Key West Guests

Here it is, a lovely beach scene in colorful Key West... a bandstand at Higgs Beach, the vacation dream of many a snowbound northerner, sand cool under the early morning sun which will bring October's daytime temperature close to ninety degrees.

The other bandstand at this county beach within the city is much more active.  The bandstand makes an alfresco area for the residentially challenged to gather and plan their busy days.



Fresh arrivals from the Temporary Overnight Shelter on Stock Island which closes in the morning, show up at Higgs beach after a pleasant ride along sunny Smathers Beach.

And you might ask, who wouldn't want to hang out at Higgs Beach on a lovely Fall morning. The problem is the city is in a bit of a ferment about what to do with a number of residents who prefer outdoor living. And many more will arrive as it gets cold Up North.

Housing in Key West is expensive, certainly by Florida standards, but that's hardly surprising on small islands discovered by people with money who like to own second homes down here for the same reason the homeless show up in winter. And things being the way they are foreclosed homes, disputed homes and homes otherwise not occupied enjoy the supreme irony of sitting useless in a  town desperately short of affordable housing stock. I think the street number on this one could be 730.

 

The homeless issue came to the forefront after the Mayor decided that after he sorted out the need for a new city hall to be built at Glynn Archer School, what the city needed was a half way house for the homeless to get them reinserted to society. The city hall plan was controversial but the homeless facility to be sited at the Easter Seals building on College Road, on Stock Island got backs up across the island. While Mayor Cates could be described as resilient, or stubborn, depending on your approval rating of the Glynn Archer project (I like it) it seems like the rehab center on College Road may be a dead duck. Fundamentally the homeless problem in Key West is about tourism. Who wants to spend 500 bucks a night just to sleep and trip over a snoring drunk on the sidewalk outside? It just isn't  on.

The homeless problem is going to get worse pretty soon. In order to settle a lawsuit with some severely offended high end apartment owners nearby, the temporary shelter will close down. The Sheriff, eyeing his next election, announced he wanted it gone from his backyard so that's that pretty much. What comes next is a  big question. The old timers who managed to create the shelter, Steve Braddock homeless rehab advocate, John  Jones gnarly former assistant city manager and former Sheriff Rick Roth all worked out a plan to comply with the law and clear homeless from city streets.

Well, that coalition of the motivated is gone and now an unknown number of homeless men and women, perhaps 200 or perhaps 2,000 depending on who you ask, will have nowhere to sleep unless the city commission comes up with a plan, and so far, in  a fair imitation of Congress the city commission has reached the squabbling stage with no sign of a plan ahead. Meanwhile the tourists keep coming because Key West, cruise ships and all, is a desirable destination. Look at those cabs lined up waiting for trade from Casa Marina Resort.

 The issue is complicated by a Court ruling that  requires local jurisdictions to make available "safe zones" where humans can sleep, before the jurisdictions can arrest people for vagrancy. In other words, when the temporary Shelter closes the  law is that  the homeless can't be moved along. Unless a new solution offering a safe place to sleep is found.

 People often ask if Key West is safe as though there are pockets of  evil doers lurking in  dark corners of  terrible places. Key West isn't completely immune to violence God knows, and  if you combine alcohol with a soured relationship (of any sort, romantic or not) the potential for people to get stupid and hit each other is there. However violence between strangers is rare, again, nit unheard of but very rare. If you want to stay safe in Key West stay sober and sensible, don't flash valuables and walk at your pleasure. Like this woman out exercising:

This dude may not be visually appealing in our youth and wrinkle free culture but he looked pretty harmless, even to Cheyenne. The homeless know they get no leeway from the cops and even the aggressive ones don't want to mess with people whose word will be believed over their own. So for the most part their dramas and disputes occur within their own street culture. Most of the irritation with the homeless comes down to appearances. 

 Indubitably it gets irritating to have a recreational space used as a dormitory, even by the self contained. However park use during daylight hours is open to all no matter how disheveled and smelly and that too creates irritation among the well heeled.

