Key West The Newspaper

The Matecumbe Historical Trust will host with month’s free presentation on Monday, June 19th at 6:30 pm at Island Community Church.

Michael Shields will present, Key West: Bohemia in the Tropics, produced by Timothy Long.  This is an account of a largely unknown story of how a radical community-building experiment during the Great Depression led to the laid-back, anything-goes lifestyle of today’s Key West.

The film opens during the darkest days of the Great Depression and goes on to explore how Key West, once the richest city in the nation, was forced to turn itself over to federal bureaucrats and accept a future forever tied to tourism.  Few outsiders know that Key West the tourist town was actually created in the 1930s by the federal government as a way to save the island city, which had been bankrupted by the Great Depression. Those images people carry around in their heads of America’s most famous tropical bohemian outpost were first put there by government-paid artists and writers as part of a plan to provide Key West with a viable tourist economy that would sustain it for years to come.

The film introduces characters such as New Deal administrator Julius Stone, who leads the controversial effort to turn Key West into “The Bermuda of Florida.” We meet some of the country’s preeminent poets and writers, including Wallace Stevens and Ernest Hemingway, who “discover” Key West in the 1920s and are outraged by the government’s transformation of “their” sleepy little island into a tourist town.

Michael Shields, is the founder of the Key West Film Society and former President, Executive Director of the Tropic Cinema in Key West. A member of the Florida Keys Council of the Arts Advisory Board, chair of the Key West Art In Public Places, Chair of the Monroe County Library Board, board Member of the Key West Art & Historical Society, where he is also the Film Curator.

The lecture is free and open to the public.  For more information contact Barbara at 305-393-0940 or visit www.MatecumbeHistoricalTrust.org