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.
Key West’s Mallory Square | What happens when history, nostalgia and cash collide?
Mornings are unkind to Key West's Mallory Square. Even after a night's rain, there's a lingering oops-I-overserved-myself on the humid breeze. The detritus of last night's Sunset Celebration is stacked in any ol' available corner and the city workers are swabbing down...
Key West vacation rentals | 5 takeaways from the community workshop
By the time last Friday that I got around to watching Thursday's three-plus-hour community workshop on Key West vacation rentals, I knew these things for sure: No one set fire to city hall. The EMTs didn't show up and no one was arrested. From all accounts, 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 Irma's Category 5...
Five things Key West locals do — and then “blame” tourists
Growing up in my parents' house in the way back, we blamed middle brother Mike for whatever transgressions caught my mother's attention. Grossly unfair, of course, since it was usually my sister who dared Mike to do stuff he ought not. He happily obliged. It's like...
Key West election day | Polling places are today’s neighborhood centers
At 12 minutes to six Tuesday morning, I lifted the backpack onto my shoulder, grabbed my cup of coffee and walked out the front door into the hot, humid, island dark. It's half a dozen blocks and a five-minute walk to my assigned polling place, but I sure didn't want...
Key West tropical forest | The garden needs your vote for the 99-year lease
If you're on a mission, and most of us are, when you make the turn off the Overseas Highway onto College Road on Stock Island, you're going to breeze right past the Key West Tropical Forest & Botanical Garden. Who can blame us? We're headed to the SPCA animal...
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.
Dismantling the 14th Amendment: Keeping it upbeat in Key West when the world isn’t
I love my Key West Bubble, but national dissonance is dribbling through today. I am unsettled at the prospect of living through the dismantling of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The 14th Amendment, ratified by the states in 1868, can be boiled down to this: Oops, when we wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (the first 10 amendments), we were thinking only of straight white men with money. Perhaps we need to fix that?
Dear Connor | As the American democracy unravels, can there be hope for your future?
American history is filled with "times like these." Three times we have been here. I believe we will be OK. Though my rage boils over too often, I believe in Americans-in-the-middle. I believe there are extremists on the right and the left -- and I believe they do not, do not, represent who we are as a people. They get the attention and the headlines today; spoiled children clamoring for their own ice cream cone, unwilling to share and willing to fight to the death to keep what they believe is theirs and theirs alone. Getting through this transition will not be for the faint of heart. But get through we will.
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.
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...
Hurricane Irma: 9-23-17: Closing up shop. Saying Godspeed. Going home to the Cat 5s
When we launched Key West Hurricane Irma, our online news coverage, we weren’t sure when “quit” would happen. We were confident we'd know. Today is the anniversary of knowing. It was time to wish our house guests farewell and Godspeed.
