Tenuously connected to the rest of the United States by a narrow ribbon of asphalt with only some scrub and sea grape separating you from the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Gulf of Mexico on the other, Key West is the end of the road – US 1 Mile Marker 0 and the last piece of land until Cuba. Getting there puts you on 43 bridges, including a seven-mile bridge that looks at times as if you will be deposited directly into the blue if you keep the car moving. Then there is the train track bridge running alongside. It comes out of nowhere, and it goes nowhere, since there are what appear to be unintentional breaks, as if the bridge had broken apart and instead of fixing it, they built another one. The air is always sweet, and the egrets and pelicans feel like self-appointed escorts.
The island of Key West is only four miles long and two miles wide, but its main street, historic Duval, could be called the longest block in the world, running from the Atlantic to the Gulf. On my first of many visits to Key West, sixteen years ago, I parked the car a few blocks from the wharf, and noticed immediately the parked car behind me. It wasn’t the fact that it was two decades old, but that the hood ornament was a naked Barbie, hair flying.
This was mere precursor to the rest of Key West, a place that either calls to you or doesn’t. It calls to me. Even after two weeks elsewhere in South Florida, I don’t really relax until I hit Key West, and I’m not a drinker.
The gods look benevolently on unconventional pursuits here, where there are the most bars and the most churches per capita in the United States. There are also more artists and writers per capita, and surely more men with long, grey ponytails than anywhere else in America. There are also real changes afoot, with little conch houses in Old Town selling to wealthy investors for $1.8 million and up through the outpost realty offices of both Sotheby’s and Christie’s.
But happily, along Duval Street today, there is still the guy with the parrot, still the hand-painted and outrageous bikes and cars, still the pedicabs, still the Lowering of the Wench from the mast of a tall ship at the Schooner Wharf Bar on New Year’s Eve, still the guy who makes hats and giant insects out of coconut fronds, and one whose sign offers “Dirty Jokes for $1…And Up!” A bridal party in white tulle and tuxedos was grouped around him on my last day, erupting in giggles and guffaws. And even though the trick in Key West is not to be in the water (because there is very limited sandy beach) so much as on it, it’s worth remembering that when clouds or a chill rain covers Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and South Beach, it is usually deliciously, even recklessly sunny in Key West.
On your first day here, orient yourself by riding the Conch Train (not the trolley) for the well-narrated and inclusive 90-minute tour. Never mind that it looks silly. The vehicle is an open-sided, canopied, padded-seat “centipede,” complete with a little-engine-that-could up front. Serving tourists since 1958, the engineer takes the train up and down, up and down the streets of Old Town. He hardly pauses for breath as he tells you everything about kapok and banyan trees, cisterns, presidents, pirates, tin roofs – all the “did you know” details.
Did you know, for instance, that Key West was once the largest city in Florida, and the wealthiest in the United States? And that it still has Florida’s oldest public library? That it was the largest cigar and natural sponge producer in the United States? With a cigar tsar? And a sponge magnate? Sure, you knew Hemingway fished, drank, and scribbled here, but did you know that Robert Frost, Tennessee Williams, John James Audubon, John Dewey, and Harry Truman slept here regularly? Or That Key West was the birthplace of Pan Am Airlines in 1927? Or that the world’s third largest coral reef is here, extending 230 miles to the Dry Tortugas?
When the Conch Tour Train is finished, you’ll know where to find the Haitian art gallery and the homemade ice cream shop, the Cuban cigar shops and the authentic Cuban restaurants. You’ll know the difference between an “eyebrow” house and a “shotgun” house, and how to “read” a gingerbread balustrade: if there are carved whiskey bottles scroll-cut into the design instead of violins or ship’s wheels, you know exactly what you could expect to find inside during Prohibition. And you’ll pass the cemetery where one grave says, in ironic self-satisfaction, “I told you I was sick.”
If you’d rather walk, walk, walk, or bike ride, pick up the outstanding (and free) 65-page “Walking and Biking Guide to Historic Key West” by Sharon Wells, a resident since 1976, who first tramped the island’s streets as a historian and photographer documenting Key West’s 19th century landmarks for the National Register. Wells worked as a historic preservationist for 17 years for the State of Florida and first penned this gem in 1984. She’s available for personalized strolls and biking – and she’s good! On your own, you’ll have 14 treks to choose from, and don’t be intimidated by the fact that there are 3,100 historic structures, punctuated by alleys and walkways, restaurants, bars, art galleries (47 at last count), theatre, shops, fishing and dive boats, guest houses, cats, and roosters.
