Fire Station 2

The new fire station on Simonton Street remains a thing of wonder to me, and there it sits after three years, doing its job after so much controversy to get it built.

The parking lot has remained much as it was except tidier and there is no panhandling zone, a sort of free speech place for residentially challenged people to hang out. But the news paper comment encapsulated the fury of some people at the tought of a new fire station where City Hall used to be:

City Hall was wrecked by Hurricane Wilma, not by flooding but by leaking roofs that rendered the building unfit due to mold. It had to go but the invective rained down.

I miss the shady parking alongside the city hall building seen above but the new fire station is nicely done and give a dog a place a to rest in the shade...

...as well as a place for studious street people to pass the time. They get moved along at night but during the day this is a public space. Patience among the agreeably housed is running out though. They paid millions for their Conch Cottages and they didn't fork that lot over tos hare their retriement space with the brazenly poor. 

Rusty will hare his space with anyone no matter their wealth or status, gender, sexual identity, color race or creed as long as they are kind. Little wonder dogs appeal to me. Besides all that they never call 911, they deal with their own problems. Which come to think, may not always be ideal.

The hotel across the street was the source of much of the lamentation when plans were published but there seems to be a truce. The trouble with living in Old Town,never mind running a business is that buildings are very close together, and any minor change can have a huge impact. I wish changes could be made a little more gradually and with a lot more discussion because it's obviously easy for panic to set in among such tightly woven spaces. 

Not everything about the place is in the best possible taste, it has to be said.

Fire prevention is taken seriously in a town built of seasoned wood with structures standing cheek by jowl.

A properly housed fire department is an effective fire department.

Bike Path

I have been encouraged to see work taking place on  various  old bridges in the Lower Keys so it seems like the bike path alongside the Overseas Highway is closer  to becoming a reality the length of the Keys...one day. That thought put me in mind of  an essay I photographed last year on the bike path.

Florida Heritage Bike Path

You'd be astonished to see how many people ride this trail in the early morning darkness when I'm motorcycling home at 6 in the morning. Modern bicycle headlights on some bicycles are as bright as motorcycle headlights and as they make their way through the bushes they give the impression of a well off course motorized machine coming at you from the wrong angle.

The state is bury making a true Heritage Trail all the way down the Keys and soon I hope to post some pictures of a new bridge the state has built connecting Summerland Key to Cudjoe. I am quite surprised to see so much bicycle-related road work going on but it is welcome. Frankly I wouldn't mind a whole bunch of shade trees even ones as slender as hurricane resistant  sabal palms to make the path more bearable in summer. 

 I love seeing the winter riders out for a jaunt properly done up in safety gear and workmen's high visibility safety gear. This bright reflective stuff is everywhere part of the trend of passive "safety devices" designed to shift the responsibility for one's well being on others. When out riding I figure it's up to me to pay attention to look after myself and not to expect others to notice me, but I'm bucking all expectations there.

 The bicycle bridge is built on the foundations laid by Henry Flagler's railroad crew around 1911 which railroad was turned into a highway by the government in 1938 after Florida bought the right of way from the bankrupt railroad. And then World War Two require further upgrades as marked in the cement alongside the white water pipe on the "new" (1982)  road bridge. The first piped water from Miami was brought to Key West by the military in 1942. Prior to that residents of the Keys lived off cisterns and rain water which modern standards suggest is unhealthy. Who knew? About the only thing I miss from my house on Ramrod Key was the water cistern. I found it healthy and delicious.

A close up of some mangroves. Fascinating bushes are mangroves, sucking up salt water and expelling the salt to use the water. 

 It was a strangely alluring view across the waters. You can see why people would bust a gut riding a bicycle around here.

And when it all gets too exhausting they have the occasional bench facing the highway for a better view of cars passing in your face.

I really need to stop more often to enjoy this odd little spot.

Pastoral Keys

There are a great many pictures available of the Keys with the typical accessories. 

That is to say with palms and sunrises and beaches and oceans.

 Because I am a man with a perverse nature I enjoy different views.

 Mangroves, clouds and swamps.

 And sometimes storms glimpsed out and sea from the hard cement of civilization.

Summer rains, much loved by me.

Fleming Street

Hmm, I wonder why they call it the Mango Tree Inn?

Intriguing pause in the work:

Dog-eating leaves:

Morning at the library, surprisingly not besieged by street people waiting for refuge:

In the signs below only one place is real. Senatus Populusque Romano referring to the government of the ancient Roman Republic, and used as an official emblem of the modern-day municipality of 

Rome. (wikipedia).