In an effort to move the homeless along from the picnic tables at Higgs beach they turned that area into a  playground requiring all adult users to be accompanied by a child. Brilliant move but now for some reason the playground is closed (the old Astro Park across the street is still open).

The homeless issue on the streets of key west gets irritating to people who rent or own expensive homes. I don't know how much of the theft and pilfering downtown is attributable to the homeless but they are an eyesore and panhandling got so bad the city created two begging zones to enable the outlawing of panhandling across Old Town and particularly Duval Street. But as you can see life this close to the street  requires a certain  level of awareness (despite the bad grammar):

And now we have the big crowds of tourists coming for Fantasy Fest and Goombay and a week of parties before the big parade and all the festivities to bring people to town. The  festivities will all undoubtedly go swimmingly but the underlying issue will still be here as winter closes in and the highly demanding high rent snowbirds show up and don't want to get used to oiks on the streets.

 Oh well, if Congress can bury their heads in the sand about big issues maybe the same will work with a little one. Party on!

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Colorful Bahama Village

The one hundred block is the only block of Geraldine Street in Key West's Bahama Village.

Murals are spreading like wildfire across the old brick wall facing the single row of homes.

The old transformer needs something to cover it and in the fullness of time I think the plants will do it. Maybe, but it's a start.

The chicken population seems to be exploding. The buggers are everywhere and in ever larger clumps. If you check early art made on the streets of Key West you'll see no chickens. I'm pretty sure they had eggs before they had chickens in the Southernmost City. But they do add the color craved by visitors.

The building on Emma Street in the picture below houses the Key West masjid, which is the Arabic word for mosque which is a word that comes to us from French. Masjid is a place of prostration and where Key West Muslims will prostrate themselves who knows. Me neither, but God is Great nd doubtless there will be a solution.

The VFW post nearby is in a parlous state and history looks set to be forgotten for want of money.

The other VFW in town was on Elizabeth Street and they were in the path of development so they sold and moved to nice new vast digs on the Boulevard. This lot, buried in the Village, well this is the South, no matter what Crackers tell you about South (liberal Jewish) Florida not being the Real South. Money talks.

I hope special tax funds from the village keep the lights on.

I may have taken half a dozen pictures of this crumbling house. It's still there so I keep taking the pictures! I love the color of the shutters against the fading white paint.

There are those who can't understand why I would wear pink Crocs (half price as no one wants men's in pink) but covering your truck in dried seaweed?

I am no predictor of trends and stuff so had you asked me a few years ago what were the chances of a $25,000 tricycle becoming popular I'd have said "Nil." Well, it's just as well Bombardier didn't ask me for an informed opinion. Like they say you can buy a Mazda Miata for less money, get better mileage and the car comes with a roof and air conditioning too. Plus the Can Am Spyder gets stuck in traffic just like a car, yet these weird machines sell well:

I have been to Fort Zachary a few times but I'd never previously noticed the beach warning flags.

This picture back a Truman Waterfront I rendered in black and white. I'm no Dorothea Lange but I liked the effect.

Laid back Key West is there, but only for the few; the very rich, the very poor or visitors.

Key West on Dwellable

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Koreshan State Park

Show up at this state park at eight o'clock on a Sunday morning in October and find the place to yourself. It is southwest Florida so if I say it was cool and fresh at that hour you have to allow for the acclimatization of the human body immersed in sub tropical weather for far too long. So for anyone looking out the window at snow drifts, orange leaves and gray skies it was hot and muggy. But either way we had the lot to ourselves.

After years spent trying to wedge myself into the narrow confines of acceptable behavior in mythical California the land of Hollywood free thinkers, the relaxed attitude the State of Florida takes to pets is still a feature of life I marvel at. Friends in Santa Cruz recoil in horror: "Florida? Ugh, isn't that humid and buggy?" they ask imagining life in some hellish low tax, redneck organic-free swamp. Oh yes I reply, eager to reinforce their insular prejudices, but I can take my dog to the state parks whenever I want. The Koreshans found a buggy humid swamp when they came here at the end of the 19th century fresh from Chicago and full of ambition. Early photographs show a less lush, manicured environment but what one sees today on the banks of the Estero River is really quite pleasant.

