I have resolved a mystery, and herewith the answer to a question that has plagued me for a while. I found the answer in two different places almost simultaneously and I was not actually seeking the answer-it just popped out at me. My favorite Keys guidebook is by Joy Williams, a dense mixture of history anecdote and information, all offered with a rather dry acerbic wit. In it she mentions that canals were dug in the Lower Keys as a form of mosquito control. Aha! I thought and when I went for a walk on Big Pine, at the Watson Trail I found confirmation:
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And a view of Duval Street to boot. Janna asked for me to say hello to Riccardo so I did and took his picture, all of which left him a bit nonplussed. Actually it left both us I suspect, wondering about the power of the Internet.
He put up with my camera good naturedly, and sorted out my change. And so, there you have that too. One of my preferred downtown lunches still thriving. A while ago I wrote an essay about places I miss and I mentioned in passing that I regretted the closure of Martha's and Benihana's on South Roosevelt. Well imagine my surprise when the Citizen reported that the owner has given up the idea of building (unwanted condos) and Benihana's is coming back as soon as he can get the staff sorted out. Maybe something to replace Martha's later as well. I shall have to treat my wife to Japanese theater-as-dinner because she remembers it fondly with her parents from years ago. Nothing in Key West is permanent. Ever.--------
I'd like to think the Blue Lagoon Motel on North Roosevelt is a permanent fixture in our town.
Who couldn't love that crazy 1950's neon sign, something that I think would be most appropriate on the Genuine Florida blog. The sign got knocked down by Wilma and it lay on the side of the road apparently abandoned. But lo and behold it got resurrected and its back in all its glory. So much so it deserves a second look:
The Blue Lagoon Motel is at the corner of Sigsbee Road on North Roosevelt, across from the much more staid Marriott Courtyard. Obviously I've never stayed in the motel and I have eaten at the restaurant lately, which goes through various cuisine transformations from time to time (the last time I ate there it was Mexican and not very good), but I love the lagoon, the palm trees and the funky lights:
If I were a visitor to Key West (and my wife let me choose where to stay) I'd try this place for at least a night, and when the Gilligan's Island theme had worn threadbare I'd move on to La Concha and pretend it was 1946 again. I don't think the Blue Lagoon benefits in the decor department from the gazillion rental jet skis, but there it is, commerce is king.
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I went to see The Other Boleyn Girl at the Tropic Cinema which was an okay film but a bit soap-opera-ish, what with the intrigue and partner swapping and what all. After Anne lost her head I came out into the sunshine of a bright Key West afternoon. And there before me lay a severed noggin.
No not really, it was just an elderly Vespa, doing double duty as a poster board for a local charter boat:
It was a bit sad really, because the Vespa and sidecar aren't in running order and aren't even registered. Some weird city ordinance requires vendors parking in these vendor reserved spaces next to Duval Street not to park anything other than a vending trailer. If the Vespa were running it wouldn't be allowed to sit at this location. Bummer. On the other hand I did spot another local bike parked downtown, a Chinese water cooled tres suave 50cc boy racer.
If I were a kid I'd have desired this more than anything, not least because 40 years ago mopeds were a lot cruder than this little rocket. I put my camera away and wasn't I surprised when a man looking to be in his 40's hopped on the little race bike and bopped off down Whitehead Street.
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Key West's history is something that I always enjoy learning about so from time to time I stop off at the Art and History Mueseum on Clinton Square and give myself a refresher course. I went with a camera so there will be a few pictures of it coming up. I came away with this one picture of 19th century Key West. The map depicts a city that only occupies part of the island, in fact the island itself is a lot smaller in the map than it is today:
No Fleming Key or Sigsbee which were fill island built later off the north shore of key West and connected by causeways (they are both part of the Navy Base today). No Garrison Bight which was created by Flagler's engineers when he brought the railroad to town, and even though it's location is a bit indistinct in the picture the cemetery is clearly on the edge of the city limits back in those olden days. Nowadays the cemetery appears to be in the middle of the city but New Town didn't get filled out until the advent of cheap air conditioning. There are people alive today who remember a dairy farm in what is residential tracts today.
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The sun was going down rapidly last week when I was on Big Pine Key after checking out the Blue Hole, so instead of going home to my empty house I kept riding through the subdivision. It was a perfect evening, warm not buggy and relatively still deep in the middle of the largest island in the Lower Keys. The only cruddy thing about the evening was the way the camera can't quite capture the richness of the colors as the sun sinks to horizon.
