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Key West All the assets of a tropical island combine with the advantages of a diverse small city to keep visitors busy for a weekend, a week, a month – even forever, should they decide as so many do to stay. Parking is limited and the meters expensive. Bicycles and mopeds are the preferred means of transportation locally. The historic Old Town area that is of most interest to visitors is reasonably compact. The best way to see and savor the real Key West is on foot. Conch Tour Train, Front Street, Key West. The first-time visitor should get oriented by boarding Key West's signature Conch train. It covers fourteen miles and 100-plus attractions in about 90 minutes. The driver narrates as he goes, with a few whistle toots and some Disneyesque audio hoopla along the way. Sit up front and slide back and forth on the bench to take pictures on whichever side is of most interest. Be really quick or you'll miss that Kodak moment. The train toots around the busy Mallory Square area before winding through the streets of Old Town, out busy North Roosevelt Boulevard and back past fascinating Houseboat Row, East Martello Fort & Museum, the beaches along the south side of the island, and the attractions of upper Duval and Whitehead streets. At tour's end, you'll be informed of interesting Key West tidbits and ready to concentrate on those sites and areas of particular interest. (305) 294-5161. Tours daily, 9 to 4:30. Adults, $14. More specialized interests are served by the architectural, cemetery, bicycle and personalized city walking tours offered by Sharon Wells of Island City Heritage Trust, (305) 294-8380 or 294-5397. State historian in Key West for seventeen years, she now writes and publishes the annual Walking and Biking Guide to Historic Key West, a free 60-page booklet that's the most enlightening and lively of its kind. Among her tours are one of Nancy Forrester's Secret Garden, a stroll through one save-the-planet advocate's remarkable rainforest and botanical garden at the end of Free School Lane, in the heart of Old Town. The day we tried to tour the owner was caring for an ailing bird and we were left to our own devices. The "$6 greens fee per primate" hardly seemed worth it for the few minutes we had available. We'd already seen our fill of gumbo limbo trees, hanging orchids, exotic palms and cages of cockatiels and scarlet macaws. Another interesting tour is of the Key West Cemetery, sixteen feet above sea level on a modest rise called Solares Hill. Vaults are above ground because an 1847 hurricane disinterred bodies from the town's first burial ground near Southernmost Point. The whitewashed tombs of pet terriers and the inscriptions on the headstones tell something of the quirkiness of Key West. One woman's memorial to her philandering husband reads: "At least I know where you're sleeping tonight." Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum, 907 Whitehead St., Key West. Key West’s most visited attraction is the imposing 1851 Moorish-influenced mansion the author was given in 1931. The house is set in a tropical garden he designed and planted. The guided tour is a nostalgia trip for Hemingway devotees, especially in the cottage studio where he wrote 300 to 700 words a day on the small typewriter on view. Others are entranced by the six-toed cats descended from Hemingway originals and visible everywhere, including in a cat hospital behind the gift shop. "We have 69 cats on the property named after old movie stars," advised our guide. "No, not James Dean," she responded to a young girl. Check out the penny embedded in the concrete at the head of Key West's first swimming pool, a gift to the author from his wife. When he discovered the pool's $20,000 price tag, he took a penny from his pocket, pressed it in the wet cement and told his wife, "You may as well take my last penny, too." (305) 294-1575. Open daily, 9 to 5. Adults, $6.50. Audubon House and Gardens, 205 Whitehead St., Key West. An exceptionally good audio tape guides visitors at their own pace through the wonders of this imposing house in which ornithologist John James Audubon stayed while painting the birds of the Florida Keys in 1832. Actually, he was only a guest in the family home of Capt. John H. Geiger, master shipwreck salvager, whose prized antiques and furnishings are of considerable merit in their own right. Here, Audubon added eighteen new species to his Birds of America engravings. They include the white-crowned pigeon, painted on a branch of an orange-blossomed Geiger tree from the gardens and one of 28 first-edition Audubon works displayed in the house. The voices of Geiger family members guide visitors throughout the house, which is well worth seeing. The tour ends in the gardens, which gave Audubon some of his inspiration. There's an excellent museum shop. (305) 294-2116. Open daily, 9:30 to 5. Adults, $7.50. Little White House Museum, 111 Front St., Key