It's almost a hundred years old and it is looking pretty good despite total abandonment by the great state of Florida.
According to the information published by Florida State Parks the Bahia Honda Bridge spans almost a mile of open water, and 5055 feet is not much compared to the span of the nearby Seven Mile Bridge but the distinctive features of this erection make it quite a landmark in the Lower Keys.
The State took the railroad bridge over after the railroad went bust and built a narrow roadway on top of the thing in 1938 and that was how one drove to Key West along the narrow Highway. The Park had a card illustrating the old road:
All the land in the picture is now part of the park and the new road cuts across the bay to the right, a boring flat cement bridge with four lanes and a helpful 55mph speed limit, useful for those of us in a hurry of course, but not so scenic:
The new road was inaugurated in 1982, the year after I first came to the Keys so I must have ridden my Vespa over the old Bahia Honda Bridge but honestly I can't remember it. The Seven Mile bridge was much more memorable I guess, especially for people with four or more wheels as the old railroad bridges yielded a pretty narrow roadbed. But they sure do look spectacular those old piles:
The state very kindly cut out a chunk of the old bridge to allow sailboat masts to fit through the gap, as Bahia Honda ("deep bay" in Spanish) is a not just a state park but a nice little anchorage as well.
I have no idea what the work boat was doing but it was all terribly industrious chugging around the bay. The park is one of the more beach oriented locations in the Keys, it's got all the water related activities one might expect. It also has a fair bit of sand and these are islands that don't generally offer the strands that mainland Florida is famous for. The Keys are made of rock unlike the rest of the state which is a land built on sand as it were, and has long sand beaches as a reward. And in even in November people are flocking to the beaches of the Sunshine State:
We've had a succession of cold fronts lately, lots of north winds and temperatures frequently dipping under 70 degrees (20C) so it's long past swimming season for me. Not for visitors to the Keys it seems:
This time of year I like a ride to Bahia Honda, fifteen minutes from my house, for the pleasure of a walk not a swim. One of the most spectacular strolls is to the top of the old bridge. The approach road has become a tad overgrown with the passage of time:
The bridge itself has been smoothed over with cement and extra handrails have been installed for the benefit of visitors but it is more or less as it was, a work of art of compound curves:
The view from the top is glorious, vistas over land, the park itself to the east:
The power poles marching off to the north mark the track of the new Overseas Highway. To the southwest: sea and setting sun and not much this side of Mexico:
More towards Cuba there is actually a little land, though not much of it:
And there, across the divide lies the remainder of the bridge, untouched, unloved and unwalked upon. It's too bad really, as I think it would make a great bike path with unbeatable views. However I guess preservation wasn't worth the expense though you'd think corporations like to spend fortunes naming sports arenas after themselves, so why not an old bridge? One that still carries the old main water pipe in its nether regions:
As you can see the old road bed, laid on top of the railroad tracks, is a bit narrow especially for modern SUVs and commercial trucks. Old timers tell me that when two trucks met on these bridges they sometimes had to fold their mirrors and inch past so little room was there to spare. For my Vespa it was a different story of course.
It is a pleasant place to stand of an evening and watch people down below being busy:
As I walked away small groups of people started up to the bridge along the sea grape covered path. "Quick!" she said, "Or the sun will be gone!" as she chided her family to step out. What the hell said I to myself. I'll come back tomorrow, the old bridge will still be here. And I got on my Triumph and went home:
And I will be back.
Generally I ride hell for leather home and to bed when I get off work but my wife had a sleepover in town with some friends so we had breakfast together before she went off to the classroom to work and me? I thought a chance to check out the sunrise should not be passed up as I was already past my bedtime and at this stage I felt I could safely delay passing out for an hour or two more. It was worth it to see that golden glow on the water.
