Editor’s Note: I am deeply sympathetic to Marlow’s views of one of the most remarkable cities in America, a place so zany and fun that it once “seceded” from the United States to form an independent Conch Republic- a sort of Mouse That Roared moment in between drinks at the Green Parrot or Captain Tony’s. A highly recommended destination, even if it is being gentrified into something else and forcing working people to leave. Of, an Happy New Year! Fiscal 2017 ends at Midnight!
– Vic
Vanishing Key West
Lower Keys pre-Irma
Author’s note: This is a whiny if not angry, nostalgic and perhaps socialist piece that has been percolating for a while. What made me finally pen it was a newspaper story this week about crass, post Hurricane Irma greed. Old school discretion keeps me from sharing more about those involved.
Thirty years ago, almost everyone I knew had never heard of Key West. Twenty years ago, most had but had not been there. Ten years ago, all had heard of it and most had visited it.
The Key West and Florida Keys they had heard about long ago and then later visited is changing. In many ways, both big and small, the islands have been disappearing during the past 15 to 20 years under a proliferation of multi million dollar condos, gated and walled homes where small conch houses once were, an avalanche of tony restaurants now swamping corners where cuban mixte selling bodegas once were and the daily storm surges of money sweeping over and drowning the city’s and islands’ conscious and unconcious funky. Many love these new restaurants culinary delights. From personal experience, it was an avocation for many living on and near the Mile Marker Zero last island. But for those of us who spent some of our early adult years in the Keys of islanders Tom McGuane, Jimmy Buffett, Captain Tony and the tree top flying smugglers long before they became widely known and wealthy on the mainland, these changes are acutely personal.
In many ways some of these passing or disfigured life touchstones defined how we belonged to the town’s history and how the town became part of us. What has replaced it now belongs to others who have resources to stake claims to it. Some of what is being built or improved is quite good but those who are being forecibly displaced face a future that remains gut wretching.
Gentrification of artists and writers compounds (a term of art that includes un-airconditioned shacks loosely arranged on both sides of an alley with the ends of the alley blocked by stockade gates) across the old section of town has accelerated to such a point that none of the still living authors and artists who were down there from the late 60s through the early 90s would recognize them.
The 21st century saw two related crises descend on the islands: a large and permanent vagrant population that has wavered between 2% and 5% of the county’s total population and an economic unraveling that some see as devaluing, if not rejecting, the significance of its workers, bohemians and eccentrics.
I arrived in Key West as a midwestern naif at 25 years of age, in 1974, at the cusp of Key West’s transition from an unknown, post-WW II paradise to boomer hippie playland whose survivors led the islands’conversion to mass tourism commericalization starting in the mid 90s. Writers like Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote still walked the streets daily then, but new age folks like Tom McGuane and trop-rocker Jimmy Buffett were honing their craft on the town’s squares and in its bars.
Suffice it to say it was a heady time and life altering experience.
The hurt I feel now at this is not in the disappearance of the shacks that used to serve the best 2 AM bucchi or lunch sandwiches but that the islands for reasons of capitalism can no longer house workers or their families without high paying jobs. A city and island chain once famously ecletic are becoming hollowed out, malignantly plastic and disneyfied.
Not more than two weeks after Hurricane Irma with piles of storm debris still growing along US 1, we are seeing eviction notices being posted on the remains of wrecked mobile homes in transparent attempts to de-house more worker residents from trailer courts so that the lot owners can build luxury houes or developments there or on other parcels of land in the Keys. This greedy without-decent-interval, “hyper-gentrification” underscores the heretofore hidden complicity between local municipal governments and big private monied interests to reconfigure the island chain into a bland tropical enclave, devoid of the ordinary classes.
I am by no means ignoring the beauty of the reincarnated preservations of forlorn and rotting pieces of the islands’ history. Those were all very good. Am I nostalgic? Hell yes. Myopic? Perhaps, but I work hard at acheiving some balance in my aging perspective. There is a case to be made that the enormously high price of living in the Keys has had a positive effects. For example, it forced people to move to and revive once barren and destitute sections of the islands.
However, I am witnessing the transformation of a place that had qualities I have embraced for almost a half a century into one that is geared toward a class of people with whom I share few to no cultural values. I feel socially dislocated. Yes, I realize life’s not fair. Tough crap.
Yet, I have it easy. Others, primarily those who make the town livable – its workers and families, bohemians and eccentrics, are being physically dislocated and told to live on the mainland by the pure economics of this unique End of the Road place.
It is depressing for me to type what follows. Key West today lives on its reputation as the haven for dead and near dead writers and artists most of whom no one has a clue about. Except for the aging Buffett and the stout, masculine Hemingway in whose honor the town holds each year a well attended, three day long, drunk-fest and look alike contest. Yes, the offshore waters and sunsets are still jaw droppingly beautiful, but the islands are populated more and more by temporary residents with no real attachment to them, and certainly not to the people who live work and raise children there.
Copyright © 2017 From My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com