There are craft shows and house and garden tours, Fantasy Fest, and festivals from yachting to conch shell blowing. In fact, there’s more than enough to do in Key West, even if you are doing nothing, and history buffs, art aficionados, and foodies will find the typical two-day stop insufficient. Don’t let the accumulation of T-shirts shops or cruise passengers loose on the streets bother you, and expect little restriction based on time. Locals sharing darts and margaritas are hanging out at the Green Parrot and Schooner Wharf by day and night, while tourists flock to Sloppy Joe’s and Jimmy Buffet’s. The Hog’s Breath Saloon draws a day crowd of 10-year-old boys who stop by for their T-shirt that says, “Hog’s Breath Is Better Than No Breath At All!” The live music is non-stop, with piano bars, clubs, and pubs, with or without an audience; sing it, play it, and they will come.
Brand new kid on the block is a museum dedicated to the soul of a pirate – well, maybe just pirate history and memorabilia. It opened on January 5 as the Pirate’s Soul Museum, and the reception I attended was swashbuckling. The ebullient Pat Croce, former president and part-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers basketball team, has been collecting its contents for twenty years, and now, instead of decorating the inner sanctum of his house, the collection has been livened up with interactive exhibits by the company that produced the Spy Museum in Washington DC and given a permanent home in Key West. It is an ideal site since the Keys’ snug and shallow inlets offered hideouts to buccaneers -- and established the Keys’ reputation for lawlessness. Eventually, the U.S. Congress sent a War of 1812 hero to Key West to establish the Mosquito Fleet of fast sailing, shallow draft schooners to decimate the pirates.
So bone up on pirates, privateers, buccaneers, and corsairs, and come, if you dare. You’ll become a part of wowee! Disney-like interactive exhibits, see the only authenticated pirate treasure chest in the world, Captain Kidd’s last journal, Blackbeard’s weapons and a reenactment of his ugly demise, the authentic Jolly Roger pirate flag from about 1850, the re-creation of the pirate center in Port Royal, Jamaica, and a ship during a simulated buccaneer attack. The museum highlights the golden age of piracy, which I assume is a pun, from 1690 to 1737, and a final eruption after the War of 1812 in the Americas when three thousand piracies were reported off the coast of Florida between 1812 and 1823.
While the romantic fantasy of pirates fostered by Errol Flynn and Johnny Depp prevails today, the reality, despite the fact that pirate ships were often models of democracy with captains elected by the crew and booty equally shared, pirates were villains, rascals, scavengers, crooks, and cutthroats. And while the long-gone Pirate and Torture Museum of Key West can no longer tell the story, the Pirate Soul Museum can.
Toting kids? The Key West Aquarium outdoes the virtual reality of the hi-tech versions across America. This was the first tropical open-air aquarium, conceived by Dr. Robert O. Van Deusen of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Aquarium. That huge Philadelphia installation closed when I was a child, while this aquarium, built in 1934, is thriving and underwent a splendid renovation in 1983.
Don’t be put off by the sense of having entered a time warp; just reach into the first tank along with the three-year-olds and pull out a horseshoe crab with nine eyes or a live conch ogling you back. Where else are the sharks just a foot away and not behind Plexiglas? Arrive at the demo hours and get to pet juvenile sand sharks. They feel like sand and they’re very cute -- for now. Kids love to up the danger ante, and one invariably asks, “Don’t you have any piranhas?” For more interaction, stand at the open tank of rays, and they will flap water all over you. In the outdoor tanks, the guide creates a barracuda feeding frenzy, and once I got to see a sawtooth shark leap out of the water, whipping his snout through a bait fish and leaving less than half of it cleanly on the line.
For lessons in perseverance, walk down the block to the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Museum. Fisher, a diver and treasure hunter who died in 1998, spent 16 years searching for the 17th century Spanish galleon, the Atocha, sunk in a hurricane while laden with over 47 tons of gold and silver. Using magnetometers and side-scan sonar, Fisher finally located the Atocha in 1985, 40 miles southwest of Key West, putting his hands on the largest shipwreck treasure in the world. And so can you. Kids like to make crayon rubbings of the coins (all materials supplied free), and everyone gets a bit out of control over the gold and silver and the stash of emeralds (the first ones were brought to the surface in a Mr. Peanut jar), as well as the cannons and a poison cup. And you can put your hands through a Plexiglas hole to pick up a gold bullion bar. You can’t take that one with you, but there are coins and jewels for sale. It’s enough to make the whole family giddy.
