The Navy made Key West a base — a submarine station from the 1930s on — and the warm island drew writers and presidents. Ernest Hemingway kept a house at 907 Whitehead Street from 1931 to 1939, a place built of native limestone in 1851 and still known for the descendants of his six-toed cats. Tennessee Williams wrote here for decades. And Harry Truman so loved the old naval officers' quarters that they became his Little White House, where he ran the country through the winters of his presidency. The literary-and-presidential Key West remains a pilgrimage.
For its first decades Key West got rich off disaster. Ships ran aground on the coral reef offshore with such regularity that salvaging the wrecks — "wrecking" — became a licensed, court-supervised industry, and the men who hauled cargo off the reefs made the town, by the 1830s, the wealthiest city per capita in the United States. Salt ponds, sponging, and sea-turtling followed. Those fortunes built the first grand houses of Old Town and gave Key West a worldly, seafaring character it never lost.
Why People Visit Key West
Key West rewards travelers who want history, water, and a freewheeling island culture rather than only a beach — the Southernmost Point, the Conch Republic, the literary and presidential houses, and a compact Old Town you can walk end to end. People come for the sunset at Mallory Square and the bars of Duval, for the Hemingway and Truman landmarks and the wrecking-era treasure, and for an easygoing day at Mile Marker 0 where the Overseas Highway, and the country, finally run out of road.
