Southernmost Cabanas

A life in Key West's modest little cottages can sometimes spill out untidily as the homes though pretty are small and not always designed with the practical in mind. 

A lot of visitors like the slightly down-at-heel appearance of this town which still lays claim to a slightly off kilter reputation, a place where vice flourishes and those on the run come to seek cover. It's mot really like that but the story is good and who wants to spoil it?

Well it turns out there are people who think homes built "in the Key West Style" are a good compromise between the gritty reality of life in a  Conch Cottage and the modern desire fo convenience and cleanliness and order.

So outside the fence trash cans and dust and messy street signs litter the way. Inside the fence will rise a fabricated community, a kind of community, of neat clean and well appointed homes of a certain style.

Outside the fence where working Key West struggles to make ends meet.

Inside the fence where intruders bring color until they crow at four in the morning and wrench the visitors from their slumbers.

I found the sign slightly ironic wondering who exactly it is that is trespassing...The land used to be owned by the Catholic Diocease which sold it to pay legal bills incurred by people make claims against the church in the sex scandals of note of years past.LINK

So trailers for the working class are gone and homes for people who need a second home in Key West are here. 

The trend is unstoppable it seems. Rusty and I keep walking.

Then And Now In Black And White

I found some few pictures of old Key West like this one below and I was pondering the nature, not only of Key West in its picturesque decrepitude in another era, but also that of the effect of photography without colors. Once it was the best and most cost effective  way to record the world, but nowadays monochrome is a way to give feeling and depth to the mundane (!).

Perhaps I exaggerate but that's the effect my playing around with the black and white settings has on me:

 Black and white imparts distance in a photograph. Color gives immediacy.

This is the ferry terminal in Key West where the Coast Guard station is today. Freight cars were loaded directly onto ferries equipped with rails. Human passengers crossed the platform to walk onto the ships:

Even earlier we see the fishing fleet in Key West Bight where modern fiberglass toys float and bob. The fleet back then looks remote and austere in black and white, but I have no doubt that iof seen in color it might closely resemble the commercial fleets on Stock Island today, in their rough and tumble glory. 

The old county jail on Fleming Street in this famous picture showing the overcrowding and squalor of the facility. As remote as the clothing pitcured.

And here a cloudy moody Keys sky, the same then as today made interesting by the color washed away.

Yardie Spice Revisited

                                    

It's a bit disturbing I confess. We are creatures of habit so when we plan a ride home from Miami we stop in Homestead at Krome and Flagler and pay JP a visit. Every time we stop by and don't explore choices. It's that good. Or perhaps it's just different, Caribbean food, this time offered with of all things, polenta...

                                         

He always has a good word for his customers ( and spicy hot sauce as needed) while his better half in back churns out Jamaican and Haitian cuisine respecting his and her heritages.

                                          

The food includes empanadas which we like to eat seated at the bar in the window looking out on Krome Avenue. Made with thick pastry-like crusts, deep fried and filled with meat or vegetables. Or small Jed herring-what I knew as kippers growing up in England. The English eat them as breakfast food with eggs but we got our herring in pastry as the weirdest smoked fish empanada that worked remarkably well.

                                           

Yardie Spice is a hopping joint. Curried goat, oxtail, jerked pork, all Caribbean Classic dishes. Accompanied by rice and peas and fried plantains. And a pile of polenta as well.

                                             

Eating at home is good but you do kind of miss out on the Jamaican vibe at Yardie Spice, watching JP charm his customers while feeding their bodies. Many giggles.

                                               

Another successful punctuation to a mainland trip. Rusty, by the way was perfect, in and out of the car.

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Cheap Housing, Tall Housing

There is one intractable problem among the many issues facing Key West that brings up heated debate all by itself. You'd think it would be the inevitable rising of the seas that will drown the lives of the children of the current leadership. City Commissioner Sam Kauffman posts pictures of his adorable family on Facebook enjoying the middle class American Dream with zero interest in the melting ice cap just up the coast. But he did lead a vote on affordable housing. Apres nous, le deluge...

His plan, to serious nods of approval among the commissioners is supposed to be the start of a program to take the affordable housing crisis "seriously," which is odd as every city commission in living memory has made the same promise. This time the city will dedicate all 91 building permit allocations to affordable housing. So there. Except of course they won't if, as the financial wizards tell us in their advertising, past performance is actually any indicator of future actions. In Key West money talks and grand gestures are no match.

Affordable housing is a euphemism for feel good policy making in the least affordable city in Florida. Developers build market rate homes on the graves of affordable trailer parks and apartment complexes. Section Eight housing died under the past thirty years of free market, bootstrap lawmaking and was never replaced, and free market economics conveniently put the playing field on a kilter from which the middle class keeps sliding off. The statistics are out there but facts mean nothing when feelings and beliefs unsupported, govern public policy and trendy catch phrases replace policy discussion. Affordable housing in Key West means multiple jobs, roommates and deteriorating housing stock. It's not easy to maintain homes for rent in a city that breeds resentment at both ends of the rental agreement: renters don't give a damn, and landlords burn out trying to keep places looking nice. Insurance costs rise and take rents sky high with them. Insurance goes up because the statistics make it clear, beliefs notwithstanding, that we face climate Armageddon in these islands and it's only a matter of time.

Yet into the midst of this festering problem the city commission tries to wade from time to time. Elections spur their concentration for a few months and then when it becomes clear the problem is as intractable as ever it gets shuffled away and replaced by something equally mystifying, like how to solve the parking crisis in a tiny city devoted to massive car ownership. My preference for living 23 miles outside Key West is based in common sense, an easy commute and a desire for quiet neighbors. Even though as you can see here Key West is very quaint.

