Bahama Village

Facing a  weekend of rain and wind and potential tropical depression and who knows what I thought to find some sunny pictures of Key West from sunnier times past.  These were of Bahama Village one sunny afternoon.

Waterfront Market

Thursday is waterfront market day in Key West from 2 till 7pm. I took my, lunch at 2pm yesterday and drove rapidly to my destination. It takes longer than you'd think to drive across town, buy dinner, stop for some picture taking and get back to work, put the loot in the fridge and then sit down and say brightly: "Key West 911, where is your emergency?"

I managed it with suave indifference to the hurdles along the way. When I got back to my desk a caller asked me if he was anywhere near the  free overnight shelter, and then he told me he was on Duval Street. So I told him he was almost five miles from KOTS, the Keys Overnight Temporary Shelter, now run by someone called Cornerstone. Five miles he asked with some surprise. Is that North or South?

Yes well, that's why they call it the southernmost city. As you can see above the Truman Waterfront really is on the edge of the known world. To go five miles in that direction you'd need to walk on water. I, however only had to get as far as the Indian food booth. 

Samosas for starters, lamb vindaloo and chicken biryani to share and a few delicious mixtures to add in. Key West has been deficient in Indian food for a long time and a well masked market offering take away vindaloo is a very good thing for the city at the edge of the world. I drove, gloating, back in the direction of my desk.

It was an overcast day, as everyday seems fated to be as we await the arrival of this late season tropical depression. On the way out of the parking lot I stopped on the Angela Street extension and stuck the Fiat in a space on the side of the narrow street. 

I've photographed the old electrical station before but there was new and bright artwork on the wall so like a magpie I hopped out to have a look. I did not hop fast enough apparently because my slow movements to assemble my camera with the door open prompted a nice winter visitor to parp their horn imperiously at me. I did my best to look suitably serf-like as I got out of the way and regretted the Key West protocol of giving an old man a chance to get out of the way.  

I rather like the bright abstract nature of the art. It will be splendid when the brick building is restored and turned into some kind of public space but for now as the bricks teeter from lack of support and care the art highlights the possibilities.

This one looked a bit sparse. I suppose it is Very Modern:

Then I saw the barricades and no doubt causing astonishment among the few passers by I stuck my camera through the fence and did the deed.

Then it started to to rain. So I went back to work. Now it's starting to rain on the days when I work as well the days I don't. I'll need an ark if this goes on. 

Hurricane Eta

We find ourselves in the odd position of waiting for a late season hurricane to descend on the Keys which is not unusual as the Western Caribbean stays warm well into December. Hurricane season ends officially on the last day of November and now indeed we face the prospect of one such late arrival.

I had noticed Hurricane Eta on the weather map while it was busy threatening the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua and it has at last report caused considerable damage. I sailed up the east coast of Nicaragua 20 years ago and it merits its nickname as the mangroves and the small sandy islands they live on produce ferocious insects. I had a primitive GPS system on my boat with a  sort of mapping program which made the exploration possible but it was  a maze of shallow waters and incorrect coordinates and island surprises in the wrong place. The inhabitants of the entire Caribbean coast of Central America are a race apart, of African (slave) descent, mostly English speaking, and not well supported by their Spanish speaking governments on the Pacific watershed. I can't imagine the desolation caused by Hurricane Eta. 

Now we see what was going to be a depression coming north is rated a tropical storm despite having to make a 90 degree turn, most unusual, over Belize then hitting the Caymans and crossing the spine of western Cuba, a series of obstacles that should slow any hurricane down. Not this one. Oh well we may end up getting drenched and blown around this weekend. 

When I was out on a  recent lunch break hurricanes were far from my mind as I had decided the season was over in defiance of history and norms and all that stuff. Current overcast skies were sunny and bright and cool temperatures were hot and sweaty and I was  wishing for winter. I really was and now a facsimile is here with dry air blowing over the Keys at a brisk 30 miles an hour.

I figure it must be snowing Up North as roads are filled with traffic and crowds are downtown and winter has arrived. A hurricane warning may come as a bit of a surprise to the happy winter residents. 

I wonder how coronavirus will appear in Key West this winter.  With the summer rapid turnover of vacationers any virus shared here gets taken Up North. With people dining out, visiting bars and staying in town Lower Keys Medical Center may be getting a  workout this winter. I shall watch with interest. Meanwhile we have a hurricane brewing.  That needs some watching.

