Old Town Trolley Tour & ….

Alice, Barry’s and Jack’s On-Off Old Key West Trolley Tour started on Thursday, February 18, 2021 at the Kimpton Lighthouse Hotel where we were staying.

The hotel is a block away from a Trolley Stop #5 and right across the street from the Earnest Hemingway Home and Museum, and a block from Duval Street. This location was excellent. The hotel was adequate with a small pool, free dry breakfast and a bar. My room did not have a table and chair to use my PC. The pool side tables and chairs being used by others to work with their PC’s, didn’t allow for social distancing. As a Resort it lacked amenities. Key West has always needed housing for many military personal, this hotel seems to have been renovated and repurposed these building into a nice hotel. I walked and explored Key West during the day and only used my room to sleep in. All things considered, it was a great choice place to stay.

Mallory Square – Is a waterfront square with restaurants and shops, known for its nightly festivals. It is the “center” of Key West activities. The Shops at Mallory Square feature some of the island’s most interesting shops, boutiques, art galleries, exhibits and places to eat. This has Key West’s only escalator.

“Aerial” panoramic photos were taken from atop the 65´ high Shipwreck Treasure Museum Tower, after I climbed the 88 steps. Photo of tower was taken from the Key West Express Catamaran as I was leaving Key West.

Shipwreck Treasure Museum – It combines actors, films and actual artifacts to tell the story of 400 years of shipwreck salvage in the Florida Keys. The museum itself is a re-creation of a 19th-century warehouse built by wrecker tycoon Asa Tift. Many of the artifacts on display are from the 1985 rediscovery of the wrecked vessel Isaac Allerton, which sank in 1856 on the Florida Keys reef and turned out to be one the richest shipwrecks in Key West’s history, having resulted in the Federal Wrecking Court’s largest monetary award for the salvage of a single vessel. Also included are relics from Spanish galleons, including a silver bar salvaged from the Nuestra Senora de las Maravillas that guests are encouraged to try to lift.

Audubon House & Gardens – We learned that John James Audubon never lived in this house! But, the house contains 28 first-edition works of the famous ornithologist. He visited the Florida Keys and Dry Tortugas in 1832. He left Key West having sighted and drawn 18 new birds for his “Birds of America” folio. It is believed that many of those drawings were conceived in these gardens in which Captain John Huling Geiger, who was Key West’s first harbor pilot, eventually built this house.

The Audubon house has many antique furnishings dating to the first half of the 19th century, many were purchased from estate sales and auctions in Europe. A replica cook house in the gardens provides further insight into life in mid-19th century Key West.

The Harry S. Truman Little White House was the winter White House for the 33rd President, Harry S Truman. It was initially the headquarters of the Key West Naval Station when on the Key West waterfront. Harry Truman spent 175 days in the Little White House during his presidency. After he left office he visited the house many times.

While I was walking through the house on our tour I got goose pimples learning: Presidents William Taft, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, President John F. Kennedy, President Jimmy Carter, Secretary of State Colin Powell, President Bill Clinton and then Senator Hillary Clinton, plus many more dignitaries, had walked exactly where I was walking! During World War I, Thomas Edison resided in this house.

During Truman’s visits, cabinet members and foreign officials were regular visitors for fishing trips and to play penny anti poker with Truman. Bill Clinton snuck out of the house and went to Sloppy Joe’s for a few drinks with other patrons at the bar!

Old Town Key West, cont. Friday, February 19.

Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum – After breakfast at the Moondog on Friday, February 19, 2021 we continued our tour of Old Town Key West by walking across the street to where Hemingway lived and wrote for a decade. (Hemmingway’s home is across the street from our hotel and a block away from Trolley STOP #5).) I had purchased reservation tickets Thursday on-line for reduced costs. We saw the sixty some 6-toed cats running around the house and the lush 1½ acre garden.

In 1938 he built the first in-ground swimming pool in Key West. It was the only swimming pool (cost $20,000 in 1938) within 100 miles. The site where the pool is located was formerly the setting of Hemingway’s famous boxing ring, where he would spar with local amateur boxers. Construction of the pool necessitated relocation of the boxing ring a few blocks away on a site now occupied by the Blue Heaven Restaurant & Bar in the historic Bahama Village area.

During his time at the home, Hemingway wrote some of his best received works, including the non-fiction work Green Hills of Africa, short stories “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”, and the novels To Have And Have Not and Islands in the Stream (posthumously published in 1970).

Ernest’s friends Charles Thompson, Joe Russell (also known as Sloppy Joe), and Capt. Eddie “Bra” Saunders, together with his old Paris friends became known in Key West as “The Mob.” The Mob would go fishing in the Dry Tortugas, Bimini, and Cuba for days and weeks at a time in pursuit of Giant Tuna and Marlin on Hemingway’s 38 foot boat Pilar. Everyone in The Mob had a nickname, and Hemingway was often referred to by his friends and family during this time as “Papa”—it was a moniker that eventually stuck with him throughout his life.

Hemingway moved to Cuba in 1939. Alice, Barry and Jack visited his home and boat in Cuba in 2016. To see our trip in Cuba go to: https://jackstravel.travel.blog/2020/01/24/ernest-hemingway-in-cuba/