Key West: The Last Resort

Storm over development at land's end

What they're trying to do is starve you Conchs out of here so they can burn down the shacks and put up apartments and make this a tourist town. That's what I hear.

--Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not

The old-time natives of Key West --such as Harry Morgan, Hemingway's one-armed rumrunner, who was played by Humphrey Bogart in the movie --are known as Conchs, after the crusty mollusks that abound off that southernmost Florida island. Like Morgan, they are given to drinking in seedy bars, fishing in the Gulf Stream and insulting tourists. Nowadays the tide of tourism is enough to make the Harry Morgans pull up anchor and put out to sea. The place known affectionately as "the Last Resort" is fashionable again.

Writers, literary groupies and celebrities are lured by the island's romantic image. Wrote Alice Turner in New York magazine: "Key West is our winter Hamptons, the place we go to continue the conversation we started at Elaine's." But the resort is more laid back than the Hamptons, less frantic than other resorts. Says Author Nancy Friday: "There is none of the relentless chic. There are no competitive lunch baskets from Bloomingdale's." Luminaries such as Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Stephen Spender, Calvin Klein, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Ralph Ellison and Thomas McGuane can be found avoiding their typewriters or agents or both at the height of the season (Thanksgiving through Easter), when the population of 32,000 jumps to 45,000.

Hemingway bought a house in Key West in 1931 and lived there nine years. While he was away covering the Spanish Civil War, his second wife Pauline built a $20,000 swimming pool in the garden fed by saltwater wells. Upon hearing the price, he took a penny from his pocket and had it embedded in the concrete, saying, "Here, you might as well have my last cent." Also in the yard is a birdbath made out of a urinal from nearby Sloppy Joe's bar. The story is that Hemingway deserved it because he had peed away a fortune in it.

Over the years, the Conchs of Key West have seen their island roller-coaster through a series of spectacular booms and busts. Organized development began in the 1830s and the lucrative business of salvaging wrecked ships soon made the town the wealthiest per capita in the U.S.

Key West's salad days, as Florida's largest (18,000 inhabitants) and wealthiest city, were just before the turn of the 20th century. It had the largest port in the Gulf of Mexico, its cigar industry employed 10,000 workers, and almost all of the country's sponges were caught by its fleet. Then came a spectacular decline. The U.S. naval station closed, the cigar industry was lured to Tampa, blight wiped out the sponge beds, the city went bankrupt, and a 1935 hurricane ruined the railway from the mainland. Except for a momentary revival during World War II, when the naval station became important again, and in 1962, when troops rushed down during the Cuban missile crisis, the island languished as little more than a haven for those latter-day rumrunners, the drug traders.

Then, starting in 1974, development began and tourism took hold. Affluent Northerners, attracted by the 77DEG average temperatures and the quaintness of the island, with its Spanish and Bahamian roots, bought up and restored many of the Conch-style cottages and rambling homes in the Old Town section. Prices there tripled in three years. The shops along drowsy and all-but-derelict Duval Street were renovated and transformed; the old Kress dime store became Fast Buck Freddie's, a trendy shoppe. Five hundred new hotel and motel units were built, with 450 more plus a convention center on the drawing board.

The new melange of life-styles is best viewed in the kaleidoscope of scenes each evening at sunset. Many Northern tourists stroll from the boutiques and galleries of renovated Duval Street to the Mallory Square dock to soak up the impromptu theater--jugglers, bands, ventriloquists, and an iguana man who lets children pet the iguanas he walks on a leash. As the sun disappears below the horizon, the crowd applauds. Tourists now outnumber the youths and leftover hippies who founded sunset watching on the dock as a communal mystical experience a decade ago. The easy movers are now more likely to spend the twilight hours at Captain Tony's bar, where Tony Tarracino holds court for his hirsute flock. The more elite swig Key lime daiquiris on the deck of the Beach Club bar at the nearby Pier House hotel. Down the street, at the Monster, the classy gay hangout, purple-shirted young men drink amid the rooftop's tropical foliage.

Such a potpourri is exciting and profitable, but many of the old Conchs, used to ups and downs, see storm clouds looming. They fear Key West will lose the fragile character that has made it a mecca for both the offbeat and affluent. Already, the growth has strained the island's police, fire, street and sanitation services, and caused a low-and middle-income housing crisis, accompanied by a large tax hike, that has forced many workers off the island. Last year there were frequent power shortages and sewer-pipe breaks. How well the island weathers the impending storm will depend on whether it can grow while preserving its unique and eccentric flavor, and whether it can maintain its tenuous balance between seediness and wealth.

The more jaded Conchs, who have their afternoon beers and whiskies at the Tide's Inn, think the battle is already lost. They are selling their suddenly fashionable homesteads at the inflated prices and moving out. Gripes retired Fisherman C.B. McHugh: "The silence is gone. There's nothing left but damned strangers." Local Aristocrat David Wolkowsky, who recently sold his Pier House hotel to New Orleans investors for $4.6 million (but kept his 1926 Rolls-Royce), is concerned but a bit more optimistic: "The future is secure as long as we keep this place as a getaway. If the funkiness goes, everything goes." Those opposed to further fast growth lost a big battle just last week when voters in all of the Keys, which stretch 100 miles into the gulf from Florida's southern tip, overwhelmingly approved a new $42 million water pipeline from the mainland that some warned would open the floodgates of growth.

The movement against growth has led to violence, often aimed at the influx of homosexuals. A local newspaper ad placed by a Baptist minister last month called for vigilantes to take action against "female impersonators and queers." Victims of recent violence include a man beaten with a pipe as he used a phone booth, a jogger almost run down by a car, a local museum director shot and killed, a restaurant owner beaten unconscious, and Authors Tennessee Williams and Dotson Rader, who were mugged. Two of those arrested were sons of prominent local families.

Chamber of Commerce President Tim Miller is one who sees Key West's 1.2 million visitors as a boon rather than a burden. Says he: "Our destiny lies with a steady growth in tourism." The big battle among the three business forces--those favoring limited growth, increased tourism and light industry--will be over the use of 100 acres of the old naval station that will be transferred to city control within a year. It includes the island's best stretch of beach and has the potential for a fine deep-water harbor. A portion, including Harry Truman's old winter White House, will be preserved as a park and historical site, but most of the naval-station property will be leased or sold to developers.

Key West's isolation is probably its true salvation. The community is united against wholesale expansion of the narrow U.S. 1 from the mainland, and building costs are very high. Most Conchs, as well as most of the tourists who love the island, seem convinced that the storms may indeed come, the booms may bust, but in the end Key West will still retain its flavor as the Last Resort.

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