And dogs are allowed on the grounds on a leash but are not allowed inside the buildings. Excellent.

Less than eighty degrees and no humidity at eight thirty in the morning. Also excellent.

The founder of Koreshanity spent decades trying to get people interested in his very particular view of the cosmos. Cyrus Reed Teed was a doctor of medicine which fact slightly boggled my mind considering an educated man of science could believe the nonsense he espoused. His name sounds like an anagram and not content he decided to take what he thought was the biblical translation of Cyrus into Koresh. And naturally named his movement for himself. David Koresh, decades later led the Branch Davidians to a fiery death in Waco, so this lot were considerably ahead of them. Koresh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The story of the Koreshan Unity is a classic American tale of a handsome charismatic leader who dreamed up a bizarre philosophy that wouldn't let go of his imagination, such that he felt the need to spread it around among the unbelievers. Being as how he was the charismatic handsome dude aforementioned he attracted women like crazy. In fact he became the object of several law suits accusing him of alienating the affection of several Chicago housewives from their angry husbands, so Koreshanity moved south to the land of the mosquito.

The thing is though that these people, mostly women, weren't just some Jim Jones nutters in the jungle. Teed laid down some pretty strict rules in keeping with his meticulous if crazy cosmology. Celibacy was the rule, women led the community and the belief was that the earth was a hollow sphere looking inward not outward because Teed couldn't imagine the extent of an eternally expanding universe. So he simply inverted the cosmos and decided the sun and moon were inside the earth. I decided it made no sense whatsoever so I gave up trying to figure it out. And I'm not smart enough to be a doctor.

The state park ranger who opened the Planetary Court, as this house was called, showed obvious affection for these people that she has studied. She wound up the phonograph which was suffering from a weak spring because she wanted to illustrate the love of art culture and literature that inspired the Koreshans. By modern standards they were by no means threatening and we would find them unexceptional today. Seven women each representing one of the seven known planets lived in this building and led the community. Because women weren't acceptable as leaders to the world outside these privileged three hundred acres, seven men represented them in public. Women didn't get the vote in the Land of the Free till 1920.

 

They were middle class intellectuals and artists and the ranger delighted in showing us the rather poor handiwork of their construction standards. The exception was the staircase, beautiful and intricately built by a shipwright the community gave refuge to for a period of time. In payment he built them a magnificent staircase. Rising damp inside the upstairs closed off the area to us so we could only admire it from below.

We got a condensed version of the Koreshan story in a film produced by the local public TV station WGCU,Video: Koreshan Unity: A Quest for Utopia | Watch Untold Stories Online | WGCU Public Media Video.

Teed's study looked better set up for a temperate climate to me. I cannot imagine hanging out here in July reading the paper and listening to a record or two. The ranger said they used cross ventilation to good effect but I am a fan of air conditioning especially in the breeze-free interior of southwest Florida.

The story goes that a first the Koreshans were welcomed into the wilderness by the few people that lived here. The railroad put Ft Myers on the map and what had been a frontier fort in the Indian Wars became a railroad stop and an outpost of civilization. But this was a world of survival not of lives lived large. The music and theater the Koreshans integrated into their daily lives brought color and recreation into frontier life and it was enjoyed by all.

The trouble started when the Koreshans got involved in politics and upset the locals with their drive to incorporate the new town of Estero, between Fort Myers and what would become Naples. Like I said this is an American story of following a dream created by the followers of a handsome and charismatic leader but these relatively wealthy cultured outsiders ended up clashing with the locals. It's a story we all know and have seen before. Hell, we see it today in Key West where people like me show up in town, and then want to change what they find, an impulse I have largely resisted, though I say so myself.

It seems that a decade after they first arrived a group of Koreshans got into a banal political debate that devolved into a punch up in town. Teed went down supposedly to break it up, perhaps to get involved supporting his own, and in the event he was knocked to the ground and ultimately got arrested.

