The Audubon House

I lived in Santa Cruz,  California for nearly twenty years and looking back I feel like I missed a lot of opportunities to see places and things that deserved my attention. I dare say my natural curiosity took me further afield than might otherwise have been the case but I still stumble across stories of  places and curiosities in the Golden State unknown to me. Here below we look out of the Audubon House in Key West at Clinton Square and the Customs House, now a fine museum.  

 In that time I made several efforts to live in Florida but my residence here never jelled. I would hand in my Florida driver's license and re-institute my California document, or vice versa as I tried living in Tampa and St Petersburg or Fort Myers or Key West and none of the visits to the land of sun and heat took very well. I always ended up back in the fog of California's Central Coast living through cold wet winters and long dry summers which never seemed long enough or hot enough to suit my taste. California residents thought I was crazy to want to live in the land of hurricanes alligators and mosquitoes but Florida for me was the land of eternal sunshine and right wing nutters and it remained as elusive as Ponce de Leon's Spring of Eternal Youth.

My best friend sailed to Key West and the little fishing village I had first visited in 1981 and found to be far too isolated became a likely prospect. I brought my wife and my dogs in a mad three week car trip and we sold my boat and bought an ocean going catamaran and made vague plans to sail to the Caribbean. We both wanted eternal summers, me and my California wife. We made road trips around California and I took motorcycle rides and still I felt I barely scraped the surface of all there was to see.  

In Florida we made a conscious decision to see everything we could want to see and that choice was made easy by virtue of the fact that we tried living in mainland Florida after we arrived in our sailboat. Mainland Florida was cheap but not cheerful and we yielded to the inevitable and settled in Key West, more than 500 miles from the Georgia state line, 800 miles from distant Pensacola. We were far from anywhere. We planned road trips and  we carried them out to see what we could. All this by way of introduction to explain why I have never previously visited the so called Audubon House, named for the painter of birds illustrated below, painted by John Syme in  1826:

The fact is he was a visitor for a short time before the Civil War and in his time in Key West he visited the Dry Tortugas and found birds to kill so he could paint them. It was a weird way to do the work of loving birds but that was what he did. He had an interesting life worth reading HERE but the fact is he was  a mere sideshow in this house that should more properly be known as the Geiger House.

In this picture, from the Audubon House website we see the man John Huling Geiger who had this house built and who lived in it with his wife twelve children and their slaves:

He was of German descent and said to be  a pretty severe man who made his money by wrecking and by being the best at it. He spared no one and the gruesome tale of having a pregnant slave whipped is told by one of his descendants in the video on display in the house. His legacy is the Geiger plant named after him, as well one assumes of Geiger Key and this superb home on Whitehead Street restored in the 1950s and now one of the best old home museums I have seen, and I have seen a few.

The rooms are perfectly laid out with period accessories and  complemented by Audubon drawings and scraps from letters and diaries of the period. I found the house perfectly done and worth hours of your time. Why I resisted visiting this place I cannot say and it was a mistake not to check it out.

Check out this letter from 1849  describing the idle  idyll of daily life for the upper classes in Key West at the time. 

One has to assume that life in summer was a a bit of a burden for women who had no access to bikinis or sarongs or the lighter side of the wardrobe as enjoyed by modern women. 

Thanks to its  strategic position on the trade routes to and from the Gulf of Mexico, Key West was for a time one of the wealthiest cities in the US. The constant stream of ships brought news from the outside world as well as the latest fashions and exotic household gadgets and dry goods. People lived well here in the most salubrious climate in Florida. In those days only Key West and Indian Key were inhabited by white people in urban settlements. The other islands were barren and only occasionally inhabited by eccentrics, lonely farmers or fugitives. Mainland Florida was an impenetrable swamp filled with yellow fever, insects and rebellious Seminoles allied with runaway slaves. No one wanted to live in Florida. Key West offered all amenities and was thoroughly modern.

It must have been quite the life to have money and slaves and to live in such a place. What am I saying? It still is for those that can! The rest of us work...and it still isn't at all bad!

There are we are told some 28 original Audubon prints in the house's collection but the reproductions on display are as lively and lovely as they are difficult to photograph successfully.

 Outside there is a garden to enjoy after the house visit.

 Hammocks and shady verandas were much in evidence in the period.

