanes with internal combustion which on the face of it sounds nice.  However  Key West has the most bicycles in the state I guess and therefore has the highest per capita  bicycle accident rate in Florida. Sharing the road has decided perils in a tourist town with drivers who don't know their way and enjoy the scenery while driving.

There's lots to see:

In my upside down world Duval Street would be pedestrian only while Simonton and Whitehead Streets would carry traffic one southbound and the other one way northbound allowing room for parking and safe bicycle lanes.  That sort of thinking brings down every kind of criticism in a  town filled with opinions. Luckily mine carry no weight and can therefore be ignored.

Nigeria And Cameroon, 1979

It was in a sense, a race to chase the setting of the sun and the outcome was still in the balance. Every so often, when my backside got tired I suppose I pulled over and balanced the overloaded Yamaha SR500 on the side stand and lifted my leg over the seat. I could see a long black trail snaking down the paved highway toward Zinder whence I had ridden that day on the motorcycle. It was the steady stream of oil leaking from the gearbox of the Yamaha caused by a  broken seal and required me to buy and add oil as I rode.

Between Zinder in Niger, a former French colony where French is the unified language, and Kano in English speaking Nigeria, even in 1979 the highway was paved and a welcome relief after miles of sand dust and washboard ruts around Agadez on the way out of the Sahara Desert. I had crossed from Algeria in a German truck convoy, 350 miles of unmarked sand that in four wheel drive trucks took four days of intense struggle from Tamanrasset to Arlit where the hard packed road resumed, and where I unloaded my motorcycle from the truck and continued my bumpy ride with many falls in soft sand. On a map the brown line looks like a road, but mostly it was a suggestion.

In one of the falls my chain cover, an aftermarket rubber tube designed to keep sand out of the vulnerable drive chain came loose and I was too hot young and stupid to do a quick check of loose bolts after one of my many tumbles. The inevitable happened and the chain guard came off and bunched up in the chain sprocket sending me into a slide that for once did not cause me to fall but did cause the seal on the gearbox to burst and allow oil to seep out onto the roadway as I drove.

Unfortunately my camera was one victim of my youthful bravado which I left exposed to the elements so I have no pictures of that journey and relying on my memory is as good as I can manage. However there was one aspect of that trip that has stayed fresh in my mind forty years later. As bad as the broken seal disaster was, or appeared to be, I was confident I could overcome it. I have no idea where that certainty came from but that night I laid my head down in the dust and dirt of the Nigerian border post parking lot and went calmly to sleep secure that I would get it all solved in Kano the next day.

It was a hot dry dusty ride, happily on the familiar right hand side like Niger, as Nigeria recently decided to maintain the same driving patterns as it's neighbors, all former French colonies. I was more focused on my oil situation than remembering which side of the road to ride on... I kept pouring oil into the gearbox and the seal kept letting a  stream out onto the roadway. No one noticed or cared in the traffic jams of buses, cattle, pedestrians, scooters and large bundles of stuff carried on the backs of people of unimaginable strength and perseverance in that heat. I was 21, well nourished and exhausted.

In keeping with my weird and unexpected feeling of confidence I was picked up off the street by an expatriate British engineering firm  whose workshops built me a new seal and after a  week of luxurious hospitality I was on my way with an almost oil tight Yamaha. I watched the new seal like a hawk but it barely perspired and instead of being amazed I felt like it was all part of the adventure of getting things wrong and learning to put them right. I kept on keeping on. I took the main road to Maiduguri hoping to reach the border with Cameroon in a  couple of days. Just like that. It had all worked out.

These days northern Nigeria is the badlands of sub Saharan Africa with fierce fighting between Muslims and Christians in places that when I rode through were settled and peaceful farmland. I would never now do what I did then, stopping in a clearing by the main road, setting up my bright blue tent and heating packet soup for dinner on my gas stove.(I told you my motorcycle was hopelessly overloaded). Shepherds would stop by and squat and watch me watch them as we made signs and grunted words to try to explain my bizarre presence in their backyard. I dare say I was the only tourist for hundreds of miles. I slept the sleep of the just, unmolested.