This stupidity was the beginning of the end of the Koreshans even though they hung on for half a century more. Teed lingered and died in 1908 apparently from his injuries and with the loss of their charismatic leader the followers, some 200 of them put his corpse in a bath tub and waited for him to come back to life as Koreshanity predicted he would. No surprise, his mortal remains rotted and a week later he was planted as ordered by the authorities. His grave was washed away in a hurricane and effectively he vanished forever.

The problem with charismatic leaders is that they frequently find themselves preaching nonsense and their cult lasts only as long as belief in the nonsense can be sustained. We've seen this in our modern era when raggedy assed prophets show up announcing the imminent end of the world. The world doesn't end (though sometimes it feels like it should!) and the followers either a) kill themselves or b) bugger off back to real life, the sadder and wiser for their deviation from reality. The rest of us mock them for their gullibility and ignore whatever revelations the experience may have taught them.

The Koreshans soldiered on, a few them, continuing to believe their cosmos was turned inside out, hoping for resurrection when it was clear none was to hand. Celibacy is bound to hamper a movement, as Catholicism has discovered in the diminished numbers of priesthood applicants, but Catholicism's back up plan calls for families to be fruitful and multiply. With neither a charismatic leader nor children Koreshanity was headed toward oblivion.

In 1961 the last four handed their lands over to the state to create this lasting memorial to the commune that flourished briefly on the banks of the Estero river. The Koreshans were the first to have electricity in these parts as they adopted Thomas Edison's direct current generating method, first by steam power and then by diesel generator two decades before commercial power was made available in 1946 to southwest Florida at large. All of it has been preserved for us to see and admire.

We spent two hours on the grounds enjoying a couple of the buildings and then taking the nature trail along the river. There was so much to see we barely seemed to have scratched the surface and a return visit will be in order. The last Koreshan, a woman predictably, died in 1982. She was a refugee from the Nazis who found a home here and resented bitterly her label in her last years as the last Koreshan insisting they will live on forever.

There is a community foundation in their name run by some of their descendants hoping to exploit 75 of the acres deeded to them to build a lasting memorial to the movement and they are mentioned in the movie. Whatever their accomplishments may be this property of lovely homes and neatly manicured grounds and a serene wooded trail are the monuments worthy of the memory of these strange obsessed people.

In a world filled with uncertainty and ugliness you can see the attraction of yielding to a leader, agreeing to some ridiculous ideas and living a life of beauty and worthwhile work in a place surrounded by like minded neighbors.

And yet the search for meaning and immortality and denial of basic human nature sank these people because being human seems to require the ultimate sacrifice from all of us. We cannot it seems just live. I continue to be astonished by the fervor daily life seems to require of all of us. I wondered at the time why the invasion of Iraq was so necessary, a war that killed thousands and contributed to half the national debt we have so far accumulated. We continue to live beyond our means and who can blame us? We prefer that to the reality of a life deprived of that which we think we need, believing industrialists who promise us easier living as they take away meaningful labor. Our politicians fail every day to represent us, and a short fantastical walk through the alternate reality of the Koreshans is enough to make you think that, hell yes, I can believe the world is a hollow sphere and the sun and moon are but illuminated discs, if that's all I have to do to leave in peace and true shared prosperity. Then the dream fades and reality intrudes once more, sweat, heat and buzzing insects.

The nature trail seemed endless and the sun was high in the sky and it was actually starting to get hot. Cheyenne's tongue was getting longer so we turned back before trail's end and clumped through the campground toward the distant parking lot and our car.

The sun blazed down out of a clear blue sky and I thought about the land clearing of the first Koreshans, living in tents and using hand tools to make Utopia out of scrub land and pine trees. They were brave people, leaving behind what they knew in Chicago to come down here and carve a communal life out of the wilderness.

In the end I suppose we can conclude they got it wrong, but I'm glad they gave it a shot. We had a good day on their land, among their dreams and their hopes. Not a bad legacy in the end and I'm sure Cheyenne would agree.

No one is going to open a state park in my memory so the last laugh is on the Koreshan Unity I guess.

Key West on Dwellable

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