Last Saturday a friend and I parked our beach chairs at Fort Zach in a four-foot square of sand surrounded by immense sea grapes. We couldn’t see a soul, nor they us, and our unobstructed view (once the cruise ship left) went all the way to the Sand Key Light. New Key West felt just like old Key West.
Conversation was desultory as evening beachside ones are wont to be. Nothing more profound than “We need to remember to do this more often.” We went from things-have-slowed-down to the locals’ myth that plentiful sea grapes mean a slow hurricane season and back around to that ubiquitous Key West island conversation that starts with “I remember when” and then wanders past every house in one’s neighborhood.
Which is when Martha asked: “If we accept that the island has already fully become a tourist destination, that there’s no going back to being a small town of locals, what should we be doing?”
Full stop.
That’s not how we usually phrase it. Most of the time we’re lamenting the changes, longing for the old days and scheming how we can return to them. But what if we let go of all that? Do our conversations and solutions shift? I think they do — and maybe for the better.
Long about 2020 Key West completed its transition from small-town, family-friendly, slightly scruffy island home into a full-blown tourist destination. The “new” Key West is already here.
The new Key West | Here’s how we got here
The shift began in the 1970s and chugged along for 50 years. By the time Covid-19 roared through in 2020, the island was ripe for final pickings by well-heeled cash-only buyers and real estate developers with deep pockets and a yen for tapping the lucrative island vacation home rental market.
Locally owned businesses have given over to corporate ownership. Generations-long homeowners have sold their places and moved to the mainland. Young residents leave for school and rarely come home. It’s simply the way of things in small towns. Key West is no exception.
Our visitors love Key West — or at least their imagination of it. It’s that Key West Mystique that pulls them here so they, too, can have island stories to share back home. It’s our history and our food, our artists and writers, the heroes and scoundrels, the Duval Crawl and the water, oh, the water. Fishing, swimming, sunset sails, sandbar trips and, arrrgh, the personal watercraft and cruise ships and private jets.
Visitors don’t much complain about the crowds. Those crowds validate their decisions to come here. They want to know they’re part of something special, whether they stay in a hotel or rent the house across the street so they can “live like a local” for a week or a couple months. And if they actually own a place here? Oh my, they can dine out on tales of that forever in their real homes on the mainland.
And while locals might roll their eyes that visitors come here for anything other than bar-hopping and doing things they wouldn’t do back home, fact is, the draw is more than that. It’s that subtle combination of culture and crazy, tropical island and modern amenities, despite that smell of decaying sargassum and rotting fish, the heavy mold and mildew stink in our clothes and in every building and house and the hot winds filled with petroleum-laced coral dust.
The more we amp up marketing our food, history, ecosystems and culture, the stronger pull we will have on visitors who want to love Key West.
We have but to look at what the Key West Art and Historical Society is doing down at the Custom House. KWAHS (pronounced Kwaz) combines ultra-fun experiences that draw locals and visitors with important historical and environmental preservation. Whether it’s a morning sail on the Argo Navis, complete with a naval history talk by Historian Cori Convertito, or the annual Holiday Concert and Bazaar, KWAHS long ago understood the power of drawing in locals and visitors to celebrate the island’s culture and history.
In 2026, KWAHS will launch its Key West food and culture project in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and Florida Humanities, a project that will capture Key West’s distinctive blend of Bahamian, Cuban, Haitian and European food cultures that shape the island’s most popular menus.
History, ecosystems and food alone won’t be enough. Infrastructure, from roads to water pressure and fiberoptic communications to swift, dependable police, fire and EMT support, will be critical — for locals and visitors. Getting at least some of the traffic of all modes off the streets has to happen, even if it means a multi-modal park-and-ride on Stock Island next to the city’s transportation center. Sidewalks will have to be foot-traffic only; no bikes, no scooters, no anything with wheels except wheelchairs, walkers and baby strollers. And there’s always that unsolvable problem of housing.
But ditching the “get drunk, do dumb stuff and buy T-shirts” brand and replacing it with the Key West Mystique will ensure that our future — even as a vacation destination — keeps our island ours.
thank you, linda, for this honest and hopeful assessment of key west. we face similar issues here in jackson hole. i heard a “long time local” share that he believed we had tipped from a small town to a resort… and that seems to be happening. efforts to reframe the future of your/our community, such as you describe, are important.
It’s so hard to watch our beloved small towns and homes become playgrounds. And, indeed, it’s happening worldwide. Perhaps my sincerest wish is that those who visit come with respect.