Key West Street Scenes

I started this blog in June 2007 as an experiment. Six years later I have almost 3200 essays logged here, almost all of them photo essays with between one and two dozen pictures. I have avoided formatting anything so I could avoid having to come up with blue pictures for Monday or wooden pictures for Friday or any such limitation. I just do what I feel like doing and throw in my opinions because this is after all my diary of my life in the Lower Keys.

I have previously explained the reason why I started this blog, partly in disgust at the food fights and name calling so popular on open Internet fora and partly too because when I started exploring the Internet looking for blogs that might illustrate places of interest to me, so few appeared. I figured why not try to show Key West as it is; or at least how I see it.

Above we have Telegraph Lane which runs behind Rick's Bar on Duval Street a minor alley beautifully paved not leas because it serves the business of a Very Important Person. There are quite a few Key West streets that could use some repaving, but so far no luck for them. The gate shown below was demolished by a motorist so drove into at full speed I believe down Caroline Street and across the stop sign at Whitehead. As I recall the gate won, but even so it is taking an age to fix.

Key West streets are unique to Florida, St Augustine comes close but nowhere else has retained the intimacy and history of this tourist town even with its drinking problem.

Cheyenne loves walking anywhere in town, a place filled with vitality and alluring scents even at ankle height or lower. She gets to hydrate as she goes thanks to the myriad water bowls littering the sidewalks all over the place. Some are fancy like this one others aren't, but she isn't picky when it's eighty degrees and humid.

I prefer Duval Street early in the morning when people are few and crowds aren't elbowing me and my dog off the sidewalk. In the picture below it looms lie it just rained. It hadn't, they just like to use fresh water to clean the city. We are told the 75,000 permanent residents of the Keys and their associated businesses have no perceptible impact on the flow of potable water out of the Soith Florida aquifer. Just as well as the millions of mainland residents are working hard to dry it all up.

I love walking the streets of Key West and it's an activity highly recommended to visitors. With reason.

Every street, Greene Street below, is a center of life and activity, human or of plant life. Full of color.

Greene Street is named for Pardon Greene one of the four Anglo purchasers of the island from the original Spanish owner. Juan Salas got the island as a land grant from the Spanish king and did nothing with it, except to sell it (twice) to eager Americans. Below we see the city public works department cleaning Duval for another day of riotous living and another night of riotous drinking.

Mallory Square as can only be seen by the early bird visitor. Stephen Mallory was US Secretary of the Navy who subsequently joined the Confederate cabinet of Jefferson Davis. Which act did not convince anyone to change the name of the principal trading area of Key West harbor.

It was an historic day for me, being the first time I ever drove my car onto Mallory Square and parked there. At four dollars an hour I expect it it will also be the last time. Paradise don't come cheap.

 

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Tiring My Dog On And Off Love Lane

I am not a fan of Facebook. I have an account, I think, but I find it intrusive to a degree that irritates me, and yet it is also a space that doesn't allow for reflection or extended thoughts.others disagree with me, billions of people actually like Facebook.

I tried Instagram too until I discovered it was overrun by Facebook and he they wanted to make money off the pictures submitted to the service. That got my allergies running rampant so I dumped Instagram.

I like my own page on the Web, my place to despoil my pictures, my ruminations and my memories. It is not an easy thing for people to maintain a web page it seems, a arrangement that I find relaxing and thus self perpetuating. Love Lane Jack used to keep a rhyming blog, a page unique among the unique, a thing of particular interest, a mish mash of pictures and politics and blasphemy all mixed in with insight and humor. above Solaris Hill .

The page is gone, left for dead on the electronic battlefield of ideas and in its place Jack has forged ahead on the dreaded Facebook. Whatever works I am sad to say, but I miss the ribald irreverent thought provoking poetry on the new page. (2) Love Lane Jack

Life goes on and so does my eleven year old Labrador.

I thought of the following picture as a study in white, the peculiar lengthened Conch cottage, added on as money and desire allowed. Not exactly McMansions!

A vast spacious empty lot, devoid of parked cars except the elderly and still bright scarlet Alfa Romeo Spyder.

The idea of one human family gets a tad bit frayed around the edges from time to time but I did like humor the sticker posted over a defaced No Trespassing sign.

This cheerful dumpster sits in Fausto's paking lot, to cheer up grocery customers. Faustos Key West | Home

This sign caused me to chuckle. Oops! Scaring off the customers won't work!