I had always had a great fear of snakes especially after Saharan travelers told stories of snakes sliding into warm sleeping bags to escape the cold desert sand at night. I had taken the precaution of buying a tent with a sewn in ground sheet for my journey so that I might sleep critter free and it did seem to work. A couple of years later when I rode my Vespa across the US I reduced my luggage considerably and traveled with a  waterproof sleeping bag and no tent and that worked too for those snake-free roads. I put my tent up all over West and Central Africa and no one ever bothered me. I was into boondocking before it was fashionable apparently. And I didn't have Rusty the survivor to alert me to hidden perils in the wilderness!

I got lost trying to find the border with Cameroon, a former German colony managed by France and Britain after World War One with the result that half the population spoke French and the other English and no one was terribly happy about it. Least of all me as I never knew how to address anyone and the Francophones took umbrage if I greeted them in French and the English speakers looked politely pained if I opened the conversation in French.

I took an easterly route into the forest off the main road and of course the pavement ended and the dirt got rough until the track petered out into a dry river bed. My Michelin road map showed this as a road to Maroua in Cameroon where there was a main road south to the capital. I had a sneaking suspicion I was all wrong and lost but I pressed on through the river and onto the track on the other side. Youthful hope overcomes the wisdom of the elderly once again. 

Wasn't I surprised when a police station appeared in the golden afternoon sunlight. It was as though the gods were following my progress and mocking me with barriers to my ridiculous tourist impulses. On a  road little more than a dirt track in the jungle where I should have been alone and lost, a frontier post materialized. The flag was the red yellow and green tricolor of Cameroon and not the white and green stripes of Nigeria. I was back to speaking French once again I thought as I got my passport and carnet de passage (international customs bond for the bike) out of my tank bag. "Bonjour," I said confidently as I walked into the whitewashed building. "Oh hello," said the man at the desk in cultured middle class English, "What on earth are you doing here?"

I rather think the inspector was lonely in his backwater and in the manner of a Somerset Maugham short story he collared me and reminisced at some great length about the happy days of his youth in England. He looked at the consular signature on my visa, stamped and signed in distant London before the trip. He sighed, "I was at school with this fellow," he said as though we were old Etonians watching a cricket match and he wasn't thinking about a career that took a wrong turn. I forgot to mention I hadn't checked out of Nigeria owing to my unorthodox route and I wasn't going to bring it up when I did remember. A shortcoming that got me into hot water further up the road and required some dazzling footwork (in French)  to save me a return journey to the Nigerian border to straighten out my carnet de passage paperwork. I slept  one more night in the jungle setting up my tent in the dark, a job that I was quite used to and enjoyed without an audience for once; I was that alone. The next couple of  days I rode to the train station and put my motorcycle on a train from Ngaoundere to Yaoundé to bypass a stretch of highway that was reported barely passable in rainy season. The neighboring country of Chad was enjoying a private but bloody civil war and that road was closed even to halfwits like me.

I had no seat and sat in the doorway with my feet dangling outside as we rumbled through dark forest and over long bridges, stopping in stations where I could buy coffee from vendors on the platform along with peculiar flour buns for a breakfast on the move. My companions put up with this strange cuckoo in their midst and made me at home in their overnight train world. It was magic (in French mostly).The journey was almost over though I didn't know it. I had contracted jaundice in Nigeria and I was flown home, my motorcycle following later by ship. From smelly train toilet to first class Air France, the privilege of wealth, and on to an isolation bed in an Italian hospital to recover from my hepatitis in surroundings familiar and boringly sanitary. I knew I was seriously ill as my family looked horrified as the skeleton stumbled through the castle door late one night and they barely recognized me, thin frail and bright yellow. I saw the look of horror in their eyes and I knew this time I'd gone a bit too far. Half a year spent wandering, unarmed, alone and naïvely hopeful put me in the hospital immediately and for three weeks. It seemed to be in retrospect the trip that set the tone for the rest of my life when I walked out permanently on my disapproving family and all that I had grown up with. No regrets as I was never cut out to be a farmer. Much more fun to get sick in the middle of nowhere.

I actually enjoyed coping with these types of streets.