Mojitos at La Concha Hotel – A Key West Adventure, Part 1 – The Hemingway Society

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Mojitos at La Concha Hotel: A Key West Adventure, Part 1

​​​​​​​By John Hargrove and Sharon Hamilton

“There it is!” John said, pointing excitedly out across the water. Rising seven stories tall, from an island along the horizon slowly growing more visible in size as we approached, was an unmistakable pinkish-white building. We were returning to Key West aboard the ferry Yankee Freedom III, which takes visitors 70 miles west of the island to a set of keys known as the Dry Tortugas, and just coming into our view was a sight Hemingway had seen nearly one hundred years earlier—the La Concha Hotel.

“I see it!” Sharon replied, equally excited.

In 1926, a developer named Carl Aubuchon opened what would be the first of its kind: a luxury hotel on Key West.¹ Considered the epitome of elegance and modern convenience (with marble floors, private baths, an elevator, and stunning ocean views), the La Concha Hotel was at the time a jaw-dropping achievement, and was—just as it still is today—the tallest building on the island. Located at the corner of Duval and Fleming Streets, this “skyscraper” was the first glimpse and suggestion of an exotic downtown for travelers by ship toward the Caribbean island that is celebrated as the southernmost point in the contiguous United States;² and it was exactly the sight that greeted Ernest and Pauline Hemingway as they sailed aboard a Peninsular & Occidental steamer from Havana, Cuba, into Key West Harbor, in April 1928.

Hemingway would later immortalize the way the hotel looms above the island, when he wrote: “Then we came to the edge of the stream and the water quit being blue and was light and greenish and inside I could see the stakes on the Eastern and the Western Dry Rocks and the wireless masts at Key West and the La Concha hotel up high out of all the low houses,” followed by, “Ahead now he could see the white of the La Concha hotel, the wireless masts, and houses of town.”³  Now, we too were seeing this building, from the water, as we sailed toward Key West Harbor.

Our day-trip aboard the Yankee Freedom III to the Dry Tortugas was specifically to visit Fort Jefferson—a pre-Civil War fortress (the largest masonry fort ever constructed in the United States, although never finished) located on Garden Key, near the very end of Monroe County, Florida.⁴ In May 1928, Ernest, Waldo Peirce, Bill Smith, Pauline Pfeiffer’s brother Paul, and Captain “Bra” Saunders camped out inside the fort during Hemingway’s first fishing trip to the Dry Tortugas. Hemingway would later return to the Dry Tortugas, and Fort Jefferson, on numerous fishing excursions.⁵

At around 20 miles west of Key West the Yankee Freedom III passes the uninhabited Marquesas Keys, another favorite fishing spot of Hemingway’s. Having missed catching a glimpse during the trip out to Fort Jefferson of this grouping of islands with its own lagoon, we stood sentinel on the return trip, giddy as the islands came into view off the boat’s port side.

“Look, the French Riviera,” John said with a smile, pointing out the strip of white, sandy beach, gleaming in the sun, clearly visible even from a distance. It was on one of these such beaches in the Marquesas Keys that, during their 1928 trip to the Dry Tortugas, Waldo Peirce took a photo of Hemingway, mugging for the camera and enjoying the sun, almost completely naked except for a strategically placed bit of fisherman’s gear. It’s known as The Socket Photo.

Editor’s Note: The longer essay continues online. As it is Part I, “to be continued” appears at the end online. The full Hemingway blog page is here: https://www.hemingwaysociety.org/hr-blog

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