West. Opened in 1991, this is a fascinating stop for anyone with an interest in President Harry S. Truman and how he turned the unlikely looking Navy commandant's house on the Naval Base into the Little White House. "I've a notion to move to Key West and just stay," he advised wife Bess on one of his first visits, according to the ten-minute film that begins the tour. You see the president's bedroom where he napped on a day bed, the South Porch where he played poker and drank Kentucky bourbon, and the living room in which an original copy of the Chicago Tribune's erroneous front page, "Dewey Beats Truman," is on display with five lines upside down. The place is full of mid-century nostalgia, but is as up-to-date as its changing special exhibits and the guest book signed by ex-President Jimmy Carter and family at their 1997 New Year's visit, when the Presidential Gates leading to the Little White House in what is now the privately developed Truman Annex were opened once again. (305) 294-9911. Open daily, 9 to 5. Adults, $7. Art Galleries are a principal Key West attraction, and a brochure lists two dozen of the best. Gingerbread Square Gallery is Key West's oldest; its offerings certainly are stylish and colorful. The Gallery on Greene is among the newest. A tiger-skin motorcycle caught our eye in the window of the exotic Caribbean Gallery. We liked the contemporary pieces at Kokopelli, and the great dolphins and marine creatures at the two Wyland Galleries of Key West, whose young namesake artist painted a stunning "whaling wall" mural in just three days on a building in the Seaport district. The tiny Haitian Art Co., crammed with primitive art, is worth the trek to 600 Frances St. Our all-around favorite was the Island Arts Co-op Gallery at 1128 Duval, to which we returned every chance we could to find yet another little acquisition. Shopping. The touristy stores are concentrated in the Mallory Square area along Front and Green streets and lower Duval Street, chockablock full of raunchy T-shirt and souvenir shops. We prefer the stores in the Historic Seaport District near the marina known as Key West Bight and those farther out Duval Street, plus a few on parallel Simonton Street and cross streets like Fleming. Don't miss Fast Buck Freddie's, a mini-Bloomingdale's known for its window displays. Inside is an incredible emporium of treasures, from clothes to pottery to cards, Christmas items and a special section for the gay clientele. Quite unexpected is the suave H.T. Chittam & Co., something of an L.L.Bean South, with a bright red seaplane hung beneath a soaring ceiling and a log facade fronting the sportswear section. With its two-story high interior, the Compagnie International Express is the most striking, especially at night. Hot Hats carries all kinds of sun hats and blessedly few baseball caps. Pick up a Conch Republic towel at Towels of Key West, or some Frette towels at John Kent next door. Cuba! Cuba! speaks for itself. Pandemonium offers colorful everything, from hundreds of tiles to vases to juggling balls to license plate albums to painted furniture, all very avant-garde. A convertible covered with tiles is parked next door in front of Glass Reunions, featuring lovely glass from paperweights to jewelry to mobiles. . In the Harborwalk/Seaport area, we like to stop at the Key West Aloe Co. and its nearby factory outlet, though the prices have soared in recent years. Key West Handprint Fashions and Fabrics offers the splashy designs popularized by Suzy dePoo and Lily Pulitzer, whose shop is nearby. Mac's Sea Shanty holds Key West appeal for tourists. We picked up a key lime pie ($10 whole, $2.75 a slice) to take home from Key Lime Pie Co., and acquired all the key lime goods we could ever need at the Key West Lime Shop, which featured a frozen chocolate-dipped key lime pie slice on a stick. The Pelican Poop Shoppe at 304 Simonton offers Caribbean arts and crafts with a bird theme in three rooms in the National Register-listed Casa Antigua, where Ernest Hemingway first settled in to write Farewell to Arms. A $2 self-guided tour of the lush tropical garden in back is free with a $10 purchase. Plantation Potters exhibits good American crafts beside a sculpture garden at 521 Fleming St. Extra-Special Mallory Square Sunsets. A Key West spectacle known as applauding sunset has grown into a unique tradition. The old pier where steamships docked is transformed nightly into a stage for an ever-changing lineup of artists, acrobats, fire-eaters, palm readers, performing animals and food vendors. Called "buskers," they work for tips and a dollar in their hats helps sustain the evening ritual that for many is the essence of the Key West experience. The frenzied scene often upstages the sunset. Material excerpted from Inn Spots & Special Places in the Southeast, by Nancy and Richard Woodworth. Copyright 2000. Wood Pond Press E-mail feedback to: Home
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