From The Archives: Tropic Cinema

The newspaper notes this weekend is the tenth anniversary of the Tropic Cinema on Eaton Street. I wrote this essay five years ago. Changes were coming to the Tropic and and the future looked more mainstream and less experimental, as seen from the outside. I've been through enough radio non-profits to know how groups are born then mature, and change and go through middle age before they tend to wither and fade. Currently the Tropic is in middle age, doing well, and while they don't allow pets anymore (revolution!) they do continue to make money selling wine and beer. Some few things have changed over the past five years, of course but the Tropic stands and seems to be doing well enough, now with four screens, to have a secure future. At least until the lease runs out in a couple of decades! Long enough for me. Especially when I look back to the tentative beginnings of an Art Movie scene in Key West with screenings in a coffee shop on Caroline and at the San Carlos on Duval. I enjoyed the ornate former Cuban Consulate as a movie theater and was slightly sad when we attended the last screening before the brand new purpose built theater opened all three screens. Now of course the Tropic is my refuge. Like this, more or less given the passage of time since 2009 when I first published this essay:

                                                      

To me the Tropic Cinema is one of the defining characteristics that make Key West civilized. I am a fan of Voltaire Books a few blocks up the street, and I don't mind at all that Key West has it's own symphony orchestra, but the Tropic makes this a civilized town in which to live.

                                                   

The communal experience of being in a large room, in the dark watching a greater-than-life-sized story unfold is in danger of extinction. I understand the seductive value of DVDs and movies seen in the comfort of home, but to be swept up into the plot one needs the sense of immersion that only a large screen can offer...

                                                   

The Tropic Cinema is on the four hundred block of Eaton Street, between Whitehead and Duval, more or less equidistant from St Paul's Cathedral and the main Post Office, symbolic perhaps of the Art house theater's role part way between commercial enterprise and spiritual retreat.

                                                

The theater is a not-for-profit organization founded at the end of the last century to bring classic movies to Key West. It started out using borrowed space in art galleries and the splendid San Carlos theater whose Cuban managers seemed to be rather bemused sometimes by the films they showed in their baroque building. I loved going to the movies at the San Carlos, they breathed life into the former Cuban consulate on Duval Street, at least for the Friday, Saturday and Sunday night shows of the nascent Key West Film Society.

                                                          

The society got a 35-year lease on the Eaton street property and started building a modern three screen theater for $1.2 million dollars in 2003. Jean Carper an anti-aging nutrition author has apparently made a fortune peddling her diet advice and put up $200,000 of the cash and got to name the main screening room in honor of her late mother:

                                                

Natella Carper had a penchant for the flickers apparently and now she has her name in red neon like a marquee. But the Tropic is growing despite the parlous financial times we live in and there are plans to open a fourth, 48 seat screening room as an addition to the current theater:

                                                       

The Tropic is a membership organization and members get discount rates ($6 versus $9 to see a movie) and various invitations to special events. My wife and I have been members since early on but we decided a while back to upgrade our membership to $600 a year which gives us both free access to the movies year round. I guess the idea that we might watch a movie a week for an entire year seems a lot and it probably is, but the real idea is to support the society.We've always viewed the Tropic not only as a source of decent quality films but as a downtown refuge, a place to hangout in, and that got difficult over the past year when the Board hired staff members who viewed the Tropic as purely a business. We dropped out. New management, a more focused Board and we are back and happy to be in the theater again. Lori a dear friend has been promoted to manager and she has restored the theater to a convivial place to gather:

The theater boasts lots of movie memorabilia in the lobby, which these days is a bit truncated by the new screening room construction:

                                           

The society offers the usual lines of clothing......DVDs

                                            

They also show DVDs in the lobby to keep up the ambiance

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And the place is ankle deep in posters and the like:

They have left up one sign from the Commissars of the Ancien Regime, but it's not as draconian as it might first appear. The Regal in Searstown used to have a policy of not allowing bags, to avoid bombs going off in the theater, they said, but the tropic is a different kind of theater:

                                          

I like to spend money at the concession stand, for two reasons. One is I am supporting my preferred cultural outlet and the other is that they have an astonishing variety of food, with candies priced at a buck and a medium soda for just three dollars, so it's no great hardship to spend a little money here.

