Early Days on Stock Island: Grit, Gravel & Good Neighbors

~ By Boyd Hamilton – Key West, Florida, July 1996

Stock Island
As time went on, I was able to purchase the land next to mine. It was almost a necessary move because a man named Frank Smith had moved in and started a junkyard there. Old cars and scrap were everywhere—kind of a midnight auto supply. Danny, Henry, and a few of the local kids thought it was great fun to play tag and hide-and-seek among those junk cars. I’m sure nowadays no one would allow children to play in a place like that—they’d say it was far too dangerous and probably force the owner to fence it off.

Later on, I found out the actual owner of the property, Rose Segal, didn’t even know Frank was there. Rose—known locally as “Mom”—had been the madam of the Key West brothel, Mom’s Tea Room, for many years. The property I bought from her included the remains of that very building, which had since burned down. That old place must have had some stories to tell—it was once the main brothel for a Navy town that, for many years, housed 12,000 to 14,000 sailors.

Now we had two large pieces of property, but 2nd Street ran between them. So I got to work on the county commissioners to have the end of the street vacated. Everything was going fine—until a few Stock Island property owners showed up to block it. Turned out, they thought I was asking to close off 1st Street instead of 2nd. But by the time we got that cleared up, there was too much talk, and politically it just couldn’t happen. The best I could do was trade the county a strip of land along the edge of my property in exchange for the piece of road that divided mine. That deal went through, so in the end, I got the solid block of land I needed. Whoopee!

Fill, as we call it down here, is coral dredged from the ocean—locals refer to it as “marl.” Every inch of this property needed fill before it could be used, and the closer to the ocean you got, the more you needed. I noticed there was already a large hole in the ground—what’s now our boat dock area. I later learned that a couple of locals had moved in there with a rusty old crane and a truck, and had been selling fill out of that hole for years. They were telling people they owned the property. The National Bank, which actually owned the land at the time, had no idea this was going on. So yes—they were stealing the fill. My fill. But in the end, it worked out okay. That hole became our marina. Today, it holds slips for twenty boats and a nice boat ramp too. When Henry found a huge anchor out at the reef, he brought it in on several floats and stored it in that hole. You can’t see it now, but it doesn’t rust while we wait to build a proper place for it.

I used to do electrical work for a few of my neighbors on Stock Island, and one of them—Ben Bernstein—became a good friend. I’d often stop by his office just to bat the breeze. He had a way of making complicated things feel simple. Ben gave me a lot of good advice over the years. It meant a lot to me when I attended the dedication of Benjamin Bernstein Park in his honor in 1995. He was a great man.

Through all those early years, Elsie and I worked hard. We were living in a 12′ x 60′ house trailer, which got pretty tight when Danny came along in 1965. We ended up pulling a second trailer up close behind it and cutting a door between the two. That helped, but with seven people—and the front room doubling as our campground office—it was still a busy place. After a long day of work, it wasn’t easy being woken up at night by late arrivals. Elsie and I used to take turns sleeping with our clothes on so we could be ready to answer those night calls.