East Martello Museum
3501 S. Roosevelt Blvd. – www.kwahs.com/martello.htm
Another old Fort!
The East Martello museum is located in an old unfinished Civil War Fort on the south side of the Island right next to the airport facing the ocean. It’s not quite as impressive as Fort Zach and definately not as cool as Fort Jefferson, but it’s still an old brick fort, and that makes it worth a visit in my book! Also it’s the home of Robert the Doll, and I definitely wanted to meet him, so we hopped in the car and took a drive over. It’s biking distance (well the whole island is if you don’t mind a long-ish ride) but it was pretty hot, and we just weren’t feelin’ it that day, so we mounted the trusty 4-runner steed and hit the trail!
The East Martello is designed after a style of italian forts called oddly enough, Martello Towers. Construction began in the early 1860′s and was never finished because the advent of exploding cannon shells made the fort Obsolete. It never saw any hostile action, and is the best-preserved example of Martello-style fort construction in the US, and also the very last fort in the world to ever have been built in that style.
The Bulwark (Outer walls) and the citadel (Inner tower) walls are 8 feet thick and made of solid granite slabs encased in red brick. The inside is similar to other forts of the time with intricate barrel-vault arched ceilings.
The fort is open-air and even in the dead of summer, the breeze blowing through the windows and the coolness of the surrounding marble and brick keep it quite pleasant inside. I don’t find Key west to be as hot as most people think it is, you just need to get out of the sun and you’re fine. And if you can go inside a structure made of solid stone you’re even better off! Add a Corona to that equation and I’d have been pretty much in heaven, but alas they didn’t serve any alcohol. I guess not everything in Key West is focused on drinking!
This is perhaps the most eclectic museum I’ve been to…
The East Martello seems to be in a constant state of… I don’t know.. disarray! It’s a lot more like a huge garage full of antiques than an actual museum. Don’t get me wrong, it was a lot of fun, and the exhibits are worth going to see, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, just don’t be surprised if you feel like you’re wandering through someone’s basement.
Everything is dusty, and there are areas where it’s looks as though someone got halfway toward finishing a new exhibit or moving an old one when the happy hour bell rang… 3 months ago.
All in all the Martello has the overall appearance of a place that doesn’t get a lot of upkeep. This seems to be a common thread here in Key West! They say things move more slowly in the islands, and they ain’t lyin’. No one is in much of a hurry for anything. I’m down with all that though, so I really enjoyed the Martello; I love old stuff, and I love to see it in a situation where it’s not all roped off and behind glass in an air-conditioned sarcophagus. You can definitely lose yourself in the sheer reality of it all.
The outer perimeter (bulwark) section houses exhibits and such, including Robert. When you wander in from the entrance (where you’ll pay 6 bucks to come in) you hit the ‘gift-shop’ which is just a room with some tables and a strange mix of key west souvenir stuff. You can even get your own Robert the Doll doll! Christina was very adamant that I NOT get one. Damn. We wandered through the gift-shop, and eventually made our way out into the exhibits, and around the perimeter of the bullwark through all sorts of odd, eclectic jumbles of antiques and displays.
When you make it past the inside exhibits, you enter the courtyard at the center of the fort. There’s an 80 year old child-scale play house out here. I’m sure there’s some historical significance to it, but there aren’t any plaques explaining it, and I didn’t bother to look it up online. It’s full of dolls though, and you can duck into it if you’re brave enough to deal with the combined heat and creepiness of being stared at by about 40 really old dolls.
Take the tower!
It was time to hit up the citadel. We walked around the circumference of the courtyard which is mostly just overgrown grass and some gardens that appeared to have been kept up at one time, but now were falling to rampant growth.
I started wondering if they needed some volunteers or grant money or something.. not that I have any.
We came to the entrance to the citadel which was a really cool brick arch type thing.. only one way in! The sign said children only allowed under adult supervision, and I wondered if that included immature adults like myself, but I figured I had Christina with me, so I was covered.
This place really was cool, but if you’re claustrophobic, you might not like the bottom floor very much, it’s a pretty tight maze of corridors and rooms. Personally, I’m usually pretty claustrophobic, but didn’t find it unbearable. From here, you can mount the rickety old cast-iron spiral staircase in the center of the tower to reach the upper floors.
The Art of the Citadel
The citadel houses a display of ‘junkyard art’ sculptures by the now deceased keys artist Stanley Papio.
Papio (1914-1982) lived in Key Largo and made sculptures by welding junkyard debris into art. He was quite unpopular at the time with his neighbors because he would line the road near his home with his ‘art’. He was in constant battle with the local zoning department over his yard where he kept his ‘art museum.’ Papio never became famous in his lifetime, and only now is he considered one of the more important folk artists of his time.
We wandered around for a bit looking at all the cool sculptures and decided to take off to the roof. We hit the spiral stairs again and made our way to the top floor.
I make fun of the ‘rickety’ spiral stairs but in fact they feel quite solid for being over 130 years old. They sure LOOK scary though.
Fetchez la vache!
The view from the top of the citadel is pretty nice. You can see back toward the airport on one side, and out to the ocean on the other, and down into the courtyard at the silly english kiniggits down there.
Back downstairs and up front by the gift shop there’s another art exhibit in a series of air-conditioned rooms – a very welcome break from the heat of the tower top! There are paintings by local artists, and a few of Mario Sanchez’s woodcutting pieces. Cool stuff.
All in all a cool place to visit. You can see the whole deal in about a hour or so, just in time to find a place to put your feet up and pop the top on a frosty cool Corona. Don’t forget the lime! More photos here: East Martello Gallery.