I set off back into town from El Mocho where we had breakfast not quite sure where to go, so I gravitated south and took the scenic route along Smathers Beach. It was the obvious place to go if I was in search of a sunrise, and I noted some keen and well equipped photographers lining Dead Man's Curve on South Roosevelt. I left the tripods and massive telephotos behind and pulled over a bit further along unsure what I was chasing. And then I saw planes, pedestrians, cars cyclists and ships all coming together in one shot:
The big white blob steaming in the harbor channel means lots of people wandering Lower Duval later in the morning bringing, one hopes, lots of money into town. I was still seeking a higher purpose than mere commerce. All manner of things presented themselves, an expanse of deep blue sky, but the brown smear was actually a butterfly, I think:
Birds huddled along the seashore apparently waiting for the sun to get a move on and warm them up:
And a busy human being bustled by with a hand glued firmly to his head shouting apparently at himself:
The seasonably un-Key West clothing was prompted by a nasty cold front that swept through town and is supposedly going to keep on sweeping all week long.I can only imagine how cold it is in upstate New York or Wisconsin or wherever this holy terror entered the country from the frozen wastes of Canada:
Sixty degrees (15C) makes for a cold start in a town where local zero is measured at 70 degrees (21C). The beauty of winter in south Florida (45 degrees in Miami! 7C) is even though it can get cold,by local standards, this is not the rainy season. Cold fronts bring some rain with them, but on the whole it tends to be sunny and dry when these cold blasts hit. The rising sun bathed the pink block of Key West By The Sea condos:
Smathers Beach is where many of Key West's active population goes to exercise; they run, they bike, they roller skate and usually they do it in shorts and t-shirts, but this is a little too frigid for most people:
For some people the cold snap makes getting to work a trial:
And when the winds are honking out of the north, as they do in a cold front the fishing fleet ducks into the shallow waters south of Key West, waiting for things to get back to normal:
The boats lower their trawling booms to reduce the rolling effect of the sea and from a distance they look, to my naked eye unaided by the telephoto lense, like bison grazing the ocean as they sit and wait for milder weather. For me, riding the Bonneville is more of a trial than i might like but I console myself with the thought that at least its dry cold, and the sting of cold air under my helmet is a change from the many months of summer heat and humidity:
It was indeed a brisk ride home, though I didn't risk hypothermia and it didn't even really wake me up because when I finally rolled into bed at 8:30 I went out like a light, and it felt good. 
Going to photograph a residential street in New Town at around five in the afternoon is a trial for a shy person like me. It's absolutely the wrong time of day as residents are returning from a day at work and the street is starting to bustle with evening activity. And then a stranger on a scooter shows up with a camera pointing it in all sorts of odd places. 
It's that time of year again, when the Christmas lights go up and a self conscious man on a motorcycle (or his wife's scooter) starts to plan some night photographs of Christmas decorations in a town where frost is a stranger. Thank God.
One thinks of Key West when one is shovelling snow somewhere else and one thinks of narrow streets and piled up wooden houses and bars and crowds and all that stuff. But the backbone of the city are those streets where the downtown conchs retreated last century when they sold off their Old Town Conch cottages to arrivistes with too much money and too little sense. Out here they found wide open spaces, room to build a multi bedroom house with land to spare for a yard and a place to park a car or two. All modern conveniences.
Pretty they aren't by architectural standards but they are much easier to live in than some of the more picturesque homes downtown:
But landscaping and especially palm trees can give a concrete block home all the charm you need:
Some of the homes have a decidedly Caribbean air, pastel colors, whitewashed walls and they wouldn't be out of place in the Antilles. Perhaps the shutters indicate a snowbird reluctant apparently to fly south but undoubtedly they will be back soon enough:
This section of Patterson Avenue lies between a mangrove lined canal which extends from the Riviera Canal to the bight north of the island and splits New Town down the middle more or less, alongside Tenth Street here:
The canal could be quite attractive but it is what it is, which is a dump unhappily:
At the eastern end of these two blocks Patterson dead ends into the Professional Building, a Stalinist lump that was thrown up as an Awful Warning I suppose, to people anxious to avoid Key West's modern height restrictions:
I shouldn't grumble,my eye doctor lives in there and a very nice man he is too. He got displaced for a while when Wilma wrecked this massive impenetrable lump by pouring rain through the roof and melting the entire palazzo inside out. I was astonished it was such a feeble thing. Just like the old Soviet Union, impressive facades but feeble underneath the bluff exterior. I hope it was rebuilt properly because losing one's eye doctor to a hurricane is annoying and I doubt he'd stay on the job after a second drenching. But I digress. Patterson Avenue in these blocks is an extraordinarily convenient area to live in. Years ago we tried to rent a cottage out here when we decided to get off the boat and give our elderly Labrador a home ashore at last.
Behind the sound proof fence, more or less, lie the loading docks of Overseas Market, which can be an annoyance as trucks like to idle their engines here and waste valuable fuel for some reason.
However for those that like to walk, Winn Dixie, the Post Office and a pharmacy are close by, not to mention neighboring Key Plaza which houses Albertsons, K Mart and Radio Shack not to mention restaurants bars and a video rental. All the mod cons (modern conveniences). Also the gap in the fence has its unintended consequences: 
The mangrove bushes that flourish around here provide homes to the stubborn outdoors types who prefer freedom to the restrictions of the homeless shelter on Stock Island:
They just melt out of sight into the bushes as the people on the lowest runs of social ladders everywhere tend to do.The smart ones don't get loud, don't start fires and pack their trash, but there are those that like to draw attention to themselves. Look on the bright side, parking is easier in New Town and homes are bigger, traffic is lighter as there are fewer visitors and strange men on scooters bearing camera only rarely disturb the urban peace:
Of what is essentially an empty residential street. Perfectly placed in my geographic opinion.