Notes from Key West ... by gimleteye

A late spring cold front kept the tarpon down low yesterday off Key West. The full measure of sun appeared around noon, lighting up the flats, then retreated quickly, leaving the surface of the water gun metal gray. I saw the channel cut where once I anchored up with the late resident of Key West and former fiction editor of Esquire, Rust Hills. The ocean disarmed him as we tried to summon tarpon from the fast tide. (please click 'read more')

Key West is the city where numerable Miami politicians have squirreled cash away in real estate. The lingua franca of Keys politics is the platted lot. The two are forever entwined. And today, both real estate and politics are in a state of heightened anxiety and gloom no one likes acknowledging.

Key West is a twitter with news that the wife of the county school superintendent has an Ismelda Marcos complex. More than $100,000 in spending by Key West’s obsessive compulsive first lady of education was charged to the school department budget, unbeknownst to her husband, the superintendent.

But intriguing and revelatory, the scandal barely budges the dark clouds over the collapsed real estate market in the Keys. On a main thoroughfare in Marathon, there is a ‘for sale’ sign on every street front home. In Key West, the mayor has had to put two homes he owns into foreclosure. Few are talking publicly about tax revenues fallen off a cliff. Merchants aren’t paying rent or renegotiating from landlords who only a few years ago were in clover.

On Duval Street, the T-shirt capital of America’s southernmost city, retailers are loathe to say how bad things are. This is where the golden goose was cooked to a crisp, long ago. During the housing market bubble, that started earlier in Key West than nearly anywhere else in the nation, the government went on a wild spending spree; building numerous monuments to itself. But the city made its mark catering to the lowest common denominator forms of mass tourism and failed to protect either the waters or the reef or the fish. It is filled with discount shoppers and other scavenger species. $69 a night. There have been fires of suspicious origin. Stores are closing , with entire inventories and fixed assets snuck out the back door before morning.

The island's long-time political insider and know-it-all, Ed Swift, is in trouble. His Conch Tour Train is like the little railroad that could wreck Key West. Swift is is buried under a mountain of debt attached to his hubristic plan to convert the city’s old electric plant into multi-million dollar condominiums. The project is unfinished long after the date a few, angry gullible owners were promised occupancy. Lawsuits abound, surrounding Swift like sharks in a Winslow Homer painting. Swift, who was responsible for influencing political decisions at the city to aid his monopoly of tour train tourism, recently settled with a competitor who had filed, and won, antitrust litigation against his company. A federal appeals court agreed that the city of Key West had to spend $8 million to satisfy the charges of Duck Tours, Inc. because Swift, the champion of free markets related to all things Key West so long as they were “his” free markets, prevailed in his monopolistic practice. Swift was famously opposed anything to do with regulations protecting the environment. He is hoist by his own petard.

But people are too dispirited and preoccupied with their own financial woe to worry much about Swift, or, the collapse of investments of another politically influential family fortune. The Spottswoods were in the thick of the housing and real estate asset bubble; converting the island charm into many millions of dollars of hotels and condominiums. They are now buried under the debt of a failed plan to build a gargauntuan gateway resort at the top of the island. Other Conchs who joined the speculative bubble are in similar dire straits, worse that being stranded in Northwest Channel with a flooded engine.

Meanwhile the Bouganvillea is blooming in lush and varied shapes; its reds, purples and orange flowering in riotous neon. By the library a yellow tree of trumpet flowers is in full bloom. Yesterday a loggerhead turtle surfaced only a boat distance away, staring with a single large black eye set high in its orange beak before dropping, again, to forage in brown sea grass beds that were once lush and green as as Eden's greenest meadow.