Bill Butler Park

Bill Butler Park is named for a Key West musician "The King of Junkanoo" which is a Bahamian celebration of a carnival sort. Butler died in 1984 and ended up being carried to his rest by his family members after the hearse broke down. That accident created a legend in that he had created a marching band to among other things accompany, funeral processions in the New Orleans style.

The park, after much of the usual Key West discussion has been cleaned up and freshened and all in honor of the musician. 

The work of renovation began in 2014 which was when I was here with my motorcycle and quite often with Cheyenne on her slow Eeyore like plods around town. Link

I like the approaches to the place along narrow streets lined with typical Conch cottages. Before the renovation the park itself had a remote feeling, far from noise and bustle of Key West's Old Town.

Cheyenne came and went in my life and through it all this old girl has spent her life on the porch watching me pass with her and with Rusty over the years. I wonder if she would envy Rusty his travels? I doubt it.  I rather suspect Rusty might envy her routine in place.

It's a pretty spot to spend a life:

I walked back to my Vespa pressed into service for a few rides around town prior to the new owner picking it up.

Mangrove Sunset

A collection of sunset pictures. There is no story, beyond the fact my dog and I were out walking late and it got dark in a blaze of orange glory. I am amazed to find myself alone enjoying the show, I have never seen anyone with or without a camera out staring at the sky above the mangroves. I keep telling myself I must soon take an evening and watch the sunset among the noise and showmanship of Mallory Square, just because I do from time to time. But this is where I prefer to be, alone with Rusty.  

Whitmarsh Lane

I was on Whitmarsh Lane in 2009.  I was on Whitmarsh Lane in 2019.  I was there last week. I like it!

I saw the long white wall and was tempted for reasons still not apparent to take a photograph on timer.

I haven't done that before on Whitmarsh lane and probably won't again.

Solares Hill

NB: I got a comment that the print size was too small and I increased it a bit. Is this noticeable? Helpful?

Apparently Solares Hill has been measured and the height given for the 21st century (sea level rise notwithstanding) is 18 feet, or five and a half Canadian feet. I always thought it was 14 feet, but apparently the dimple has grown. Or I wasn't paying attention.

I wrote about this spot in 2008 on this page and not much has changed. The Vespa pictured in 2008 looks the same but now has a new owner in Key West. The hill hasn't changed. The pictures on this page are bigger now I have a 20 million pixel camera instead of the 500,000 pixel HTC phone camera.

Looking west toward Simonton Street at the bottom of the hill, unhelpfully flattened by the camera optics, below. They have 100 million pixel cameras for sale nowadays and they still flatten hills. 

As I mentioned in 2008 there is no sign here that this is the highest spot in Key West. Everyone crowds around Mile Marker Zero as though touching that sign confers magical healing powers. Solares Hill crests somewhere near the red car in the picture below.  Not that anyone cares.

I've added a few more photos I took from the area. 



Solares Hill is the hump on the far right of the picture below:

Find the church and you've found the hill, a Caribbean look in bright winter sunlight.

Old Houses

I took my last surviving powered two wheeler for a spin after I sold my Vespa last week. The little electric Jetson Bolt is my circus-bear-on-a-unicycle look and it hauls me around at 9mph so I can get back to the office without being a  smelly sweating pedaling mess. It also fits easily on the back seat of the Fiat 500 which has become it's garage. I drive to work with the electric scooter always there and ready to run an errand. This old house is at Bill Butler Park:

I was meandering aimlessly enjoying the sun when it occurred to me I wanted to photograph old decrepit buildings. I recently posted a photo on Instagram of the new hole at Olivia and Emma where the old white house with the pink shutters used to be, in Bahama Village, across from the Douglass gym.  

I took the photo below in 2013 out walking the late Cheyenne and you can imagine that eight years later it was probably time for a change for the crumbling house. But I got to thinking...there are so many old houses in key West and soon they must all disappear. 

So, I thought to myself as I rode around photographically uninspired but enjoying the fresh air, why don't I round up a few pictures of places that might soon be gone, pieces of key West history, the city as it was? This next one I found on Johnson Lane, last photographed in 2008 LINK:

I grant you it is quite the cliché photographing old distressed buildings, and I adhered to that cliché by making the pictures in black and white. I think the fascination with the old buildings comes not just from how picturesque they look, but also because that look evokes feelings. Sometimes one is glad to see some undesirable thing collapsing and finally rotting away to be replaced by the fresh new version. For me in Key West these old homes are the vivid expression of memory, they are the manifestation of life lived. 

I grew up with shutters like these in the photo below, and I remember my mother throwing them open and yelling at me to come upstairs for lunch or for an unwanted siesta or some other intrusion into my summer vacation. So when I rode by on Olivia Street and saw this window I was compelled to stop. 

Obviously anyone who walks Old Town can allow themselves to fall in love with wooden homes and masses of greenery and narrow lanes and so forth. But these old things are on their way to extinction and when they are replaced externally they will have to adhere to historic code criteria while inside they will be modern and comfortable and livable as they should be.  For now they are monuments to the past awaiting inevitable transformation into modern practical expensive dwellings for winter visitors. 

This one on Olivia at Frances is lived in.

And if you were under any illusion that living cheek by jowl with your neighbors was easy there is a message here for you.

As unsightly as it is I guess it beats calling 911! (For the humor impaired I'm making a funny as I answer 911 in Key West and these are exactly the nuisance calls I deal with all day: trash parking and noise complaints). For some neighbors life in close quarters is very difficult and communication frequently breaks down.  

The other reason I like black and white is because I can paint a more modern lived-in home into an essay on old houses. Such is the architecture of Old Town. This conch cottage has survived the passage of time as a lived in home. It is a survivor.  

And so we come to end of my lunch break, a dead end as it were. Like this dry wall in The Meadows.