“Sloppy Joe’s,” patrons jokingly called it. The floor at Jose Garcia’s Rio Havana club was a mess: wooden planks soaked from large chunks of melting ice that were cooling down the fresh seafood for sale. A man’s man, Hemingway enjoyed hunting and fishing Sloppy Joe’s The bar, in fact, is where you might say it all started. Of course that came after the writing, after the fishing, and long after the bar. It saw the birth of their two sons, Patrick and Gregory, and hosted frequent parties and visits from friends, but the house was also the setting for numerous dramas and, ultimately, the family’s dissolution. was a happy home for the couple and the numerous six-toed cats Hemingway kept on the property. He and his wife filled the house with furniture from around the world-Venetian glass chandeliers, woodwork from Spain, a cigar-maker’s chair from Cuba-and added a brick wall for privacy in 1935 after the residence appeared on a tourist map. Remarkably for Florida it has a basement, which Hemingway used as a wine cellar.
The house is a grand piece of work, built in 1851 on the second-highest piece of ground in Key West (the highest holds the cemetery) by a marine architect and salvage wrecker named Asa Tift. Hemingway’s writing studio with various trophies and souvenirs Sitting among various hunting trophies and reminders of his travels, he would have enjoyed the calm about the place, which remains even today.
The studio in which he finished A Farewell to Arms and created such works as For Whom the Bell Tolls, Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa, is on the top floor of an old carriage house behind the main house on Whitehead Street, connected to the master bedroom by a catwalk. It was mornings that found Hemingway writing, going through a handful of No.2 pencils-seven pencils was a good day’s work-or punching out a couple hundred words on his Royal typewriter before heading into town. Key West, not technically tropical (above the Tropic of Cancer) but it may as well be with its warm breezes, palm gardens and cool mornings.
It was a walking town, with most everything you’d want to get to shoved in a few square miles at the west end of the island. In return, Key West expected nothing of him, took nothing and posed only one real constant challenge: To spend the day drinking, fishing, or both? Papa’s Royal typewriter, though he reportedly preferred pencils Home During those years he produced some of his most endearing literary works, drank, fought, wrecked a marriage, named a bar, discovered saltwater sport fishing and gave the city at the end of the road a legacy of sorts. The lighthouse would have been one of the first buildings to come into view as Hemingway and his wife Pauline first sailed into Key West in 1928, and one of the last things the writer saw as he left, alone, in 1939.
He used to joke that living near the town’s lighthouse ensured he could always find his way home from the bar, and so it likely did. Ernest Hemingway made the walk countless times, drunk, sometimes angry, maybe lost in thought, happy from a good day fishing or not thinking about anything at all. It’s nearly three-quarters of a mile from Sloppy Joe’s bar to the house behind the wall at 907 Whitehead Street.
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