                                          

Zabar's Coffee is, I am reliably informed, a well know coffee in New York, and i like it well enough. Some times one needs something a little stronger at the movies:

New Yorkers have their coffee at the Tropic, Mid-Westerners get their beef:

                                          

The rest of us get dollar Snickers and Key Lime Pie on a stick for a few dollars more:

                                          

Not forgetting popcorn for all:

And now dogs are allowed back into the Tropic. The problem of dog ownership and going to the movies can get onerous in South Florida. It's hard to find a cool spot to park the car, cool enough to leave a dog inside in the summer if you live out of town. Plus it tends to rain without warning and leaving the windows open in summer guarantees a soaked interior. Much better to be able to bring the dog with you to the movies:

                                           

From the early days of the film society with Michael Shields, the future has always been one of making enough money to keep going and building on what he started the Tropic seems to be doing well. There are dozens of creative ways to raise money and named plaques are everywhere in the theater. I'd have happily paid $250 to get my name here had I thought of it and had my wife not thought me mad to want to stick my name above a urinal

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there are theater seats still available for plaques I believe. Management is also getting to show more mainstream films, movies that draw in patrons not devoted to movies with subtitles. The new Star Trek movie showed at the Tropic and the Tom Hanks/Ron Howard religious thriller Angels and Demons is also getting an airing at the Tropic.

Unlike the Regal this is an adult theater where using cell phones and talking in the movies really is frowned on. All that and a glass of wine too.

A great place to hang out. I'm glad the Tropic Cinema is going from strength to strength.

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Tourist Town

Key West Bight one fine Spring Morning.

Key West the picture postcard, sun reflecting off still waters.

Tourists negotiating a ride on those waters...

They say owners end up looking like their dogs...

...and I know I do.

 

I saw this woman cleaning a life ring off a charter boat:

I wanted to enquire whether drowning patrons would prefer to be flinging to a nicely polished flotation device? The question sounded flippant even in my head, so I refrained.

One more new luxury resort is making progress on the waterfront next to Schooner Wharf Bar. I wonder how the guests will like the music from across the lane all day and late at night. I see lawsuits and bitter recriminations in the future. Tourists like their towns just so.

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A Walk, A Movie, And A Night At Work

The southeasterly breeze has been keeping us refreshed these last several days, and fitting on the beach in my folding chair that I keep in the trunk of the car is a favorite activity. Aside from the view of the iconic Old Bahia Honda bridge I like this spot because there is no beach!

What that means is gawkers come and quickly get bored and bugger off back to the Highway to reach some more sandy spot. Cheyenne likes to lie in the grass, snoring loudly until she likes to get up and cool off by paddling in the water. Dead seaweed gets washed up by the incessant winds and that adds to tourist discomfort as they expect not only a sandy shoreline but a clean one too!

I caught Cheyenne rising up like a furry Venus from the seaweed and saltwater, in the act of shaking herself, pleased to have cooled off on an 82 degree afternoon. Then we climbed the hill created by Flagler's engineers to get the 1912 railroad tracks onto the elevated bridge. Cheyenne found a bush for a short nap in the shade.

Driving home I got to enjoy being for a short while, suspended between a blue sky and a turquoise sea, and as I was in the car I could do nothing. Human bring versus human doing. Cheyenne got her bath once home and then she passed out from excess activity. I got ready to go into town and she barely opened one eye as she stretched out on her favorite piece of floor, not her bed, not the couch but the floor.

I was alone for the 3:50 show of Monuments Men a World War Two caper about soldiers assigned to retrieve stolen art works. I was so alone in the George screening room at the tropic I behaved very badly indeed and sent texts periodically to my wife from my seat at the back.

It was loosely based on a true story but in this case embellished into a melodrama with a stellar cast and an dolly paced story. One minute comedy, the next minute tragedy and over it all hovered the very real truth that the Germans wrecked and looted thousands of artworks as they occupied Europe and Russia.

It ended awful close to my start time at work but the Bonneville was in rare form and we raced away to the police station where I arrived with give minutes to spare. I had done rather too much stuff and not taken enough naps for my taste but it has been a lovely day. No alcohol, no bars, not much human companionship but of that I would have plenty all night as I sat up dispatching with Nick and Shannon.

I arrived just in time for the movie but as I parked the Bonneville an old dude with a BMW Custom Cruiser, a unique bike, asked what year my frisky young colt was. He told me he had put 300,000 miles on his 1960s model and I wanted to hear more but the movie was starting so I had to rush off, rather rudely. Not at all in the spirit of the laid back Florida Keys.

 

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Home Sweet Home

Let's face it, there's no place like home. Especially when it's sunny but not hot, breezy but not cold and your dog needs to recover from a long road trip.

Work has been interesting to come back to, no big changes, everything tools along just fine without you...as though you were never there. My dog slips back into her routine the same way, a hop into the back of the car, a walk, a meal and a nap.

We went downtown yesterday morning, Cheyenne and I, just to make sure Duval Street hadn't fallen off the continent in my ten day absence. You know how everyone has two minimalist jobs, maybe three in Key West...I wonder if I'd get free Crocs?