The "tour" of the house is a brief introduction at the entrance by a docent and then you are cast loose to visit at will the home and the gardens. This time of year is excellent as there aren't nearly as many people as there would be in winter, as usual in Key West. Upstairs there is this video presentation by Richard de Aguero which is both informative and very funny. He lives in Miami and is a descendant of the great "Old Man" Geiger and he tells a great story or two about the goings on in the house. Well worth sitting down to watch.

I had a great time on the house and my hat is off to the curator Katia Dabdoub Hechema whose work is really extraordinary in bringing this place alive and I am told she isn't quite finished yet.

The outdoor kitchen was  a popular feature in the homes of wealthy Southerners and I've seen this concept many times elsewhere. Pity the poor slave cooking in this inferno.

 The link for the Audubon House is  HERE

Highly enjoyable way to spend a hot afternoon and see how the one percent lived a hundred and fifty years ago. Strongly recommended.

Small Town Tea Cup

I was quite surprised to read the public airing of dirty laundry in the pages of the Citizen newspaper. The public ravaging of Lower Keys Medical Center on the front page and in the editorial was surprising because Key West usually washes its dirty laundry behind securely closed doors. Let me explain.

The newspaper has been engaged in telling stories about the Lower Keys Medical Center, Key West's only  full-service hospital facility and the stories have not been flattering. Lower Keys' owner has been engaged in massive over billing of Medicare  according to the paper and the local facility apparently has too. Then there was the case of the unimpeachable local homeless activist Reverend Steve Braddock who got in a tussle with the hospital which refused for two years to give him an itemized bill. He let them take him to court all of which the paper gleefully and properly reported. Especially when the itemized bill submitted at long last showed vast charges and some mistakes.

Apparently the hospital did not take kindly to this treatment and decided to ban the paper from its hallowed halls and wards and offered patients copies of the Miami Herald instead. Paper racks were removed all under the cloak of various and sundry excuses, no mention at all of a vendetta. The newspaper responded by laying the whole mess out for all to see and at last word some sense of proportion has returned and the Citizen supposedly may be allowed back in to the hospital according to the last headline I read. I haven't seen a public airing of  grievances like this since the golf course banned the public utility executives when the Aqueduct got in a  fight with a private company that won a sewer contract and then proceeded to mess the job up badly, on Stock Island (toilets and showers backing up spilling sewage in homes and the like). The golf course was operated by the private utility and they took their revenge by spoiling the utility executives walks on the greens, retaliation for criticizing the private utility sewer installation.

When you say Key West is a small town it doesn't convey the utter isolation of a city of 23,000 stuck at the end of a very long road completely in the middle of nowhere. Everyone knows, or knows of life in a small town and frequently outsiders equate this small town with what they know of small towns elsewhere.   Believe me when I say Key West is different. I have tried to find my space by living in the suburbs up the Highway, a life on a canal in a silent neighborhood that I greatly enjoy and which represents to me the essence of life in the Keys. But for those brave souls who think higher rents are compensated for by a car-free commute I say life in a very isolated fish bowl carries its own stresses. Not everyone can cope with the unrelenting intimacy of a town where everyone knows everything and any social gaffes can carry severe consequences. If you cross the wrong person or institution in Key West you can easily lose your job and there are no replacement opportunities within a 130 miles. How I have survived and even flourished here for going on two decades I'm not sure. Keeping my mouth shut has been part of it, and for someone like me that can be a trial, let me tell you. 

I have survived partly because I do a job, and I do it well, in an office where not many people want to work even if they can do the work. Our 911 center takes almost 200,000 calls a year and we are frequently understaffed. And let's face it not many people come to the party capital of Key West to work in a police station with strict hours, overtime and all that serious mainland stuff. For some people the idea of creating a career in Key West sounds ludicrous but I feel immensely privileged to have been able to create this space for myself in such an unlikely location. It hasn't been easy, certainly no easier than anywhere else as Island Time, that figment of the visitor's imagination, has no place in a 911 center. 

How other people cling to the Rock is a bit of a mystery to me. Some hold down several jobs, some have longstanding sweetheart deals on the rent and others, lucky or unlucky depending on your point of view have family roots in Key West which gives them access to housing or perhaps jobs under additional intimate scrutiny. 

