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 grief: Coping with the ways Covid-19 changed us forever
Key West’s legendary resilience fascinates me. Pick any moment in its 200 year history and watch as its citizens wrestle with impossible disillusionment, gut-stabbing failures, slavery, wars and plagues. Stratospheric wealth cheek-by-jowl with crushing poverty. And woven though it all a near constant threat of storms and assorted Mother Nature pestilence. Not to mention no reliable local sources for water, electricity and communication.
Key West voters: Take a deep breath. Vote yes on 3.2
Key West homes like those proposed for the 3.2 acres are a sound, smart start to re-building a stable home market for the island’s working families. The more secure our working families, the stronger our local economy. Let’s don’t let our burgeoning, 21st-century cynicism — or our esthetic arguments over paint colors — get in the way of doing the right thing. We need that 99-year lease to put us on the right path. Vote yes.
Living in Key West: Part 3: cat hair, garbage cans and fresh water conchs
It doesn’t take a degree in demographics and a passion for data dumps to know when Key West’s snowbirds arrive. Lights in that once dark house come on at dusk. There are peals of laughter across the fence line and the rumble of interesting conversations of which I can...
Living in Key West | 5 predictions for 2022
Well, my friends of Key West, here we are, smack on the cusp of a new year. If even legendary columnists, like Miami's Dave Barry, can't resist the temptation to write a year-ender, how much less so I? We write these things, not because we actually sport prescience...
Key West Christmas | Find your moment of peace amid the cacophony
Monday evening as I listened to the banter among my friends and one day after her birthday my baby sister died. We were as I recall just dipping into the deliciousness of Key West politics following a discussion of various flat breads when my phone buzzed silently with an incoming text.
Key West cruise ships: Is there room for compromise?
Key West is precariously close to pulling itself apart over cruise ships. The frustrations evident during Monday's city commission workshop are becoming hard line positions from which, if we are not careful, we may be unable to find a path forward. In 1969, the...
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 | 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.
Dear Connor: Breaking the loop of endless despair
The 2016 presidential election will, on hindsight, be recognized as the precursor to the catalyst that ignites the transformation of America from fragmented, angry and disillusioned into cohesive, collaborative and powerful. America will move away from six decades of tearing down to four decades of building up and then we'll start the process over.
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 | 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...
Hurricane Irma | Are you ready for the anniversary?
Sunday. Aug. 20, 2017 -- exactly one year ago -- was a perfect island beach day. High temps in the upper 80s, low humidity -- at least for us -- great breezes and sunny skies. No storms on the horizon; all quiet off the shores of Africa from...