The wind has been blowing for weeks, as it tends to do around here in the Spring and the clouds were scudding by. A Key deer at ground level pretty much ignored them a sit stepped daintily across the road:
The road at this point is behind a barrier and the land belongs to the Wildlife Sanctuary, so I was walking and pretty much ignored by the deer. There was one solitary house at the end of the street, far out into the marshlands. It seemed very lonely to me and looked it too:
I have discovered in this place another open space with no particular purpose except just being. Yet in this case we have what appears to be construction interruptus or just a very large swimming pool with absolutely no facilities:
Another of these impenetrable Keys mysteries. But this time I adjusted the camera's attention and got it to focus on the sky and got a rather grand result as the sun sank lower:
It was getting too dark to photograph anything and I'd have to come back another day for a more in depth exploration of this area. The headlight made a warm orange glow on the road in front of me as I burbled back to civilization, Big Pine Key's shopping center where neon and fluorescent lighting invited me to shop, and perhaps rent a video....
...on my roundabout way home.
Robert Duvall's line about "the smell of napalm in the morning" from Apocalypse Now comes to my mind when I pass a working boatyard. I love the smell of drying fiberglass resin, the mixture of dust and copper bottom paint hanging in the air. I like the chaos and the sense of new things rising out of the old and worn. I like boatyards because I know boatyards from many years experience. Ask any boater and they will tell you hauling out is the most stressful part of ownership, watching one's precious hull swaying around in the slings, out of its element. I remember it well, to quote that other movie chestnut, sung by Maurice Chevalier.
Spencer's Boatyard lives in a corner of Garrison Bight Marina and it's a left over from a more industrial time in Key West. These days there are three haul out facilities left in the Lower Keys, Spencer's and two on Stock Island. How it is that Spencer's has survived into the 21st century in a town that is remaking its image so rapidly, is a mystery to me. But here it is apparently thriving:
Thriving is a word I use advisedly though one can never be sure, but the yard seemed full of work even though the facilities are not "polished"
This yellow boat I've seen swinging to a mooring just off the docks at Spencer's and out of the water its lines as attractive as when the boat is floating, and that's a rare attribute:
The smooth lines of the shear offset the angular lines of a nearby Swedish built Vega 27, a small sailboat notorious for making long journeys. It doesn't look like much but its an amazing machine, and this one has to be at least 30 years old:
One thing about hauling your boat out is when you get to paint that toxic copper bottom paint on the hull to discourage growth the result is instant good looks. I mention this because I am giving my skiff a coat of paint this week in hopes of going swimming next week and I look for the same result. Instant, creamy smooth, improvement:
The yard is right off Palm Avenue, the street that bisects Garrison Bight marina with a bridge through the middle. Spencer's is on the north side of the bridge but is blocked from the open water by 50-foot wires at the entrance to Garrison Bight so big sailboats can't get in. But there are big honking motorboats in here awaiting attention:
And tell me this massive prop won't be a glowing bronze work of art when it gets cleaned off and fresh green bottom paint is applied to the fiberglass bottom of this beauty:
To one side of the yard you will find the Key West Sailing Club which is not the Key West Yacht Club (that's the expensive one!):
No this is decidedly not the expensive one. When I lived in the city I was a member for something ridiculous like $10 a month, and I could take out any of their 17-19 foot sailboats for a spin. That was one advantage of living in the city, nowadays I like to be at home and drive my motor boat, which is the advantage of having a dock at your house:
And this is also the end of the yard that holds the facilities. The thing is, when someone who lives on their boat hauls out they need to continue to live on the boat- it is their home. Which means they need to do their ablutions in the yard. These facilities were more than usually...rustic:
In our years sailing together my wife suffered some pretty gruesome shower blocks but I think this might have been a bit much even for her.
And though it may look like chaos to you, to some intrepid boater, in the midst of all the stuff lies a critical component for the very project he is working on in his cabin. So out he pops like a prairie dog, pops down the ladder, grabs the thing, nods to the stranger while exchanging a pleasantry about the weather, and finally pops back out of sight:
Indeed checking aloft one can hear the halyards clanking against a nearby mast (a halyard is the rope one uses to raise and lower a sail), a sure sign the wind is picking up:
And check out those clouds! This had all the makings of a classic summer squall, the wind got fresher and cooler and small waves starting building across the enclosed waters of the Garrison Bight Lagoon:
And the clouds raced across the sky and the waves raced across the water pushing weeds and trash into the seawall at the yard:
Half of me wanted to be snugging down my boat, and then sitting in the cabin listening to rain pelting down on the deck. There's no feeling quite so snug as a decent anchorage or a secure berth when bad weather hits. The rational half of me wanted to get the hell away on the motorcycle before the big fat wet cold raindrops hit from the clouds. The dog wanted me gone too:
I got to Mile Marker 9 before I had to stop and put on my waterproofs for the rest of the ride home. And that too is a snug feeling, tucked inside a waterproof cocoon with big heavy slugs of rain splattering down around you and your motorcycle. Different strokes, same good feeling.
