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.
Dear Connor: Nine promises that we will be OK
Being OK doesn't mean the next several years will be moonbeams and unicorns. The next decade will be harsh, unsteady, inexplicable and frightening. We will, as a country, walk with that awesome shadow of the valley of death. History tells us that we must face our worst selves before we can create our best.
Dear Connor | The day the young ones took charge
History will remember the march as the coming-to-power of Xers and Millennials. Though there were aging baby boomers aplenty in the crowd and at the microphones, the marches around the world saw these elders step aside to open the way for younger women.
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 | One year ago, we awaited the storm
Why did so many decide to stay on the island, defying the mandatory Hurricane Irma evacuation orders and flirting with destruction? The answers are as complicated as the Keys. Re-reading my 2017 columns reminded me just how powerful we were as an online community. To each of you who followed along, who shared your stories and your tears, I say "thank you." It was a tough time. It's been a tough year.
Hurricane Irma | How did news coverage get so confused?
By Sept, 5, 2017, five days before Hurricane Irma battered Key West and the Florida Keys, I was swearing -- or at least muttering unpleasant comments under my breath. I was, as some will remember, visiting my mother in the Shenandoah Valley and...