And people are still dumping food where my predator dog can hunt it down and kill it. No fast food joints on Ocracoke but there are a few in Key West.

We ambled down Caroline Street, wandered down Duval and crossed to Whithead Street, where the county courthouse is located and thus so is the marker for the end of US Highway One. I had hoped they opened at eight but a helpful janitor shook her and told me eight-thirty. Bad news for my bladder. Besides, what is all this shit about the "end of the rainbow..." and "endless opportunities..." Someone was high when they chose that sentiment for public consumption.

Key West has done well for me but I'm a lazy sod, not motivated by ambition, and happy to get time off, some overtime, old fashioned health benefits. I don't need to make waves or change what works for the people in charge. Years ago I was a really good radio reporter but sainted Ronald Reagan deregulated the airwaves to reduce everything to common denominator crap, the stuff you hear today put out by remote newsroom. I quit before I got canned, wondering what to do next and where to do it. A lack of a career is a joyous thing if you like to travel.

I feel lucky I landed my police job, much better pay and benefits and better prospects too than I never expected. And I landed it in a town I like to work in. But it does limit you, this much pleasure in where you live. You got to think three times before you decide to quit. The weird thing is I don't want to. For the first time in my shiftless life I am not looking for the next good thing. It's here and now.

When I was a youngster I was footloose and fancy free, I quit jobs and moved and I saw a lot of this country. Nowadays with a national economy in flux, not booming like they tell us, work is a precious thing. Even if I wanted to I wouldn't budge right now. I like Ocracoke, a lot, it's such a small intimate village. It's a great vacation spot, with no work and no prospects and damnit, they had snow this past damnable winter. Ocracoke is my Key West, the place I like to go and think and rest, and work off the stress of Spring Break.

So, dispite the irritations I'm glad to be home. Key West is the hometown even though I live outside the city limits. The work I do gives me intimate knowledge of streets and lanes and peoples' bad habits. One day Key West will get it together to work out a plan for dealing with those few hardcore bums who don't contribute and don't want to learn to either. The tourists come and step over them.

And yet I can see the attraction even for bums, perfect weather, lots of music, art, literature and public debate about every little thing because this is a town that inspires passion. Even on skid row I guess. I'm glad to walk my dog here but I'd still walk without her, there's so much to see every time I stroll.

Pretty nice to be home, and nice to have a home to come back to.

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Big Yellow Taxi

So Garythetourist asked me what I thought of the proposal to spend seventy seven million dollars to restore the old Seven Mile Bridge. Hmm thought I, what could be bad about that? At least they aren't paying to pave a Pigeon Key with luxury homes! Unhappily the money will come in dribs and drabs over decades, so I will be dead before the last of the money is assigned to Monroe County by the State under this plan. Florida's DOT pays $57 million over a 30-year period; Monroe County pays $14 million and the City of Marathon pays $5 million over some unspecified period of time. The old bridge was built just over a century ago and nowadays is used as a fishing and walking pier but passenger traffic to Pigeon Key is no longer allowed.

Nowadays the public gets to the Pigeon Key museum by boat, which makes me glad I went when I did.

Someone happened to mention to me that the "Submarine Pens" on Boca Chica Key are for sale and I was surprised, not just by the fact of the offering but that I hadn't previously noticed. In this aerial view from the listing website you can see the Boca a Chica a Naval Air Station in the background and the thin white line cutting across the picture: that's the Overseas a Highway. Key West would be to the right, Big Coppitt Key to the left.

There is a lot of mythology surrounding the so-called Submarine Pens, and Sotheby's website perpetuates the nonsense. They say the seven canals cut into 122 acres of land will produce 26 luxury canal side homes on the land that was "used to house submarines during the Cuban Missile crisis. I wonder how they got unwieldy subs drawing at least fifteen feet into this isolated lagoon that has absolutely no facilities at all, not even cleats to tie the boats off to. And why would they have penned them into these tough hewn canals anyway? No photograph exists showing submarines parked here but you can find lots of subs at their proper docks at Truman Waterfront, as related here: Marker Details - Key West Historic Markers Project.

I believe the submarine pens were created as a project you build officer housing north of the Boca Chica base and the canals were part of that project. Now we will see luxury homes sprout here when some developer scrapes together the asking price of twenty six million bucks, a mere bagatelle in a world sheer a bank CEO gets a bonus that size for getting his too big to fail institution in trouble with the SEC.

Here is my original essay on the Submarine Pens from distant 2008 when my Bonneville was nearly new and Cheyenne was unknown to me.