Okay, giddy. But now let’s get serious. For the past twenty-three years, the Key West Literary Seminar has brought together the country’s leading authors and their readers in a 4-day marathon of discussions, panels, readings, and receptions, followed by a few extra days of workshops with the authors. That’s serious stuff. But this year, the theme was funny stuff. Humor. And the response was so overwhelming that a decision was made to run two seminars back to back, from January 6 through the 16th.
Key West has long collected artists and writers, among them thirteen Pulitzer Prize winners. Not just Hemingway but Tennesse Williams, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, John Hersey, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wilbur, John Ciardi, John Dos Passos, and Elizabeth Bishop also made homes here. More recently, Barbara Ehrenreich, Dave Barry, Allison Lurie, Judy Blume, Nancy Friday, and Annie Dillard have chosen Key West for its sense of place. Nancy Friday moved here for the “ease of the indoor, outdoor life” and to be with the “fascinating and outrageous group of people” and part of such an “accepting, warm, fruited place.”
Friday says, “New York runs on envy, but I don’t smell envy here.” And that’s the tone of the Literary Seminar. I attended the 1999 seminar on the American Novel, and as Professor of English, was taken with the intimate and easy-going atmosphere where I could ask Joseph Heller the questions I’d had on hold since I’d first taught Catch-22. This year promised a starlit roster of participants, and I figured I could use a few laughs heading into 2005.
I wasn’t disappointed. While none of the authors claimed to have the secrets of humor writing, most of them seemed to have the gift – perhaps a disposition from birth -- so that we laughed our way through the sessions and into the evenings with America’s Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, with the irrepressible Roy Blount, Jr., with Calvin Trillin, Dave Barry, Christopher Buckley, Gary Trudeau, Nora Ephron, Wendy Wasserstein, and Molly Ivins, among others.
When a conference is as richly scheduled as this one, from early morning until 11 pm, with dinners and receptions and book signings and generosity of spirit, and staffed by such dedicated and literate people, word gets out. Long-time Executive Director Miles Frieden, who makes it all seem effortless, says that people come “as a community of readers and writers, a nomadic tribe gathering each year to celebrate the written word, to honor our best lights, and to proclaim that literature still matters.”
Something else still matters in Key West -- a place where the cigar industry, the sponge industry, and the conch industry have come and gone, and even great wealth has come and gone – and that is the future of living reefs. Reef Relief, a non-profit grassroots effort to preserve and protect coral reefs at a time when over a third of the world’s reefs have disappeared in just 15 years and another third is at immediate risk, has its home in Key West. I met with DeeVon and Craig Quirolo, a husband-and-wife team who have pretty much given up all else in the last twenty years to work for this organization. Reef Relief has established a Discover Coral Reefs School Program, built an educational facility called Reef World that has hosted over one thousand visitors in the few months since its opening, has established a Coral Photo Monitoring Survey, in place for the past twelve years (Craig’s photographic record of a 300-year-od coral colony off Sand Key documents the changes and ultimate disappearance of the reef between 1994 and 2003), a Clean Water Campaign to remove harmful nitrogen from the agricultural and stormwater runoff reaching Florida’s coral reefs, and a Bahamas program to get a coral survey of Abaco underway. Craig has also designed a self-cleaning mooring buoy that will be useful in marine parks around the world. I learned enough in my hour at the facility to become involved in this behind-the-scenes aspect of the Keys.
Back to the surface. So lively is the current Key West scene and so precious is the sweetness of jasmine nights in Key West that the rich have discovered that they “want” it. Concomitantly, the price of a guest room in a top hotel or Bed and Breakfast has escalated, and while you can still get a reasonably priced monster sandwich for lunch at Paradise Café on Eaton Street, and scrumptious and inventive breakfasts and lunches with café con leche at Camille’s, eating out has also become more expensive. Still, it’s worth the splurge for the veal chop at Antonia’s or the award winning entrees at Café Sole (both with a Perfection rating from Zagat 2004), and the food at Café Marquesa, Seven Fish, Michael’s) for the Filet al Forno and the veal chop, Pisces (for its signature Lobster Tango Mango), and much more, including the ever-popular Mangoes. Eat local food like the fresh pink shrimp of the Tortugas, and in fall and winter, Florida lobster and stone crabs, along with the Keys’ own avocado, mango, Key lime, sour orange, breadfruit, and coconut.
