Selling Key West

Regular inundations of cruise ship passengers are a boon to some. But to others, they are a threat the city's soul.

KEY WEST - Fresh off the Enchantment of the Seas, Laura Jones is at the Mad Hatter gift shop at 8:15 a.m. looking over a shark puppet hat for her nephew. She checks the $25 price tag and quickly puts it back.

Her mom, Sharon Moses, ticks off their plans for the morning. "We'll ride the trolley, see the Hemingway House, maybe see some things to buy," says Moses, who lives near her daughter in Tallahassee. "But it's not like we can't get Florida stuff."

Jones and Moses are among thousands of cruise passengers from two mammoth ships who, on this Friday morning, will visit Key West's historic Old Town district for a few hours before leaving for Mexico, the last stop on their four-day trip before heading back to a South Florida port.

They will jam sidewalks on Duval Street, buying enough T-shirts to clothe a small town. They will ride the Conch Tour Train to hear tales about such historic visitors as Harry Truman and Tennessee Williams. They will grab a beer and maybe a Hemingway logo souvenir at Sloppy Joe's.

And they will annoy some residents and business owners, who worry that the almost-daily cruise ship calls are ruining Key West's laid back, quirky atmosphere.

Nearly 1-million cruise passengers visited the 2- by 4-mile island last year. Nancy Klingener of The Ocean Conservancy says cruise crowds have changed the nature of Old Town, with chains such as Banana Republic and Wendy's moving in and local artisans being forced out.

A survey in the March issue of National Geographic Traveler magazine ranked Key West third from the bottom of 115 destinations worldwide, saying the city's charm is succumbing to mass tourism.

"Key West's whole selling point is that it's a unique community with interesting things to see and people to talk to," says Klingener, a former Miami Herald reporter who has lived in the city 13 years. "If you destroy that, you've destroyed one of our most valuable assets."

The issue basically has split Key West's business community into two camps: those who profit from cruise passenger traffic and those who don't.

Cashing in are retailers on lower Duval Street, near the main cruise ship dock, attractions such as the Ripley's Believe it or Not! museum and the Conch Train. On the other side are bed and breakfast inns, art galleries and museums off the beaten path.

Boosters say the rising cruise ship tide floats everyone's boat. Money spent in Duval Street's T-shirt shops and jewelry stores recirculates in groceries, restaurants and clothing stores, says Virginia Panico, president of the Key West Chamber of Commerce.

"It's a big economic boom, it's the trickle-down effect," she says. "If the stores didn't open until 11 a.m., there would be less people employed, less people able to go out to eat or buy an extra pair of shoes."

The best evidence of Key West's tourist appeal is the 80 percent average occupancy in local hotels, says Ed Swift, president of Historic Tours of America, which owns the Conch Train, Old Town Trolley and souvenir shops of the Mallory Square Festival Marketplace.

"They say we're ruining Key West because of the cruise ships," he says. "But the customer votes with his presence. If we're ruining it, what are they all doing here?"

City officials and the cruise lines, however, acknowledge that at times the crowds have become too much of a good thing.

They quickly point out that passenger traffic is down year-to-year for the past five months in reaction to the overcrowding and the city boosting the per-passenger fee charged to cruise lines.

Key West won't allow more ships until a consultant completes a study of the impact on Key West's quality of life, City Manager Julio Avael says. "We're at a point where we're saturated," he says.

Cruise companies hear Key West's concerns and don't want to spoil the experience for passengers, says Michele Paige, president of the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association. But, she says, the city brought these problems on itself.

"It's up to the port to dictate if, or at what time, there's overcrowding," says Paige, whose trade group represents 11 cruise lines.

That's a complaint one also hears from Elliot Baron, a restaurateur and self-appointed City Hall muckraker, and his fellow activists with the Committee for a Livable Old Town.

The group decided to protest on March 11, a day when five cruise ships were bringing thousands of passengers to Key West while the city already was packed with spring breakers and motorcyclists down from Daytona Beach's Bike Week.

"It was," Baron says, "boneheaded beyond belief."

"If they want traffic, let's give them traffic!" declared a newspaper ad placed by the activists. It called for residents to drive their cars on Duval Street between 11 a.m. and noon.

That morning, a pastamaker in Baron's Mangia Mangia restaurant picked up the phone and got an earful from someone who identified herself as a Duval Street business owner.

The woman claimed Baron was destroying her business and hung up, employee Tim Doherty says. He says she called back with threats: I'll kill Elliot. I'll blow up your restaurant.

Baron pressed star-69 on the phone and traced the call to a Duval Street store.

Police could not make an arrest because the caller didn't identify herself and any number of people at the store could have made the call, police spokeswoman Cynthia Edwards said. "Just tracing a number doesn't establish culpability," she said.

