An outpost of Buffett’s Margaritaville restaurants is here, selling eponymous drinks and tropical Keys lifestyle to Parrot Heads (Buffett fans) on a pilgrimage. I wander down Duval Street, thronged with tourists, every second bar blaring live music. His name was Jimmy Buffett, and he went on to become famous for his so-called ‘drunken Caribbean rock’n’roll’. In the early 1970s a young busker set up his Fender Showman amp in here and played songs about pirates, hurricanes and fast women for the mayor, judge, police chief and fire chief. Pictured: Conch house in Key West Historic DistrictĪ spoonful of Fisher’s ashes is encased in a section of the wooden countertop at the Chart Room Bar, a famous treasure-box sized space in the bowels of the otherwise corporate-looking waterfront Pier House.
Then, in the 1980s, tons of a certain white powder found its way into the USA through the Keys, and things got really wild. Later, stronger substances – marijuana bales smuggled by shrimpers in the 1970s – brought new money and a blissed-out creative crowd. Rum-running (smuggling cane liquor in from Cuba) turned out to be a lucrative industry, and the demi-monde of shady characters that sprang up around it inspired celluloid classics such as Key Largo and partly influenced Ernest Hemingway to move here. In the 1920s and 30s came a lifeline: Prohibition. But you don’t live at the edge of the world without being resourceful. After Flagler’s railroad, a miracle of waterborne engineering on par with the Panama Canal, arrived in 1912, the industry collapsed and the city fell into decline. Salvagers could claim a significant amount of a wreck’s load and so many vessels ran aground on the offshore reef – occasionally with the help of a malfunctioning lighthouse – that it became the richest American city per capita. The houses, with their double balconies and intricate gingerbread trims, date from Key West’s mid-to-late-19th century golden age, when the salvage industry was king. Outside of New Orleans’ French Quarter this is the finest historic walking district in the USA. Barely five square miles, Key West’s historic old town is laid out on a grid of hundreds of colourful wooden two-storey Victorian frame homes known as ‘conch houses’, standing cheek by jowl on coral-paved lanes shaded by jungle: tangle-root banyan trees, bright-red ginger blooms, pink bleeding hearts.