Hemingway House

This morning I left Homestead and drove south on Highway 1 to Key West, Florida. The drive was pleasant. Tomorrow morning I take a ferry to I wanted to figure that out early. Here is the Ernest Hemingway house. Admission for me was $18. I took a guided tour. Key West has numerous chickens running around town.

Important people visited him like Herbert Hoover, Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote.

The grounds outside reek of cat urine.

In this portrait Hemingway (left) is portrayed older than he looks. The man on the right was the fishing captain depicted in his book The Old Man And The Sea.  I think it's a great adventure story.

When Hemingway was in Europe messing around with another woman, his wife got angry. She demolished his boxing ring and put in a swimming pool.

The wall of wives. He had four wives.

In the 1930's he acquired a white cat and named her Snowball. She had six toes. Snowball had many friends in the neighborhood. Outside are many cateries, cat nurseries, cat feeding and watering stations, and cat foot prints in cement. The outdoor grounds reeks of cat urine. Some cats are in the house but it doesn't smell as bad as the outdoors.

Hemingway had a problem with alcohol. For a year he and a buddy rented a local bar for three dollars a week. When the owner raised the rent to 4 dollars a week he got angry. He and his buddy rented another bar a half block away. If his friends brought furnishings from the old bar to the new bar they got free alcohol. When they brought the urinal from the old bar Hemingway insisted he should keep it because of all the money he pissed away in that urinal. He brought it home and put it in the yard. The wife got upset and tried to improve the appearance by putting an olive barrel on top and fancy tile across the front. Now it serves at a fountain for the cats to drink. Outside you can barely see the Key West lighthouse above the trees. Before it was easier to spot and a beacon from an inebriated Hemingway to find his way home.

He put in a walkway from his bedroom to his writing room. He suffered from insomnia and depression so he would often start typing early in the morning. He wrote 70% of his writings from this house in Key West, Florida. He caught many tarpon too. At one point his house was next to the ocean. The US Navy dredged the harbor and added a mile north and south and another mile east and west to the island that was Key West. I imagine it was charming in the 1930's. Now it is very crowded, limited parking, and very touristy. I wouldn't call Key West charming.