I meet quite a number of arrivals in Key West, dispatch hopefuls who seek a position in what I consider to be the best job in Key West. It's a tough process of background tests, hearing tests, psychological tests all before you get through the door and our boss starts classroom training. Then they come into the room and one of us starts training these hopefuls in taking actual 911 calls. And if I determine my trainee can't do the job, and many can't I have to advise my boss that this person can't have the opportunity of the best job in Key West. But it has to be obvious to anyone that an iffy 911 operator is in no one's best interest. My advice to newcomers, whoever they are, is to keep a low profile, proffer  no opinions and don't speak unless spoken to. In a general sense its good advice anywhere in Key West, not just in the workplace.  Relationships in Key West are intricate, people sleep together and break up, people are related in the most unexpected ways, memories are long and shared experiences create bonds. A newcomer who steps in and announces a dislike or antipathy can set off a chain of reactions that can land the unwary in the middle of drama or worse. If you think elephants have long memories you haven't seen a slighted Key Wester. 

All this by way of expressing my surprise that the newspaper, generally not a publication given to stirring up controversy got into a public brawl with the hospital. Not that I frown upon it, quite the contrary I think the Citizen did a bang up job of afflicting the comfortable and I'd love to see more of it. Some people refer to the Citizen derisively as a "mullet wrapper" of a newspaper, an epithet of which I disapprove. I hope I have made it clear that stirring up shit in this small town is  a short path to creating revenge motifs in unexpected places. For the paper to even accidentally tread on the hospital's corns is some pretty brave stuff. 

It's funny in another way as well because the paper itself has come under fire, usually from the socially prominent for carrying the "Citizen's Voice" column which is a platform for malcontents to be heard without having to identify themselves.  It's one of the first things many people read after they check the front page. On the  other hand if it weren't anonymous no one would say a word. 

I expect that in public the whole hospital thing will disappear from public view. But I am pretty sure the elephants on both sides will be biding their time, checking allegiances and not forgetting any of this. When something weird happens, a job is lost, a contract is broken, an insult is traded, and no one knows why, just ask yourself if in some convoluted way they had anything to do with a newspaper, a hospital and a storm in a teacup.  

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USCG Cutter Ingham

I got to board this floating museum at the Inner Mole at Truman Waterfront one hot day in late July.

Built in 1936 and taken out of service in 1988 with a crew of 300 and service all over the globe Key West is lucky to have this ship and for anyone with ten bucks in their pocket, they get to pay a visit.

All you need to know about the Ingham is here:

And this man, former city commissioner Bill Verge now owns this ship, purchased exactly as abandoned by the last crew to serve on board. He says it costs $250,000 a year to keep the ship docked in the city and this is a town which doesn't yield much money for projects like this. So I'm doubly glad I got to see this museum. The other ship USCG Mohawk has been sunk off Sanibel Island because they say it cost too much to keep afloat.

The Ingham is a self guided tour and you an easily spend more than an hour poking around seeing everything everywhere.

I took a ton of pictures of which I have published the most representative here. Words for the most part seem superfluous. Sick bay:

Laundry:

Tailor's shop:

Barber shop:

All these facilities were on the ship which was capable of staying at sea for months and steaming 8,000 miles on one load of fuel. With 300 men on board one wonders how they didn't all go crazy.

I found the interior surprisingly spartan and very functional. It seemed as though the crew had to live in a steam punk distopian interior filled with pipes and metal corners and ghastly paint colors with tiny port holes and not enough light and air to keep a body sane.

The entertainment facilities seemed spare at best.

Ah, the joys of well worn linoleum.

This man was the first U.S. sailor to board an enemy vessel in combat since the war of 1812. He boarded a German submarine in World War Two after it surrendered and before the Ingham sank it. He was photographed holding the Ingham's mascot.

The Ingham tour is not for the faint of heart, those susceptible to heat or those with a fear of vertical ladders or enclosed spaces.

The Captain's cabin, once used by General MacArthur.

Looking west, across the Key West harbor across the Outer Mole.

Modern ships are ugly and vast. I've heard it said ghosts inhabit the Ingham. I doubt any ghosts would bother to inhabit the fugly forms enjoyed by modern cruise ships.

The bridge, the command center of the ship underway, cramped and airless as usual.

The combat information center, where the top officers went during battle as the bridge was too exposed. Even darker and more airless.

Remember I did mention steep ladders? There is a delightful freedom to touring the Ingham. Personal responsibility is old fashioned and required here.

There is a big gun, a 4.5 incher if that means anything to you. But I couldn't get a decent picture of it inside the turret so here is a machine gun to sustain an appearance of my non existent interest in guns.

Looking out at the waterfront where I am usually standing looking in.

The Ingham is a worthwhile tour and with the constant fear it could be towed away to serve as an undignified artificial reef make time to visit when you can. The history on board is astonishing and barely touched in this essay.

 

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