I want to start right off by saying, I love Key West. I visited the island, first, in the early 1970's when the place and its charms resembled a stop-off point for young travelers in Southeast Asia. Its attraction included the incomparable shallow water wilderness called Florida Bay. (If any of you are bitten by the nostalgia bug about Key West and that time, see the recently released DVD video, "Tarpon" with Jimmy Buffett, Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, and Richard Brautigan; all wasted a fair share of brain cells in one of Florida's most picturesque and brain-dead cities. Click 'read more')
The movie is a time capsule. If you look closely, you will see lush sea grass beds that have all but disappeared in the thorough trashing by government that refused to regulate or enforce pollution rules that might have saved Florida Bay and the Everglades. And, if you look really really closely in the first frame of the clip, you will see a driver of the dumb tour train-- a miniature toy-like road version-- that destroyed Key West.
I think of the dumb tour train every time I see on Miami Beach one of those Duck Tour buses rolling on big wheels down the Causeway or on city streets. It's called Duck because it is vaguely amphibious; a thrill for anyone who has wondered how you survive flipping a car into a canal.
The four years I spent in Key West in the late 1980's were an education. I learned a lot more than catching tarpon on fly. The city's good old boy network was organized, as so much of the rest of Florida, around land speculation, development, and the need to bring ever more buyers into the equation. As such, it proved the ultimate lesson in supply and demand economics tied to corrupt land use. We do it the same way in Miami Dade, with only a few more strings of zeros at the end.
At some point along the curve, supply only succeeds meeting demand by mispricing risk to the environment. That, my friends, is the story of Florida.
The chief architect of Key West's slow fade is the company and the majority owner, Ed Swift, who owns the Conch Tour Train, as it is familiar to the public. The corporate name is something vaguely patriotic: "Historic Tours of America". Mr. Swift's business model is based on increasing the volume of tourists at any cost to the public he could manage. He managed to do so, as the city's volume chaser, through control of the Key West City Commission and its agencies, staffed with insiders loyal to him in one way or another.
The result couldn't have been clearer: the charms of Key West rapidly converted to lowest cost denominator tourism, turning the destination into a haven for T-shirt shops that had their own money laundering purpose hidden on Duval Street.
Swift also believed he could enforce a monopoly on tourism. And how that greed worked out is the lead story in the Herald B Section, today, "Payback for the Ducks". In short, Ed Swift not only paved the way to destroying the underlying value of Key West, through his particular brand of mass market tourism, his strong-arming local politics led to a federal lawsuit that forced, finally, an $8 million settlement to the competitor he and his minions closed down, "A 14-year old legal battle is over in Key West, with the city approving an $8 million settlement to a defunct Duck Tours company it forced out of business."
The only color in the otherwise dull story is how the jury, in 2005, heard testimony that "the city attorney had vowed to 'grind the Ducks into the dirt.'" That certainly has the odor of truth, to it.
It is painful to visit Key West these days. Not only is real estate in a steep decline from the massive bubble in the latter stage of the housing boom, but those glorious sea grass beds, the fishing, and the value of natural resources have been blasted to a fare-thee-well. It took many thousands of years to make that treasure: it's all covered up by stupidity, now.
7 comments:
What, you're not into t-shirts with crude phrases on them?!
My first visit was in 1972. My last visit was in 2002. I would make some remark about the chickens coming home to roost if there were any left there. Key West now has all of the appeal of Maggie Valley South. Thanks Yuppie/Boomer scumbags.
Gimleteye is right on the money regarding Key West and the classless place it's become, due in large part to Ed Swift and his bubbas. But let's not forget that Swift is also responsible for some of the degradation of the unique and priceless natural resources that surround the island. For example, in the 1980s in the Keys he fought state and federal protection of wetlands and shorelines and denigrated government employees as if he was lord of the place, argued against limitation of jet skis, even in Keys national wildlife refuges, early on fought sanctuary designation tooth and nail, and led ill-fated efforts to expand KW airport into the Salt Ponds. And, of course, Swift led the charge to bring those wonderful cruise ships to Key West - all the while lining his pocket and growing his "bubba empire".
Greed and arrogance, and lack of appreciation of nature's diverse bounty and wonder, has resulted in the national mess we're in now. Ed Swift and Key West could be another poster child for that mess.
It should also be added that this disaster unfurled while the Miami Herald was supposed to be covering the Keys. The paper had reporters in place and never let them report on the real story of what was happening in Key West. Individual pieces of "color" and infotainment, yes. But real reportage? Nope. And all the Miami Dade politicians who got paid off in Keys real estate... that was never reported either.
Key West is a parody of itself now. It is a parody of Disney. All the realness and charm is gone. I used to visit six times a year (every two months), now I visit once every two years.
Come on now, there have been changes, and I was shocked to see what political bent has taken over Key West, but compared to the contiguous strip of overdevelopment stretching between Miami and Jupiter Beach, there is no comparison. A lot has changed since I was last in Miami in 1998.
And Lantern Bearer, there are plenty of chickers and roosters left - they woke me up every morning at 6:00am whether I wanted to be or not. I had not counted on Spring Break coinciding with my visit, and the parking situation was horrific, but I walked 10 miles of the island and there is still some of the old character left - more so than Atlanta has retained. All things considered, I considered the trip worthwhile - notwithstanding the idiot Mayor and the huge, oddly timed fire on Duval Street. For anyone interested, I've posted a summary of last weeks return/recon visit to Coastal Florida here.
I have been visiting Key West since the 50s when my high school played a game in Key West. I continued the visits through most of my adult life until it became a "tourist meca". I stopped going in the late 80s. There is nothing left of any charm or interest. Duval St is like Burbon St in New Orleans; booze, Gaps and boatloads of day trippers. The once beautiful reefs I dove are dying or dead. Is this progress? Key West killed the golden goose just like Miami-Dade.
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