I have previously wandered Smurf Village with my camera but Harriet Street deserves a second look all on it's own. 
At first glance it's just another New Town Lane, hidden from Flagler Avenue, the main four lane street in this the eastern end of key West.
Yet it's a street with a couple of little oddities that I like. So I took my wife's Vespa ET4 for an outing and enjoyed a meander on Harriet Street. The first odd thing about Harriet is that is a very out of place jog at one end. In New Town, an area built up heavily in the sixties when conformity and trigonometry seemed to rule Key West's urban planning, a street with a weird angle is out of place.
The large two story house that forces the angle in Harriet's course, marks the end of the Smurf Village development. You won't find Smurf Village on a map, because it's a local nickname given to the collection of duplexes that in some people's minds resemble the homes of the cartoon characters known as Smurfs:
You can see their point:
The duplexes follow the same basic back-to-back layout but their owners have taken pains to decorate them to their tastes:
According to a friend of mine who bought a home in Smurf Village, this is an area of key West that has been hard hit by foreclosures, and some of the less well maintained homes are on offer for lower prices than one might expect. I saw one for sale by owner asking $203,000. Which may seem a lot for half a duplex that needs some work, but these places were selling for up to half a million before the housing crash. The problem now is that those bought as investment properties and rented out, are shuttered and temporarily abandoned by the banks who now own them outright and don't want to deal with renters. Judging by the state of the pool this might be one such:
Most of the homes are still occupied and treasured, and even in a neighborhood with a few empty homes Key West isn't the sort of town where feral urban decay takes over, happily:
I spotted this well used Tomos moped, a true moped with functioning pedals, and as I stood there taking the picture the owner came out and growled at me rather suspiciously: "Can I help you?" in that tone of voice that means: "What the @#$%! are you doing?" So I showed him the picture and he agreed it was as pretty as a ...picture. "I'm going to have to take a photo of it like that," he said, though he declined to pose with his pride and joy. 
He waved a cheery good bye after admiring my wife's Vespa, "You can't pedal that," was his parting shot as he turned left on 16th Street. I was continuing straight across to my other favorite part of Harriet:
I'm not sure this is really part of Harriet at all, and on the maps it isn't but as an alley it makes a fine adjunct to the street:
Until you skid along the gravel far enough to come out behind Poinciana Plaza which faces Duck Avenue. In the back it's all blank delivery doors and loading ramps:
This is the front of the Plaza, the respectable facade wherein works my chiropractor:
And just off to the end , which cannot by any stretch be called "part of" Harriet Street is the old Holsum Bread bakery. Long since shuttered, this store used to offer day-old bread at knock down prices which helped more than a few people stretch their dollars:
Now the Spottswood Real Estate Empire is offering it for sale. Funny isn't it. how Key West, so cramped has all these useful open blocks of land available for sale? .
Returning to Duck Avenue I captured just another couple of images of the front of Poinciana Plaza and the wild terrible creature of the day:
No, not a snotty nosed school child though that would be bad enough, but a dragon:
This demented dinosaur (and noted garden pest) stuck it's head down as though no one would notice it, sunning itself on the hot asphalt. I figured the school bus driver wasn't going to make any bones about running it over, so for my good deed of this day, I rode the Vespa close enough that the startled lizard picked itself up and scuttled off the street. I shall probably rue this decision the next time one of these brutes decimates my ripe strawberries but I am weak, what can I say?
No, not a snotty nosed school child though that would be bad enough, but a dragon:This demented dinosaur (and noted garden pest) stuck it's head down as though no one would notice it, sunning itself on the hot asphalt. I figured the school bus driver wasn't going to make any bones about running it over, so for my good deed of this day, I rode the Vespa close enough that the startled lizard picked itself up and scuttled off the street. I shall probably rue this decision the next time one of these brutes decimates my ripe strawberries but I am weak, what can I say?