Someone with a very large back hoe or a plentiful supply of dynamite came to the north shore of Boca Chica Key, at Mile Marker Eight and blew the bejeezus out of the limestone rock. They call these cuts in the rock the Submarine Pens. Thus one could reasonably assume that they were created to dock submarines in... However when you visit these very expensive holes in the water it becomes obvious the best you could do with them is...swim in them!

I don't know who dug them and I don't know when they were created but there are fully seven rectangular holes in the limestone, and to me as a veteran of the Canal they look wider and are definitely longer than the thousand-foot locks of Panama's Eighth Wonder of the World. They also appear to be a great deal less useful, even though they do look quite pretty in a pastoral, unmilitary sort of way: These holes in the water could be Key West's Stonehenge or perhaps, viewed from the air, they could be the island's crop circles or cousins to the enormous figures drawn in the deserts of South America. Submarines? I don't think so. I've poked around online and the only mention I can find of submarines and Key West are the official docks at Truman Annex, where the Navy was based for a long time. On the north side of Boca Chica Key the long arm of military militariness is still felt at the inner end of the road past the last pens:

The gate has a shiny new lock to protect the radar installation for the nearby Naval Air Station airfield where Navy jets take practice flights:

Other than the radar dome there is no visible purpose for the road anymore. The Navy owns the land and the mangroves on the other side but the street itself is deteriorating visibly and the bushes are growing out of control:

The thing about the "submarine pens" is that there are no structures alongside them, there are no docks, no cement no signs of any of the shoreside support systems that ships need when they come into port. So the conclusion one draws is that someone somewhere decided to hew out of the living rock a proposal to dock submarines 8 miles east of Key West Harbor across waters too thin to float a sub and instead of completing the channel first, they decided to carve out the pens? If true these things are the most expensive toilet seats the Navy ever sat on. But they do make a pleasant recreational area for Keys civilians, I must say. And clearly some locals have taken advantage of these unused giant swimming pools. I found a camp site complete with fire ring, tables and chairs and pool "facilities."This place has been floating around in my consciousness forever, because I have heard people talk about the pens, but I have never previously bothered to come out here. Why? I don't know really despite my self anointed tag as an explorer. Now that I have come out here I feel like a kid discovering a huge new playground, and I'm guessing that weekdays in summer I shall find a corner or two within this "park" I can enjoy by myself on a hot sticky afternoon.

I mentioned to my colleague Diggy that I was planning a trip to explore the submarine pens and he looked at me quizzically, declining to ride his Honda 750 "all the way out" to Mile Marker 8 only to get stopped by a Navy Guard. "Those places are on the Navy base aren't they?" said this Conch graduate of Key West High School. That misconception stayed with me as I swung off Highway One at the Navy Base entrance.

The Navy owns most of the land on Boca Chica ("small mouth" in Spanish) Key, with an active Naval Air Station south of Highway One which bisects the island. On the north side of the island, accessed from the ramped Boca Chica exit from Highway one, lies the mystery of the submarine pens.

 

The access road runs parallel to Highway One and then passes through some broken gates. As I rode the Bonneville through the gates I wondered, in a rather paranoiac state of mind, if armed Navy guards were going to leap out of the casuarina trees, armed to the teeth with camouflage sprouting from their helmets. No such thing came to pass, as I rumbled down the tatty old access road. In the distance, beyond Highway One, I could see the hangars at Boca Chica glowing in the evening sun:

And alongside the access road the old outlines of cement bunkers, probably ammunition magazines rose out of the mangroves like large immobile turtles:

 

I first rode to the end of the road, snapping pictures as I went, still half wondering if I was in fact trespassing, but after I got to the locked gate I realised that I was alone on an empty, unmarked street open to all. The fact that we in the Keys live on small slivers of land necessarily gives these extra strips of open space value out of all proportion to what you see here. This is an excellent piece of parkland right off my commute and I can see strapping a folding chair to my saddlebag, stuffing a thermos of tea inside the same saddlebag and taking an afternoon to sit in the shade and read in peace and quiet, far from the distractions of modern life. No bums, no radios no nothing to disturb me or my motorcycle.

It isn't as though I have explored the whole place yet, so next time I will have to poke a little bit further, ride a little bit deeper into the undergrowth and check out a few more views.

Nevertheless I don't think that, picturesque though they may be, the Submarine Pens of Boca Chica Key should never reveal the whys and wherefores of their existence, even if military officer housing were the real answer.

PS:

The Submarine Pens were closed and locked to prevent public access a short while later. I was told there was a serious accident there, involving alcohol and lack of judgement of course so to prevent lawsuits and possible loss of life the Navy had decided to close the delightful park-like pens to public access. As always the stupidity of the few impacts the many. Now it seems we may well see even more homes and traffic and so forth originating here where before there was not much. Paving paradise was the refrain I think, coined by Joni Mitchell.

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