EastMartello (82 photos)
20 August 2009

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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.

Robert the Doll has perhaps one of the more famous ghost stories of Key West. He certainly has one of the more tangible and creepy ones; tangible because he’s still around and you can go visit him, and creepy because.. well he’s just really creepy.

Young Robert Eugene Otto lived with his parents in Key West in the early 1900′s in what is now know as the Artist House. His parents were well off and had in their employ a few Bahamian ‘servants’ (Slaves?). It was rumored that they were stern people, and kept Robert under strict rule. They were also rumored to have been fairly unpleasant to their servants, one in particular, a woman who gave the then 5-year-old Robert a life-size doll in his own likeness shortly after the death of his sister. The doll made of wire, cloth and straw, and some say Robert’s own hair. It is also said to contain a soulstone. (This practice involves a small crystal being placed into an object, thus imbuing it with power by taking a soul of its own).

Robert struck up a strong bond with the doll, naming it Robert after himself, and demanding everyone from that point on refer to him as Eugene. Whenever Eugene would be scolded for something by his parents, he would always blame the doll.. “Robert did it!”

Eugene eventually went off to Paris to study painting and met his wife Anne, whom he brought back to Key West. His parents had died and left Eugene the family home, and upon moving in, Anne learned of the Doll Robert. She thought the relationship between her husband and the doll strange, but kept her thoughts to herself in the beginning. Eugene reportedly had Robert by his side at all times, wether painting or relaxing and this began to wear thin on Anne.

Reports vary, but the story basically goes like this; Anne had had enough, and insisted Robert be put in the attic, but after only a short time Eugene told her that Robert wanted his own room, and he hired carpenters to come in and construct a Robert-Sized room in the third floor turret room of the house. The room was complete with low ceilings, and doll sized furniture. Eugene sat Robert at the window so he could look out over the street.

Children on their way to school would walk by and claim to see robert moving about in the attic room, the curtains moved, and they said Robert would change positions. They’ve been interviewed as adults and still hold true to their claims.

Eugene became abusive towards Anne in his later years and would always tell her that “Robert did it.” After his death and burial in the Key West Cemetery, Anne locked Robert in his third floor room, moved back to her family in chicago, and leased out the house with the proviso that Robert remain the only occupant of the turret room.  This remained the case until her death in 1976 when the new occupants decided to renovate part of the attic to accommodate another bedroom.

This is the account of a plumber hired to work in the room:

“I was doing some work in the larger part of the attic of the house. The people there wanted to make it an additional room so I was running the lines for a new toilet. The doll looked pretty creepy sitting there on the little chair holding its stuffed animal, but I had work to do so I didn’t think much about it at first. As my work continued I had to make a few trips to get some parts from the van. Each time I returned I could swear the doll had moved a little bit. Like I said, I had work to do so I ignored it as much as I could, but when I was just about finished with the job and started decending the stairs, I heard a little kid giggling behind me. When I turned around the doll was on the opposite side of the room. The first thing I did was look to see where the kid was, but no one was there. I wasn’t really frightened, but it was weird so I just continued down stairs and left. Some of my tools are probably still up there.”

Subsequent occupants reported the sound of children giggling, thumping, and footsteps coming from the turret room. The often would enter the room to find robert in a different place than where they had set him. They were so disturbed by this that they locked Robert in a sea chest in his room.

Eventually the contents of the house were willed to the East Martello Museum where they discovered Robert in his chest and put him on display. I just had to go see this!

These days robert still holds court in the East Martello Museum

And he really does hold court. People come from all over to see him, they leave notes.. they write letters, there is an official ‘Robert the Doll Day’ in Key West. It’s said that Robert drains batteries, and causes all manner of disturbances with cameras. People report of having an entire roll of film come out black, others report having the entire roll be photos of Robert instead of the rest of the museum. Three People have had their pacemakers fail while visiting Robert. If you don’t ask Robert’s permission to photograph him, or say hello and goodbye to him, you will have bad luck, even sickness.

I went in thinking to myself.. I’m not going to ask permission, that’s silly.. besides how am I going to know if it’s true or not!

I chickened out. I asked. I’m a little ashamed of it, but at the last minute I decided that I was on a mission to have less strife and more harmony in my life so I needed all the superstitions help I could get.. no matter how silly it was.

Seeing Robert up close and personal is a little unsettling. I don’t know if it was because I’d read so much about him, or if there was really something emanating from him. It’s not so much that it feels evil as develish.. like a little kid holding a burning bag with a dog turd in it, trying to decide who’s porch to drop it on…

Goodbye Robert!

We took turns taking our pictures with him, and we said our goodbyes.

I haven’t experienced any bad luck or anything, but Sunday Christina and I had a little fight.. I wonder if it was Robert working his mojo on me…

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!