I have always wanted to live on a canal with a boat at my dock, and now that I do and have done for half a decade I find myself still marveling at my good fortune that my canal on Ramrod Key is overflowing with mangroves and the houses follow no distinct architectural models:
And then a pause for incoming traffic:
Finally up onto a plane, 20-something miles per hour out into Newfound Harbor. My boat, a 14 foot (4 meter) Dusky, has no lights or instruments, as simple a machine as I could find after years of struggling with systems on my sailboat, but it tracks true across the water:
My idea was to buck the light south wind for a mile and take a short cut to Niles Channel where I will head north with the wind at my back. The day was hazy and the water was hard to read but the bubba sticks made it easy to find my way: 
Past the boats anchored near the Niles Channel Bridge; these are the waters I stare down upon from the crown of the 40 foot bridge as I pass over on my Triumph:
The ability to be down here from time to time makes it entirely pleasant to be up there commuting, knowing that with ten minutes in my boat I can be down here. Some days I'm up there and the weather is foul and I'm glad I'm not down here, being tossed around. Beyond the bridge are the open waters of Niles Channel stretching to the Gulf of Mexico:
With the small matter of a shoal area in the middle marked by two mangrove islands. the northernmost one was I believe called Money Key, until a wealthy musician bought it and changed the name to Melody Key, though the chart shows it as Howell Key. The island is a couple of acres in size and has a house on it:
It seems an inconvenient place to live, a fact that has occurred to the current owner apparently, because for the unattainable sum of four point five million dollars, reportedly, this lump of mangrove could change hands. The views aren't bad if you, like me, enjoy flat waters:
Because I was alone, footloose and fancy free I decided to bugger about a bit off the main channel and explore the mangrove passages. I cut directly to the west across the top of Knock'em Down Keys, a spot that seems godforsaken enough that no one would be there yet, lo and behold, an angler:
Travel between mangrove islands in areas where the charts (if I'd had one) show shallow water is easy enough if you have a grasp of the basics. First read the water, and you need sunlight from behind you to do that. The ditty goes: Brown, brown run aground; white, white yes you might; green, green nice and clean; blue, blue straight on through. Which may or may not be helpful in determining water depth. I try to keep an eye on the vegetation because it's easy to slide too close to one side or the other of a channel if you aren't keeping your eyes open. Luckily the bottom in the back country shelves pretty uniformly in most places and it's unlikely you will go from four feet of water to none without warning. One hopes. If all else fails wave to the military at the blimp base on the northern tip of Cudjoe Key. Maybe they will take an interest in your welfare.
You'd better believe they'll take an interest if you stumble ashore on their heavily protected base. And as one turns and heads north again to open water there they are again, anglers feeding the fish all over the place:
And then finally, about 45 minutes after I left my dock, the object of the exercise hove into view, a long line of mangroves, from a distance a dark patch on the water, one island among many. Except, this one has a beach:
Tarpon Belly Key has the distinction of being an actual island with dirt, pebbles, a very little sand and trees of the casuarina type growing above the waterline. There is also evidence of human use on the island with large blocks of cement lying around as though tossed carelessly aside. Tarpon Belly was once used to farm seafood, shrimp as I recall and my friend Robert remembers when there was a functioning truck sitting on the island used to haul materials around. Now all is in ruins and very picturesque it is too, overgrown and deserted. Except I had forgotten this was Easter weekend and everyone and his brother was out splashing around at Tarpon Belly Key. It looked like an RV Park:
I figured this was neither the time nor the place for a meditative swim off the beach so I got back up on a plane, and made like a leaf and blew. Back out on the water buzzing along, the wind in my hair and the sunscreen bubbling under the sun, it could have been worse. They'll be gone soon, I said to myself, and I'll still be here. And presumably Tarpon Belly Key will be there too.
And so back to Niles Channel Bridge. I was pondering so deeply on the injustice of other people getting time off at the same time as myself that I managed to take a wrong turn and found myself once again blundering around in mangrove channels unfamiliar to me. This time it wasn't fun because I wanted to get home. It's amazing how invisible the Nile Channel Bridge can be when there is a mangrove island between you and it, for all that it rises to the giddy height of 40 feet above the water. Eventually I got my bearings and got going again. I wonder how people will ever recall the peculiar feeling of being lost, even if for a moment, in a time when people turn on their GPS receivers even when driving even on Highway One, the only road available to them.
I slowed down for a bit and played with the camera and the Old Flagler Bridge and the new arching Highway bridge.
And then, off I went to park the boat and take a walk..
...but that is another essay for another day.
Pohalski Lane is a block long and is easy to miss, even though for a change this short street is well marked. As I recall the brown building used to house Hornes, the last Harley Davidson dealership in Key West. He decided to retire and no one took up the flag in his place.
Considering Key West is almost entirely swamped by Harleys I find it surprising, though you can rent one at Hurricane Hole on Stock Island, and Jiri at JK Motorsports also on Stock Island does a land sale business repairing and maintaining them :