2020  just won't stop producing chaos. Local electoral results are in a recount. Not chaos exactly but a measure of how close opinion divides. Peace and serenity in 2021. 

Diane Roberts/Florida Phoenix

From April 2020 as more assistance is planned in 2021.

Florida’s junior US senator is quite a guy–as he’d be the first to tell you. He’s worth over $250 million, and you’re not.

Rick Scott has no sympathy for these grasping whiners who lost their little jobs in the coronavirus pandemic and now have the gall to expect a government hand-out.

Who do they think they are: Boeing?

Scott sent a fundraising email on April 23rd to his well-connected and  richly-upholstered campaign donors complaining that, “Businesses looking to reopen are telling us their employees don’t want to come back to work because they collect more on unemployment.”

Under Congress’s Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, these laid-off layabouts could theoretically get $600 a week to do absolutely nothing.

(Scott, of course, voted for CARES, but it pained him. Truly it did).

After all, $600 a week is lavish: enough to cover the rent, maybe the car payment, some ramen noodles, and a four-pack of tuna. You might have to let the health insurance slide, but there’s always the emergency room, right?

Most of the aid money is federal, but you have to apply though the state.

Problem is, the state system, to put it mildly, ain’t working.

You can’t get anyone on the phone; it can take a week to breach the online portal; and half the time, it crashes. Around 40 percent of those who somehow manage to fill in the forms discover they are supposedly ineligible”–even though they meet all the criteria.

To date, more than 1.8 million people have applied, but only about eight percent have received a check.

Now, who do you suppose we have to thank for what one Republican insider calls this “sh-t sandwich”?

Rick Scott.

Scott, you see, shelled out $77 million in taxpayer money for the glitch-prone, security-challenged, crash-happy, slow-as-Christmas CONNECT system. It never worked right. It wasn’t supposed to. As an adviser to Gov. Ron DeSantis (who’s been highly critical of CONNECT) recently told Politico, it was “designed” to fail.

The former governor, elected to the Senate by the skin of his capped teeth two years ago, signed legislation in 2014 requiring people trying to get that princely $275 a week in unemployment compensation to answer a 45-question “skills questionnaire” and prove they tried to get hired by at least five possible employers every week.

Many were rejected anyway, owing to some ill-defined charge of “misconduct.”

Scott, a person of limited imagination, thinks that if you’re poor it’s your fault—and your sorry bone-idle ways should not be rewarded with a handout.

Like many pols, including Donald Trump, he’s so thoroughly bought into his mythologized background he thinks he struck it rich entirely thanks to his own hard work and genius–instead of what we might describe as a certain ethical flexibility.

Trump talks about his “success” as if the money he got from his dubious daddy and the loans from the Bank of China and Deutsche Bank were incidental, as if he pulled himself up by his own bone-spur-friendly boot straps.

Scott talks about himself as if he were born destitute in a log cabin he helped build and split rails until he joined the Navy, founded the hospital chain Columbia/HCA, made money, and became governor of the Sunshine State.

In truth, his Navy career was remarkable only for the way he bought Cokes onshore and re-sold at hugely-inflated prices to his fellow sailors. At Columbia/HCA he presided over one of the largest healthcare frauds in history. He invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination 75 times; and he finally walked away with $300 million in stock and options–some of which helped him buy his way into the Florida Governor’s Mansion.

Like Trump, Scott equates money with intelligence and skill–and quite possibly divine favor.

Business über alles.

Those who pursue low-paid but intellectually-enriching fields are losers.

Public employees are losers. Teachers are losers.

When he was governor, Scott tried to force universities to push students into what he saw as lucrative careers in STEM subjects, instead of useless nonsense like anthropology, which should not be supported by state funds.

His own daughter majored in anthropology, but that’s different. She comes from money.

Scott invented all kinds of ways to torment what he saw as the Undeserving Poor. He undercut public health facilities. He tried to mandate drug testing for all state workers, who are among the lowest-paid in the nation.

He also thought it would be a grand wheeze to drug test welfare recipients–at their own expense. If they didn’t come out clean, they wouldn’t get their benefits.

Scott’s family happened to own a string of clinics which perform drug testing. What a coincidence.

Though he had allegedly gone to law school (SMU), Scott seemed to have never heard of the Fourth Amendment. The courts slapped him down.

Taxpayers still ended up paying $1.5 million in his legal fees.

In the midst of this deadly pandemic, Scott wants to underline the fecklessness of those who need public assistance and the way profligate Democrats enable them.

