James Street is two blocks long and busy as a hive of bees with traffic at certain times of the day, the rest of the time its in its own torpor. Its the sort of street that visitors pass by a dozen times a week and never notice. For people who know the area, James is a short cut from Eaton via Frances or a way of avoiding Caroline Street around Conch Harbor and the Ferry terminal. It's residential so it doesn't do to behave badly on this street but in winter its a nice way to avoid snowbirds queuing at the light on Eaton at Grinnell. James Street is cut in half by Grinnell and that is the home to one of the nicer Irish pubs in Key West, in my opinion. Perhaps that's because when I lived on a boat it was a short hop from the water to a pint of Guinness and they used to welcome my Labrador too in the days before some people got fussy about dogs in bars:
They are building next to the pub and I'm betting someone is going to be complaining about the noise down the road:
The luxury development is called Ocean Breeze and would it sadden you to know this lot used to be a nursery filled with all those plants we decorate our yards with. I remember too there used to be the graffiti on the fence here "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot" from the Joni Mitchell song. I guess it was referring to the huge Park and Ride building across the street (the subject of a future essay) but it goes well with the current state of construction. Tara meets manufactured housing:
McMansion anyone? You can't have this one, carriage lamps and all because it must belong to:
I need to remember to do that; put my name on my parking space at home. I'm sure my wife would be delighted. The dog from Finnegan's Wake seemed indifferent in the heat:
And so did this spectacular tree:
But people still keep hoping, they don't give up and just stand there, they put bumper stickers on their cars and hope for better times:
I like a quiet street with a few of those cute little homes they specialise in around here:
Were you to have had breakfast at say Harpoon Harry's and resolutely turn your back on the waterfront, after a block you'd see this relatively rare tree in Key West:
And up James street in the shade of another tree there is this final example of a mid century shed, or garage, moldering gently in the humidity. Its been mouldering there for years, as long as I can remember:
The sign says no parking so one assumes the red car belongs to the owner. Be careful when parking in Key West, doing as others do can lead you to a ticket or a $200 tow if you park wherever you feel like. I used to use the open space in back as a secret parking lot which may account for the fence: 
The times they are a-changing because from the upstairs at the parking building I saw a lawnmower standing by to keep the place in apple pie order: 
Across the street I saw a Key West sized car, a Suzuki convertible that used to be seen on the road and now seems to be doing its own bit of moldering:
This was where i saw a guy striding up the sidewalk carrying a bag of golf clubs. Which in itself shouldn't have caught my eye but his rather dressed down look prompted speculation:
Key West is home to casual dress but I wonder what the minimum requirement is at the golf course on Stock Island? Flip flops and a tank top? The other half of James Street is residential on one side:
While Keys Energy, the Lower Keys public utility company dominates the other side:
Light industrial chic:
Or for a hardcore urban industrial look check out the Checkpoint Charlie gate that lets the lumber trucks in and out of the back of the yard:
All this could be on your front door steps for more money than you can imagine:
Fixer upper needs some tender loving care. Don't we all?
Power lines notwithstanding I find this church, recently renovated, to be a nice example of the Caribbean Anglican style of church. I call it that because I have seen numerous examples of church architecture on English speaking islands around the Caribbean that have been built in the style of the English parish churches, and their square towers or pointy steeples dominate skylines from Grenada to Jamaica, and also it turns out Key West!
Well, dominating may be a bit hyperbolic but sure as eggs is eggs, there is the church of the long name peeking over the greenery. As far as tropical funk goes I like this one, a little run down but exhibiting the faith of the small and intimate:
I find the notion of "holy ground" harboring plastic pink flamingos to be suitable entirely for Key West. Or take this little beauty near the hill called Solares, Key West's highest point:
Trinity Wesleyan combines the elements of Anglican stolidity with the lovely pitched roof and slat walls typical of Key West home building. 
When I was a juvenile delinquent altar boy The Church of Rome required its' adherents world wide to pray in the one true language, impenetrably enough that had to be Latin. And as St Francis reputedly taught us, once its learned as a child, whatever it is, it's never forgotten! Indeed i remember many of the responses still, from those far away days. Nowadays along with eating meat on Fridays the Catholic heirarchy has relented and Mass at St Marys is recited in the vernacular. So the traditions change and yet these lovely structures remain:
This is the big old church on Truman Avenue at Windsor Lane on the way into Old Town. It's the heart of the extensive Catholic community in Key West and it makes it's own statement about size and architecture:
St Marys operates a school, a soup kitchen, a grotto built to protect the city in case of hurricanes (napping apparently during Wilma) and that most Catholic of institutions, a gift shop:
When in 2007 my peripatetic Jewish wife went for the first time to St Peter's in the Vatican she stood in awe, her jaw literally dropping, under the vastness of the rococo embellishments of the vast basilica and confessed that for the first time she understood the worldwide reach of the Roman Church. Outside she was equally astonished by the trinket trade in plaster Madonnas and graphic artwork for sale in the streets surrounding the Holy See. Needs must and they do a roaring trade. Its not exactly money changers in the temple even though I find the gift shop trade rather tacky.
It's history in the Southernmost City is frequently held up as an example of tolerance in Key West but a few years ago some unidentified anti Semite torched the place, which became the opportunity for the neighboring churches to send the opposite message and they grabbed it wholeheartedly offering the synagogue space in their churches. Which incidentally would have got you a roasting in hell in the Catholic Church I grew up in, but times change and sometimes for the better. 
