The Key West Mystique
Key West Island News
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
Linda Grist Cunningham | Columns and news analysis
Key West Island News editor Linda Grist Cunningham has written more than 4,000 columns — in print and on the web — since 1968. She hates writing and is compelled to do it anyway.
Higgs Beach: As long as we’re askin’, I want a park not a bunch of stuff
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? Depends on who’s doing the looking
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.
What’s in a name? The new “old Publix” and the old “new Publix”
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?
Alligator Alcatraz: DeSantis political theater turned Florida into a monster
I guess we Floridians can be forgiven for losing track of a year-plus fire hose of headlines condemning and defending Alligator Alcatraz and the state’s sordid immigration abuses. But it’s impossible to ignore this: Florida’s immigration policies are a financial and humanitarian disaster. Whether we agree or disagree on immigration policies, Floridians are on the hook for millions of dollars DeSantis continues to promise the feds will cover. Heaven help us if we have another Hurricane Irma. And this governor and his lackeys don’t care. It’s just soulless political theater for them.
Key West city manager: Does he stay or does he go?
Wouldn’t it be nice if some good, old-fashioned reconciliation therapy could lower the temperature? Probably not gonna happen, but the new commission will hold the winning card: The city manager serves at its pleasure and direction. So direct him. If he gets the message and meets the goals, he stays. If he doesn’t, send him off. I hear pretty much every city in the Keys is advertising for city managers.
September in Key West: No excuse for being a jerk
Locals with spare cash love September because we have laid-back Key West to ourselves. Those living paycheck to paycheck? It’s a slog of making ends meet. And if your neighbor, coworker or your dad has been disappeared into the horror show that passes for immigration law in 2026? There’s no such thing as a good September.
Dear Connor is a collection of columns Linda writes for her grandson, Connor. Though he may never read them, they help her make sense of the world.
Baby boomer revenge | Rainbows, home rule and “me first”
OK, boomers: It’s 100 percent our fault that Key West and the world have gone sideways. We are the reason we’re arguing over rainbow pickets, morphing home rule into a historical relic, stalking the globe as a deranged, self-anointed emperor and chanting “we win; you...
Dear Connor | The American “middle” won’t tolerate extremes much longer
Dear Connor, Dick Grist, your great-grandfather, was a political junkie, a World War II vet and a voice of reason when your Ninny went off the rails over whatever outrage of the day sparked my ire. One of the things he counseled me often was big-picture patience: "The...
Hurricane Irma | In September 2017, Linda Grist Cunningham created and launched a Facebook Page that aggregated news coverage during Hurricane Irma. She was off-island at the time visiting her mother in Virginia. Her husband remained in Key West. Over the three weeks that she and her partner journalists John Teets maintained around-the-clock coverage, they reached almost a million people around the world. These are the columns she wrote each day. Hurricane Season is always June 1 – Nov. 30.
Key West City Commission voids agreement with ICE and reaffirms its status as a “welcoming city.”
In what is the most stunning vote taken by a Key West City Commission in recent memory, commissioners at 7:16 p.m., voted 6-1 to void the 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Doing so puts the city, commissioners and the...
Hurricane Irma | 5 years that changed Key West and the Keys
Once a month I drive to Marathon and back for a board meeting. I've done that since before Hurricane Irma clobbered Key West and the Florida Keys on Sept. 10, 2017. For five years that 100 mile round trip has been my gauge for our recovery from...
