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.
Five ways to make Key West a “best place to live”
I admit I pretty much snorted the sweet tea out my nose last week when Gwen Filosa posted this on her Facebook page: "Those people who are like #saltlife and #ILiveWhereYouVacation are the same people right now outraged over cell service going out for a few hours,...
Key West poverty: Almost half can’t make ends meet
Let's go out on a limb: Ninety percent of y'all reading this sentence never went hungry for very long. If you did it was because you chose to do so. I'm not talking about tummy rumbles while flipping through a menu on Duval Street. I'm talking about worrying whether...
Key West neighborhoods | Which one’s the best? It depends
Last week a neighbor and I kinda smugly patted ourselves on the back for decisions we made in wayback times to forego a house in Old Town and instead move to The Meadows. His wayback is four decades, give or take a decade, ahead of mine, but we chose The Meadows for...
The 3.2 | Getting the Bahama Village Lofts built is a true test of patience and perseverance
Every time I round the entrance to Key West's Truman Waterfront Park I hear echoes of the decades-long kerfuffle that accompanied every step and misstep toward getting the park built. I don't know why I hoped building the Lofts at Bahama Village on the remaining 3.2...
Key West clutter | Or, how to downsize — again
It has become embarrassingly obvious I can no longer roll my eyes when I stumble into a pile of stuff Ranger Ed says he might need someday. What I call Key West clutter when it's HIS stuff morphs into priceless stuffed pillows and ancient quilts with threadbare...
Key West summer | The things that didn’t happen
Grumble Season is fewer than 10 days away. That gives me a 10-day window to wrap up the 2023 Key West summer, followed by three months of Grumble Season, in which I am inclined toward cross words while I wait for December, which is a great month to live in Key West....
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.