Not forgetting the Unitarians in The Meadows with their delightful old Florida louvered windows. Either the building is lo-o-o-ng or my Bonneville is shrinking:
There is a persistent sign holder plaguing downtown Key West ever since Fantasy Fest, and he holds up a notice encouraging people to believe that queers go to hell, by virtue of their gayness. Apparently this bald statement is supposed to be an encouragement to Key West gays to change their ways which is a proposition I find bizarre, human nature being what it is, and I doubt it would gain much traction at the Metropolitan Community Church just up the street from the Unitarians:
It surprised me when I realised just how many churches there are in Key West. I think the number and variety of them (a Mosque interestingly enough does not appear to exist) of which these are a tiny sample speaks to the fact that even a rootless shiftless migrating community like that viewed superficially in the Keys in fact has a population that demands the rooted sense of community that churches bring to a town. Churches in Key West seem to thrive because many many people in Party Town USA are just ordinary people raising families and going to work. They are why I like living in Key West, not because I can go to Sloppy Joe's and get tanked whenever I feel like it, but because I work in a small town that has real roots, despite any appearances to the contrary. Of course there are those that manage to slip off the bottom rung of the societal ladder:
And the churches minister to them and their needs. The Salvation Army is prominent in town, and made a spectacle of itself by declining to hire a gay office worker on the grounds of the old going to hell problem, but hey no one's perfect. They help a lot of people regardless of orientation who come looking for it. This sleeper chose his spot well because when he awakes the beacon of Glad Tidings will be across the way, a church noted for its services to the down and out:
On Flagler Avenue there is a big time soup kitchen across from this Lutheran erection. It's some sort of Buckminster Fuller apparition lacking the conviction to go all the way and become a real geodesic dome. What the Tudor style wooden beam highlights are doing I'm not sure:
The attached school enjoys a fine reputation and is housed in a more conventional if rather dull building. I think in my next life I would like to be an architect and offer my services in communities across the country that would like to see proportioned attractive buildings housing their banks and churches and public offices. Whimsy is delightful but it hurts the eyes after a while:
My hat is off to them if they can round up a congregation at that unearthly hour. Oh, wait a minute, I think it says nine am not five am, nevertheless.....
Especially when contrasted with the traditional church it is attached to. You don't get to see enclosed porches like that very often at rthese latitudes: 
But out of this series of buildings my hands down favorite is the church at the 800 block of Center Street. This a two block street between Petronia Street and Truman Avenue. To find it simply turn north off Truman at the over sized Adirondack Chair. 
Clearly a church I would rate as Anglican Caribbean, from the exterior it has the attributes of stolidity from the interior it is cool and dark to make it a restful and intriguing place to sit and not think:
And when such a place invites one in, what can one do but respond?
All those drunks need ambulances and police, all night long! God help me...
Seagrapes are hardy buggers, just right for people like me endowed with black thumbs. I have one bush that started to topple when inundated by Wilma's floods in 2005 but I didn't touch the tree except to cover up the exposed roots and the thing is flourishing like never before. My kind of plant. While the grapes are edible and i love eating them, I should note there are a few issues with seagrapes. One is that their giant green leaves turn into crisp brown dead dinner plates when they fall off the tree which they do copiously year round:
When the winds blow, as they often do, these large dead leaves blow all over the place rattling and crackling as they go. They create carpets of dead leaves. Also, like most fruit the seagrapes tend to riped all at once. This is good for the birds, mourning doves mostly, that live in my neighborhood, but the ripe grapes tend to fall off in clusters when the stems are shaken and they make a peculiar mess:
I do like having this huge clump covering half my driveway, I look out of my study window and there it sits, huge and green and full of fruit:
Here's the hard part- how to describe the flavor of these so called grapes? Well, they are fresh and taste like a mild grape, a little astringent, not too sweet and are little more than a large black pip surrounded by a thin covering of flesh. I peeled a couple to illustrate my feeble powers of description:
I like grapes and I like them wild too. When I was growing up in Italy one of the pleasures of my unfettered summers was the ability to head out into the fields in late August and take up residence among the leaves of the vineyards for a little light snacking. The beauty of the vines growing in central Italy is that they are planted in long lines and grow about six feet tall, so that in the fullness of summer their leaves cascade to the ground and a small boy can sit under them, invisible, and gorge on ripe grapes.
We look angelic, after a fashion but we were seven year old expert fruit thieves, Diego in the background, and I. My mother was always puzzled why I came home from a morning of wandering around the fields and wasn't famished. So it is that to this day I get a strange nostalgic pleasure from stealing my own seagrapes from the bush in my own yard:
It was a Huckleberry Finn existence though I hadn't read Mark Twain at that stage in my life. Aside from stealing grapes from the sharecroppers around the village I and my buddies wandered the hills and fields and bothered the grown ups like this guy with a herd of pigs, or a flock of pigs, or a porker of pigs:
I don't remember this picture being taken by my older sister claims the honor. I do remember the grapes, the symbol of summer at its peak. Nowadays that means hurricane season at its peak but I take my nostalgia from my seagrape bush:
Just a taste of what is essentially a wild grape and one gets transported across time and space. Powerful fruit, indeed.