Key West suffers from an intense contradiction that is built into the 21st century city. On the one hand it sells itself as a pirate haven, home to the dropped out rebels and pirates from Up North, people you should fly down to visit in their natural habitat as through they are creatures in a zoo. However these reprobates and inebriated are finding it harder and harder to fake an existence in the other Key West, the one that is hell bent on maximizing profit and sending a message to people with vast wealth that the weather is lovely, the city is quaint and the restaurants are world class. And you just can't combine the pirate message with the well heeled appeal in one small town. It isn't working and the well heeled naturally are winning.

The other bar to affordable housing is the politics of the town. Key West is no longer on the cutting edge of society. If you are gay you can stay home pretty much these days. Or go live in a more affordable and more avant garde city than Key West which is as unaffordable to young gays as much as to young straights. Rent control, a dubious proposition at best, is nowhere in sight, and there is a vocal group in town who shout free market every time affordable housing comes up. It's inevitable as a side product of the gentrification created by a second home economy which is gaining the upper hand. Key West will never even remotely imagine a future with a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage, anymore than it can imagine a vehicle- free Duval Street. Banning plastic bags? Creating bicycle routes and one way streets? Solar power? Even allowing white roofs was an undertaking.

So now the city commission wants to increase the height limits of new construction as a way to improve the affordable housing situation. I kid you not. That is the answer to the shortage of worker accommodation. When city commissioner Margaret Romero voiced her opinion that this was a maneuver to benefit developers she got slapped down by the manly Jimmy Weekly who labeled her a conspiracy theorist thus damning her to eternal outsider-hood on the commission. Except I fear Romero may be right. Which is odd as she is a former corporate executive and devoted to the free market thing so you'd imagine clear thinking would approve of increasing the skyscraper count on this little sliver of land.

But clear thinking and rational solutions are nowhere in sight. It's time Key West came clean. No one gives a damn about affordable housing. Hotels are building employee housing into their structures, and as unpleasant as indentured servitude sounds there is an unending supply of foreign "students" ready to dig in for a year or two and go home with a supply of dollars to give themselves a leg up in Latvia or Poland or Croatia or somewhere Slavic. They may be wetbacks but they are the modern breed, young, thin, white and blonde so it's okay.

Stock Island will be gentrified soon enough and the trailers filled with Cubans and Haitians will be gone. Commuting from as far as Big Pine will be the norm and life will go on. It will look different but we humans are adaptable and living up the Keys will be seen as the thing and my eccentrically long commute will become the norm. As for rising seas I figure if a city commissioner with small children isn't worried, child-free me has nothing to concern him. The water's warm, the dog is happy and my pension is building. Let the shenanigans continue, island style.

 

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Rusty Does Marathon

I am not an angler and far less am I a commercial fisherman but as far as I can recall lobster season starts in August or thereabouts and I believe this is crab leg season. I am no great fan of either fish meat but many people are so I suppose it would be a relief to see people actively loading and unloading traps. I was surprised to see it being done mechanically. Serious business.

This one around the corner had me pondering what "provisions" are. People who go sailing frequently talk about buying "provisions" as though a sailing trip were on a par with outfitting an expedition. When we sent sailing my wife and I pretty much went shopping as we always did. We liked traveling by sailboat but we never came across anything remotely resembling "provisions." Here they are:

It was a hot still day best rendered I thought in black and white and there was Rusty doing his dog thing. This is the time of year when leaves fall as the dry season is wrapping up and soon rains will (should)  start and everything grows again. Seasons around here are a bit bass-akwards.

Rusty ignored the incongruity but I wondered why a business based in Florida, apparently, doesn't pay road taxes here by displaying a Florida license plate. 

The Overseas Liquor place is looking as though it may be quite striking one day but only if they ever manage to finish it. Rusty hadn't walked too far but his tongue was starting to drag. It was quite hot and he was remarkably resistant.

Even the locals were submerging themselves in the shade of a submarine mural...

He passed out in the air conditioning but back home later the shade of the deck was cool enough for him.

My sun bathing Carolina Dog.

Early Duval With Rusty

Urban walking for Rusty is a trial. He loves the woods and back country among the mangroves. The city fills him with dread such that I wonder what his previous lives consisted of. Whatever it was he did not enjoy himself.

So I feel it my obligation to get him used to that which makes him nervous, gently and over time he will learn to trust me. I wondered a bit when I saw this sign, a discount not for locals...quite possibly a smart move.

For Rusty danger lurks over his shoulder so every now and then he stopped to look back and check. Nothing showing- for now.

Cheyenne was a honey badger when it came to downtown. She preferred the smells of urban walks and didn't care about anything much as she stumped around.

I used to walk her early in the day to help her cope with the heat, Rusty does fine in the heat so I was out early to spare him the crowds. I think it helped a bit.

I like having the time to wander early in the day. The light has it's own quality early in the morning and this time of year it doesn't start to get light before seven. Abandoned shoes as a form of artwork:

 The particular curved balconies of some Key West homes:

 The morning light illuminating the tops of the buildings in the middle of Duval Street.

I saw quite a few help wanted signs in store windows. Expect to pay rent between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred a month to hold down a twelve dollar an hour job. Paradise indeed!

 But there is free water from time to time.

 We made it! Now let's see how soon the wife can show up with the car.

Pretty soon it turned out and Rusty was swept off the mean streets of Key West to live another day.