My sense of humor causes me to enjoy irony even in death, that most fearsome affliction of even the faithful. Death comes to us all but Trespassing on it is frowned upon at Key West's largest funeral home. From time to time of course I have to call out the on duty undertaker when police officers come across a body. No matter how ungodly the hour the voice answering the undertaker's phone is always a voice of a man wide awake, calm, and ready to help. I have great admiration for undertakers, they deal with people in terrible shape and they do it superbly.

The Federal Building on Simonton Street is lovely in its limestone magnificence and then your eyes are drawn to the ghastly security measures that demean the beauty and solidity, as though this were a fortified foreign legation not a customs and court house dispensing the Law.

This lovely grassy knoll is a few blocks from the Federal Building. In point of fact it is across Lazy Way Lane from Schooner Wharf Bar.

The former model home for the proposed development by a group of failed local investors has been torn down to make ready for a new hotel. Oh well, the open space will be nice as long as it lasts.

I frequently come across dog walkers who fear an encounter with my happy Labrador. Dogs are the gods of frolic but so few of their owners know it. En garde!

Gecko, anole, or miniature iguana. You decide.

An elderly Cuban dude rolled up on a bicycle while my dog was rooting around in his bicycle parking spot and I was busy taking a picture of yet another pair of abandoned shoes. Where do they all come from, I ask myself?

The Cuban dude smiled as I reeled in my errant dog. At first I thought he was, as everyone is, afraid of my hound. Instead he kept smiling at her happy face, parked his bike and sloped off into his house. Cheyenne and I went back to Love Lane to find the car.

Key West Diary: Love Lane

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Walking On Water

You don't have to go far in Key West to find dramatic seascapes. This one I took facing west from Truman Waterfront, looking across the Navy Basin towards the harbor.

The skies are usually blue around here, unless it is threatening sturm und drang thunder lightning and rain.

I enjoy the play of sunlight through the wispy cotton wool overhead and I spend too much time peering overhead as I go about my business down here.

The old coast guard cutter Mohawk has long since departed the seawall, dragged to Sanibel Island to be sunk unceremoniously to attract divers to the Lee County coast. It was got rid of to make way for a marina planned for the area now stymied by a firm no thanks by the US Navy which controls access to the waters of the Navy Basin. All that's left are these deck guns painted the same shade of gray, incongruously decorated with a bottle of fabric...softener? Most unwarlike.

One day not too long in the future the city wants to have a pedestrian boardwalk running the length of the waterfront, from Fort Zachary Taylor to the south, to Trumbo Road to the north. I look forward to it. At the moment the waterfront is a bit chopped up, with large hotels like Ocean Key dominating the waterfront skyline.

Mallory Square's bricks retain some of the old ambiance of a working waterfront, marred by high visibility clothing and the ubiquitous rehydration device, bottled tap water. High Viz is highly fashionable but curmudgeons like me wonder why anyone expects others should see them when thy are out enjoying themselves. High Viz is a cult requirement among novice motorcyclists . I figure it's up to me to pay attention, not to expect bored drones in cages to notice me. Try telling that to a devotee of fluorescent yellow.

Old Key West is always celebrated, but always as a way to pander for dollars. I like history because the past is a guide to the present. It makes sense of life the way religion works for believers.

On the subject of history Key West has its own Wall Street:

When I'm answering 911 calls I wish each building in Key West had a sign like this. The a swer to my inevitable question: Where are you? would come easily...

The answer to the question of where Cheyenne is at any time is: usually rooting around in the bushes.

I am always surprised by how much clutter occupies the lives of the residentially challenged, overflowing bicycles and shopping carts abound in Key West.

Some kind soul donated a snack to my dog. And not even hidden in the bushes.

The pause gave me a few minutes to compose some pictures through the Mallory Square railings.

This guy on the walkway was enjoying a morning in Key West a d we came abreast of him I gave him a cheery good morning. He looked startled. I guess men in pink Crocs are looking for sex wherever he comes from. Glad I don't live there or my life would be extra complicated.

Every morning Key West is ready for the tourist influx.

The Westin:

Once the boardwalk is complete there will be lots of places to amble and stop and look and think.

Not that you can't do that right now.

I was looking idly at the Cusotms House Museum windows, enjoying their beauty when I oticed the photo. Hmm, homo-erotic art? Really? Ah, Key West has an image to keep up.

Key West and its feral cats. They are smarter than a lot of people because they aren't scared of Cheyenne.

And then we come back, by way of Truman Annex to the Navy Basin and the seawall that separates it from the Westin Marina.

Amazing views.

My Key West; everyone's Key West, there for the viewing.

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