Key West Island News connects Key West residents and friends of the island, fosters our One Human Family culture and advances understanding of shared goals for our island community
January and February were demolition and construction months. In addition to the outside work, interior walls came down, floors were removed and the makeshift kitchen was installed in the living room — minus any water. We used the shower for dishes.
But, day by day, we could see the architect’s drawings coming alive in three dimensions.
The best suggestion of the morning came early from longtime Key West resident Edie Hambright: Make Higgs Beach a real beach and park for locals, she said. A place with easy access to the beach, a place where families can come and enjoy the water, maybe have a cookout. A place where we don’t have to pay for chairs and umbrellas. Make it ours. I’m on board with that.
What does Key West look like? And we answer it every time a proposed renovation or major development project drop its AI-generated drawings, “But that doesn’t look like Key West.” I’m of the mind that Key West looks exactly like what we are, a weirdly cobbled together accumulation of architecture that changed each time residents felt flush with cash and an itch to expand.
You can stick up all the signs you want, even change U.S. maps, and folks are still going to call it the way they learned it. Take that quarter-mile concrete pier at the end of Key West’s White Street. Rebranded in June 2016 as the Edward B. Knight Pier, it remains the White Street Pier. Humans ain’t much fond of changing up words just for the heck of it. So what do we do with Old and New Publix?
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