Where Legends Never Die In The Conch Republic
“I went down to Captain Tony’s
“To get out of the heat…”
– Jimmy Buffett, “Last Mango In Paris”
I’ve gone into Captain Tony’s, tho not to necessarily to get out of the heat, as Jimmy Buffett so famously sang about this Key West landmark bar.k
I went in there because, well, Jimmy Buffett so famously sang about this Key West landmark bar.
And I suspect that’s why pretty much everyone else visiting Key West goes in there, too.
As far as bars go, it’s not particularly appealing. It’s old, dark and dingy and the bathroom, whew! Let me just say to hold your breath before you have to go in there.
But it has air conditioning and legacy and on a sweltering afternoon on the Keys that’s reason enough to walk down Green Street a couple of blocks from Duval Street and into the you-can’t-miss-it yellow wood building.
Captain Anthony “Tony” Tarracino made the bar famous. He was once the city’s mayor, winning by drinking with his customers (and voters) at the bar and with a platform to “limit Key West’s growth and to keep its reputation as a refuge for eccentrics and renegades who had found their way to the southernmost point of the continental United States.”
He also preserved Key West ’s daily sunset celebration ritual, one of the must-do things to do in Key West.
Walk into the bar and you walk into history. Ernest Hemingway drank in this location when it was Sloppy Joe’s and Buffett was a regular in his early Key West days.
There’s a lot of bras and underwear hanging from the ceiling and while there are no stories of legend of how they got there, you can be sure there are stories among the people who put them there.
There are also license plates and dollar bills hanging on the walls; there’s so many of each you really can’t even see the walls.
What got my attention the most was a faded framed photo of Buffett with Captain Tony. I must have stared at it for 10 minutes without moving, thinking of what it must have been like to be in this bar, at that very place, at the same time as those two famous Key West characters.
“Our lives change like the weather
“But a legend never dies…”
– Jimmy Buffett, “Last Mango In Paris”
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