The protest went off as planned.

Today, a steady stream of Conch Trains and trolleys continues to roll past his restaurant, much to Baron's dismay. His house next door was built in 1890 and others in Old Town date back to the 1860s - before the first automobiles, he notes.

The cruise ships are "a little well the city pumps for its revenue," Baron says. "The ruling interests largely aren't answerable to residents, who have to co-exist with this."

Key West needs the money cruise lines pay in docking and passenger fees, Avael says. The city nets $2.2-million a year and without that would be forced to increase property taxes or cut services, he says.

Baron and fellow activist Bill Verge, a retired CEO of a security company, say city officials don't count all the costs of hosting ships, such as additional police and paramedics. More important, critics ask, why is the city putting so much effort into attracting tourists who contribute to only a small number of Key West businesses?

The number of cruise passengers in Key West shot up 46 percent in 2002 to 990,000, as American travel abroad slowed and cruise lines moved ships from the Mediterranean Sea to U.S. ports.

And since the late '90s, Key West has attracted more bargain-minded tourists on short cruises, says Heather Carruthers, owner of Pearl's Rainbow, a bed and breakfast. That means more people buying cheap souvenirs and quick doses of Key West culture, she says.

"If you're only here four to eight hours, what do you do?" Carruthers says. "You ride the Conch Train and the Old Town Trolley. The benefit is for people whose business model is built on churn . . . people whose business needs that congestion."

The Key West Business Guild, an association of gay-owned businesses, surveyed members in April about the cruise traffic. Fifty-four percent said the ships had no impact or a bad effect on their business.

At her chamber of commerce office, Panico says lots of cruise passengers return for longer visits to Key West. A recent survey showed 62 percent expect to come back in two years, she says.

"They got a taste, they liked it and they want more," says Panico, although she admits there are no data on how many actually do return.

Singling out cruise passengers misses the point, says Swift of Historic Tours. Hotels and other businesses benefit from different parts of the tourism trade, like Bike Weekers and celebrants at Fantasy Fest, the city's weeklong Halloween party.

"Do I really want the bikers or Fantasy Fest?" he says. "They come to drink. But do I attack their segment of the economy? No."

Key West wasn't always a popular cruise ship stop, says Paige, the cruise association president. Passengers dismissed it as a sleepy party town. Saying you went to Key West didn't impress friends back home, she says.

Now the city is a favorite port call. "It's safe, it's clean, it's got facilities for passenger movement with the trolley, and the shopping has gotten better," Paige says.

Activists like Verge contend it's more than economics. "When you get off the cruise ship here, you see white faces," he says. "At the other ports, you step off and it's foreign. You step off and see people of color."

Paige says race is not a factor when cruise lines pick ports. But in places such as Jamaica, passengers sometimes feel "a bit insecure" around aggressive vendors. "What they consider harassment is actually good salesmanship there," Paige says.

Dale Larson of Fort Lauderdale remembers the Key West of her '70s college road trips: funky clothing stores, colorful characters and crazy nights in Duval Street bars.

This time she arrived by ship with two sisters and two friends, who all grew up together in Chicago. They picked the four-day cruise instead of a Las Vegas trip to celebrate the 50th birthday of big sister Nadine Moore.

Larson and Moore came to Key West as middle-age moms and didn't like the changes. "Now, the quaintness is gone," Larson says. "It used to be what (Miami's) Coconut Grove used to be."

They wandered up Duval Street, calling out raunchy T-shirt slogans and stopping for a light breakfast in Papa's Restaurant. The only shopping committed by 10 a.m. was $31 in souvenirs (Key West cap, license plate and refrigerator magnets) and a $3 bottle of water.

At Island Needlework just off Duval, Julie Pischke says the few cruise passengers who come to her shop are needlepoint enthusiasts who know the craft and call ahead.

"The "wanderer' isn't my customer," she says. "The cruise ship tourist is a mass-market tourist. That person won't come in for a tapestry. They want to know what you have for $9.95."

She misses other artisans forced out of Old Town by skyrocketing real estate prices. Pischke can afford to stay only because she bought the vintage Conch house, which also includes her studio and the family's upstairs living space, for $200,000 in the mid '80s.

One of her daughters said Pischke reminded her of Meg Ryan in the movie You've Got Mail. Ryan's neighborhood book store is run out of business by a chain owned by Tom Hanks' father.

Small artists "can't make that much money to pay the rents that the chains can pay," she says. "Once you make the decision to open up to cruise ships, it's like (allowing) gambling. You open the cage and the beast is out."

- Researcher Kitty Bennett contributed to this report. Steve Huettel can be reached at huettel@sptimes.com or 813 226-3384.