Rusty loves Love Lane next to the Library.

My favorite church structure in Key West.

Eaton Bikes. Now for sale.

I tried the Cuban bagel, and I applaud myself for being adventurous but I did not like it. 

The coffee helped.

Monochrome Beach Babes

I wanted to post these pictures on my Instagram account. I liked the photos but I had no story to tell which is why I like Instagram, a  place to post pictures without commentary politics or drama. I liked the black and white pictures I took at Boca Chica Beach. But Instagram let me down.

Instagram messed with my artistic visions cropping my pictures every time I tried to group them into one post. Instagram knew better than I how to post these photos. Fair enough I said, I'll post one so it won't be cropped by the Instagram auto-editor and the rest I shall keep to myself. And a few select friends.

In photography classes they tell you to keep objects in motion in the side of the picture that projects across the photo, giving the moving object somewhere to go, as it were. In the picture below I did the exact opposite barely squeezing the yacht into the frame while just managing to get the navigation aid on the right into the picture also to give perspective. But I liked the unconventional result anyway.

Pictures that should have been without words...but all quite pretty enough for me on my beach.

More Changes

I miss  Yebo. I miss bunny chow and hot South African sausages and the couple who owned it and made a dream come true. And incidentally they also helped pioneer food trucks in Key West, a city determined to resist any innovation with every collective breath.  Nowadays the food truck is a banal pizza machine.and I hope the operators know what a struggle it was to get this location in the first place.            

But in this town time passes rapidly and people and businesses come and go, usually they come with much fanfare like Rum Barrel owned and built by a guy involved in sports medicine or some such.and now its all gone. The attention span is now focused according to the sign on the door on developing an empire around the Green Parrot and the neighboring barbecue restaurant. I suppose some other wide eyed hopeful will try here and may last another eleven years as did the Rum Barrel.

This convenience store location has puzzled me so it hasn't surprised me to see periodic changes in ownership, or at least in signage. However the note on the door says that Ana's a Cuban grocery much loved by visitors at the far end of Simonton Street is opening up a second location here. More empire building and who knows maybe that's what this place needs to thrive, a well known name. 

But let's face it, convenience stores are on every street corner in this city. I watch people walking around town clutching plastic bottles of water as though this town is a desert with hardly an oasis to slake your sudden tropical thirst. Gallery 511 selling "fine "art made it to about three years I think. 

Which leads me to wonder how you pay downtown rents selling pretzels. I am told Auntie Anne's is  a popular chain and as they close at midnight I guess the drinking crowd might be persuaded to get some solid food late but it seems like a lot of pretzels need to get sold. 

There is much lamentation that Duval Street is all chain stores but chain stores seem to stand the best chance of fronting the enormous costs the complexity of hiring and thus survive to become established. That was the lament of the old Fast Buck's who closed and found his only viable tenant was a chain drug store. Is that bad? I don't know but it seems inevitable.

The Side Bar is a new place to drink attached to Aqua the gay nightclub around the corner from Angela Street. This used to be Rexall Electric a solidly Conch business in the practical world of supplying electricians. Now it's a place to drink after watching men dressed as women sing on stage. Well, at least it's not a chain.

Flora and Flipp's closed in 2009 and the place has been empty since. Apparently 811 Fleming Street is ready to come back to life as a small neighborhood store as soon as the city agrees to let them sell beer and wine. They have a lot to live up to if anyone remembers Nancy Larsen who used to run the place (with a dog bowl of water outside).

The store is modest by all accounts and has been lovingly described as "shabby chic" by tourists who amble in for a soda, candy bar or suntan lotion, Larsen said. The building itself has been around since at least 1899, according to city maps from that year. The old-fashioned counter looks decades old, and the rows of shelves behind the register likely date to when the building housed a pharmacy in the 1940s.

"We had a very good time," Larsen said of her tenure at the store. "Everyone knows a store like this is not a big moneymaker, but we've enjoyed it very much and we've lived comfortably."

Flora & Flipp is kind of like the "Cheers" of convenience stores -- Larsen seems to know everyone's name.

It's clear after spending some time in the store that her regular customers adore her. She asks with genuine care about their children, inquires how work's going and keeps dog treats under the counter for their four-legged friends.

"It's almost like I've been adopted -- like I'm a surrogate mother," she said.

From the Citizen reporting the closure.
The new place should soon be open, they say:

I was surprised to see Eaton Bikes and the adjacent house now appears to be for sale for one point seven million bucks.From the Bascom Grooms website:

Convenience stores, bike shops, art galleries and bars, they come they go, the city abides.