If you’ve eaten too well, climb off the carbs with a trek up the 88 winding steps of the Key West Lighthouse. It has none of the architectural genius of the 463 steps of Brunelleschi’s dome-within-a-dome in Florence, but I got a gulp of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico and all of Old Town at once, twinkling in the night, and I got a little sticker handed to me with pride by a local docent; it said, “I climbed the Key West Lighthouse, built in 1847.”
For lodging, there are the easy and predictable chains of New Town, while Old Town boasts luxury hotels and historic inns and bed-and-breakfast hideaways. This year I divided my week in Key West between the luxe of the Ocean Key Resort and the tranquility of a B and B, the Westwinds Inn.
Westwinds, just two blocks from the wharf and four blocks from Duval Street, dates back to the 19th century with its gingerbread charm and brick pavers and granite curbstones that were once part of a ship’s ballast. Charm and cleanliness define the place, and outside, two lovely pools are surrounded by jasmine, mariposa, and hibiscus, while stately palms, banana stalks, and banyan, mango, and Spanish lime trees reach into the bluest skies. The staff and owners are gracious and wonderfully accommodating, and breakfast by the pools is genteel and lavish with tropical fruits, cereals, muffins, croissants, bagels, juices, coffees, and teas. Guests were as delightful as the place, with some returning year after year.
Noble House accurately defines its resort properties by location, distinction, and soul, and the Ocean Key Resort fits all three. It is in the holy spot of Zero Duval Street, where water and land have an improbable oneness, and where every happening thing seems to have its beginning. The lavish attention to detail in accommodations means Doric columns, terra cotta tiles, lamps with four levels of light, hand-painted armoires with parrots and pineapples, leather trunk coffee table, a flamingo pink-legged writing desk with a hand-painted, frond-fringed chess board top, two televisions, two phones, and a private terrace opening onto the waters of the Gulf and the sunset. Spanning the bedroom and marble bathroom (think thick and thirsty white towels and waffle-weave robes) is an enormous Jacuzzi for two -- from which you can jump into the Noble House pillow-top bed with luxurious pillows and sheets – and turn-down service.
Outside, the lush foliage of the outdoor walkways is fun and funky, punctuated with faux parrots nesting in real cages and by ornately framed, gilded mirrors. The heated pool is on the second level, overlooking the ocean and sunset, and if you happen to be there at 3 pm, complimentary mango sorbet magically appears. The resort is never intrusive, is always relaxed and always full service. There is the world-famous Sunset Pier with its turquoise European market umbrellas. For dining, there is the Hot Tin Roof -- under the stars or indoors -- with a sophisticated menu (terrific pan-seared Florida grouper) and five “conch fusion” appetizers. And opening this month is SpaTerre, all jasmine and frangipani, with a full range of exotic treatments from Indonesia. Of the major hotels in Key West, Ocean Key is the only one without a national hotel affiliation, but it is the one with the most character.
And finally, consider two essentials of a Key West visit. The first is Flamingo Crossing at the southernmost end of Duval, ice cream that rivals the best artisanal gelato in Italy. This year, there were a lot of ice cream stands along Duval, but pass them all, each and every one, for Flamingo Crossing. Flavors rotate and are made fresh daily on the premises, and I function like the rest of the devotees who fly or drive into Key West and stop here prior to check-in for the unusual Sapodilla or Cuban Coffee or Mamey or Black Mangrove Honey.
When I first came in 1990, there was a little old lady on Torch Key who sold the mangrove nectar from her apiaries to Flamingo Crossing. This year, I learned that she just died, but the last of her mangrove nectar went to Flamingo Crossing, so I believe I had a historic cone, while paying homage to the indomitable spirit of the Keys in the form of an elderly beekeeper. If I come back in the next few months, I’m told, there might still be enough honey for this extraordinary flavor.
The second essential is sunset. The setting of the sun in Key West is a 365-days-of-the-year “event.” When the fiery orb dips into the watery horizon, slips from view, and streaks the sky in mauve, pink, persimmon, and gold, it is ostensibly to entertain the enormous crowds that gather at Mallory Square each evening to gape and cheer and applaud madly, even as they snap the prize-winning photo of the definitive moment. Sunset from Mallory Square is almost primitive in its power to draw visitors and locals to the communal solar rite – and to the pre-show of crafts and quirky entertainers, from the statue people and Golden Elvis to the fire eaters, jugglers, and tightrope walkers to the bagpipes. Next door at the Hilton are acts like Dominique and his Flying cats. For the more restrained, the same sun sets elegantly from the rooftop of the La Concha Hotel, and at the water’s edge with a drink and appetizer at the Ocean Key’s Sunset Pier or the Pier House where the Gulf meets the Atlantic.