In a hysterical (not in the funny way) column for Fox News, Scott splutters that while decent American families stick to a budget, reusing tinfoil and “cutting their own grass,” Big Gubmint throws money to the unworthy.

He quotes Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois saying of the CARES Act: “if we err on the side of giving a hard-working family an extra thousand dollars or two thousand dollars because of our approach, so be it.”

Clutch those pearls! You taxpayers, who have shelled out a mere $133 million  to pay for Donald Trump’s golf outings, should rise up and say this waste, fraud and abuse will not stand!

Rick Scott’s counting on you to be as wet-hen mad as he is. He’s running for president in 2024 and rage is all he’s got—rage and contempt.

Diane Roberts/Florida Phoenix

LINK

Old Town Homes

Some changes are coming to Monroe County after the election. Long time County Commissioner Heather Carruthers has been ousted by a couple of hundred votes in the unofficial count, by Republican Eddie Martinez. The cruise ship ballots in Key West all won resoundingly. What that means in the short term is unclear but in the long run Key West is starting to turn away from mass tourism as wished by the mayor who already won her seat with 60% of the vote a few weeks ago. No runoff needed.

I walk around downtown and I see empty storefronts everywhere, so I wonder what will replace the businesses that have closed. Locals don't like to go to Duval Street not least because there is nothing there for people not on vacation.

Rents on Duval Street are astronomical, $30-$40 thousand dollars a month for modest storefronts which makes the prospects for small business without corporate backing pretty dim you would think. Beyond our local problems unemployment nationally is not great, stimulus checks are running out and rents in the Keys are very very high. So taking away more retail jobs is going to have a knock on effect on the make up of the city's population.

Key West has been through many boom and bust cycles since it was founded in 1828                                                                  

In the 1960s the Navy reduced its presence in Key West and left gaping holes in the storefronts of Duval Street which created an opportunity for today's community leaders to buy up city  blocks cheap and slowly start a turn around. It's a question for the modern city of those same leaders are up to the challenge again now that the referendum is pushing Key West away from cruise ships and easy money downtown.

I got an email from Webb Up North remarking he has seen a lot of advertising pushing the Florida Keys and Key West as vacation destinations using the slogan "Close to Paradise, Far from Normal," which is cute but the more time passes the less accurate that catchy slogan looks. Far from Paradise and Close to Normal seems to have been the path forward for some time as gentrification displaces eccentricity as the norm.

Key West will find a way forward even if there is a financial glitch as the city reassess it's goals. Key West's fundamentals don't change, frost free weather, turquoise waters now promising to be more so with fewer large ships and a cleaner sparklier less shabby town for more high class visitors. 

For those looking to live  here on three part time jobs with no benefits to enjoy a few years of bohemian living in the tropics things will be stickier if not impossible. The Upper Keys import labor from the mainland which is an hour bus ride away. Key West is learning to create housing for a revolving corps of visitors who work. The cruise ship vote was won by people who do not depend on retail jobs fed by cruise ship passengers but by people who will need to look further afield and with greater creativity to find their chores taken care of by the working class. Minimum wage and an attic bed for a working stay in paradise? Far from normal indeed.

Around The Fire Station

The Old Town Fire station was built on the site of the former city hall on Simonton Street at Angela. Key West has the largest wooden historic neighborhood in the US, which is pretty as I have tried to show over the years on this page. As a fire hazard it is a torch. The fire department takes any possible report of fire, a smell of smoke even, very seriously.  

In the 19th century when homes were fed by fires and light by lanterns and candles fires in urban centers were common and Key West burned down once but nowadays electrical codes make fires a rare occurrence, not impossible but rare. This fire station  can respond to as report of fire in a couple of minutes and I've seen them do it. Which makes the new fire station a reassuring presence.

Rusty fears chickens and when we park in their parking lot it's like they know it and close in.

Winter sees more homeless people oddly enough as they seem to ride the rails south just like their housed counterparts. However winter residents call them in all the time to get them moved on and the new managers of the shelter are keeping it open twenty four hours so I hope  that will help. Key West's winter weather attracts everyone inevitably and not having a place to live is not necessarily a deterrent. 

Those picturesque wooden houses...

... shadows waving in the breeze...

...headlights on the fence to produce a strange shimmering effect...

Night lights.

Shoot the proverbial cannon down Angela Street in the pre-dawn hours:

And look up to the skies this election day and see what the gods may bring. Peace and harmony seem out of reach.