Photographing North Roosevelt Boulevard presents not a few challenges. There's tons going on along its two mile length and cramming it all into twenty pictures seems like an impossible job. Then again this isn't the most visually appealing part of Key West, but it seems to me it is still a story worth telling, perhaps it is especially worth telling because it is such a peripheral area of town. This is Key Plaza where Key West people go to shop, I mean this is the real locals shopping area.
Can't get more real than K Mart, and in this picture we see the third most profitable K Mart in the country. Not surprising really because as we shall see, there ain't much in the way of competition. I read a plaintive comment in the Citizen's Voice a few months ago. "If they let us have a Wal Mart we wouldn't be so poor," went the comment. From the height of middle class mediocrity I could sniff on reading the plea as of course Wal Mart is all things bad in corporate America, but they do help make ends meet for many milllions of Americans. Not in Key West where the cold harsh reality is that things cost more here, not because we are a "long way away" but because we are isolated. And here's the competition, flying the flag, Sears Roebuck and Company:
Searstown was an early development in the wilds of far Eastern Key West, built up in the salt ponds and mangroves, a 1960's outpost of shopping civility for an island that relied on Fausto's and Pantry Pride for groceries and then Sears stepped in to compete I suppose with downtown Kress: 
Nowadays Publix is located in Searstown, along with a six screen Regal Cinema and an Outback, a Champs and a whole bunch of stores both chains and locals. There's a Home Depot in Key West which was built in 2004 as I recall and that opened up a lot of shopping possibilities. Beyond Searstown is a region for a future essay, currently a line of chain hotels that will soon make way for a giant convention center(!). Megalopolis here we come... Meanwhile we have got used to Albertsons, next to K Mart:
And then in the third big shopping plaza called Overseas Market we have Winn Dixie as the anchor supermarket. This chain used to advertise itself, years ago as "the beef people" on their old signs and for the longest time I thought Winn Dixie was a butcher's shop. 
I love the totally black sky at night, and no one in the parking lot except me and my trusty Bonneville which of course I have to sneak into a picture...
I know Pier One, and Ross next door have given local shoppers a few more choices when it comes to furnishings and clothes. Around the corner from TGI Fridays there is a dark delivery area alongside the mangroves. I love poking my way round these spaces, sneaking a peek as it were behind the facade of the nice stores up front:
And shining a light into the bushes, where Salt Run Creek flows, from the Riviera Canal out to the Gulf of Mexico to the north. Our residentially challenged locals hang out around here too, not so much for the shopping I believe, as much as for the peace and relative quiet:
Until my Bonneville comes rumbling through at some ungodly hour. I saw no one while I chased the dirt road with the Triumph, doubtless they were all asleep like solid citizens, not drifters like me. 
As I viewed this picture I thought to myself, "hmmm, Anywhere USA" and all I can say is that this really is Key West and not the back side of your local shopping maul. And just around the corner across from the back of K Mart lies this magnificent structure in all its cement glory:
Looking at the Professional Building you'd think this would be the spot to take refuge in a hurricane. Well, it turns out Wilma did a number on this place in October 2005. The building is on stilts with parking in the lit up space underneath, but the roof yielded and the entire building flooded from the top down! It was a nightmare for the many offices in there, which lost all their records and their furniture, including my optician. The building was closed for ages while they gutted it and rebuilt it from the inside out. 
The family owned Gordon Food Service bought this little warehouse and added it to its chain a few years ago. That was weird because apparently they don't sell alcohol, the family being religious in some manner and teetotal, and for a while they were dumping their stocks of wine and beer from the Smart and Final store at fire sale prices. A bit of a stampede in heathen Key West ensued. Nowadays we get our fizzy water here, but I believe restaurants appreciate the bulk supplies. 
Then you can have your burgers your way, just next door, past the Borders Express bookshop:
Looks familiar doesn't it? This doesn't though, the "mobile" seafood vendor at Owens gas station:
In the land of the perpetually underpaid and intoxicated there are several pawn shops that seem to do quite well, all over town, including here:
The Boulevard is home to one of three overnight gas stations, this one has a car wash, the other two sit across from each other at the intersection of Truman and White Streets. I read a thread on the Adventure Rider forum about a Georgia kid who rode to Key West and backon his sports bike and he prudently filled his tank in Florida City because he didn't know if he could find gas in the Keys...Dude! This is the US you know! And this proves it!
You might meet a cop here doing a business check at some unearthly hour, buying coffee or a soda. Not this one though, Officer Cardona is Puerto Rican and he prefers his cafe con leche to an Americano.
Shining like a beacon in the night. And that's it, one quick look at the Key West that tries to emulate Main Street USA. Like it or not. Which is my cue for a gratuitous picture of the Bonneville, across the street from Sears at the Blue Lagoon Motel, of which more later.