But the most expansive way to observe the sunset ritual is to board one of the flotilla of boats leaving Schooner Wharf for the Gulf of Mexico, about an hour before sunset. If, like the poet John Masefield, you “must go down to the sea again,” cruising aboard a tall ship will give you “the beautiful sea and the sky” that will meet yours and Masefield’s yearnings.
On the wharf, you can find the perfect $4 million replica of the sleek and mighty schooner America -- the one that captured the 100 Guinea Cup in 1851, a 53-mile race around the Isle of Wight whose prize was renamed the America’s Cup in her honor. The replica was built by Ray Giovanni, a man I met in the 90s when he was fulfilling his lifelong dream of building her, but then died shortly after. Bought by Historic Tours of America, the schooner now awaits the public for daily cruising. One fellow and his new bride, who had sailed on her after their beach wedding, were in Key West again and stopped by to find out the name of a ship model master, as they were eager to have a model of the America, emblem of smooth sailing. A few years ago, I was on this schooner when we all got caught in a sudden, lashing storm. Most guests went below, to the dry mahogany interior, but I stayed above to keep my eye fixed on land and be less seasick. I didn’t get seasick at all, thanks to a terrific crew and the incredible engineering of the craft. This schooner reminds me of a nautical line that Katherine Hepburn delivers to Cary Grant in The Philadelphians, remembering the boat they sailed as a metaphor for their marriage when it skipped effortlessly across the water: “My, she was yar,” said Hepburn. The America is, indeed, yar.
To sail into the sunset and into history at the same time, choose my other favorite, the 130-foot, two-masted schooner, the Western Union, the last tall ship to be built in Key West, in 1939. She was a working schooner for most of her years, maintaining underwater communication cables for the Western Union company. With a 24-foot beam, she draws only seven feet of water, and so is suited to the shallow Gulf waters, the South Atlantic, and the Caribbean. But fiber optic technology rendered her income less than her expenses, and in the mid-70s, she retired to Philadelphia, taking at-risk students out to sea on a kind of vision quest. In 1997, she returned to her home port to become the official flagship of Key West and the Conch Republic, where she goes out for day, sunset, starlight, and special full moon sails.
This year, on one of those perfect nights, I impulsively took the starlight cruise with Joe Universe, an astronomer who had dreamed as a child of studying the stars from a ship. He had long since set that dream aside, until a visit to Key West three years ago, when he spotted an ad for an astronomer aboard the Western Union, and now he now teaches shipboard guests about the stars. It’s the kind of personal story that gives Key West its allure and luster…With a laser beam that reaches its artful green light 25,000 feet into the heavens, Joe explains some of the mysteries of navigation, if not the universe, and there are binoculars aboard for everyone and a place to lie back for the view. Ask Joe if you can look through his lenses, and the Pleiades will dance for you.
A few years ago, I went for the sunset sail on the Western Union. She is unique in that her captains always signal the start of the sail by blowing on the pink-lipped conch shell, and Gary plays the dulcimer as the schooner glides out into open water. “Wannabe” sailors are invited to help raise the sails and heave lines, and hot conch chowder is served along with beer, wine, champagne, and soft drinks. Wedding ceremonies at sea are not unusual, and I watched a couple from the Netherlands marry on board. At the close of the beautiful and solemn ceremony, Captain Dave released a pair of pretty white doves from their wicker basket. There was something steadying in the spirit of beginnings and endings and the middle journey on the Western Union, in the sails of a grand dame of the sea luffing lightly in the wind, in the ritual of marriage, in the turning of the sky from light to dark, in the flight of the doves who knew their way home, and in the return of the Western Union to her berth, all to the sounds of the gentle dulcimer.
On my last day in Key West in the first week of 2005, I was awakened by the electronic soundblasts from the speakers of the Royal Caribbean’s 9-story Seven Seas Navigator, docked and grandiose in front of the Hilton and maddeningly dwarfing the landscape of 100-year-old gingerbread houses and lush green foliage. And then I heard what I wanted to hear. The cock-a-doodle-do of a rooster, master of the old Key West, when roosters and cats were lords of the walkways and alleyways, and you could hear the palm fronds rustling in the wind.
