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Until a few weeks ago, before the winds of progress struck, the Boot Key Marina was the kind of place where everybody got together and cooked a collective Thanksgiving dinner. They had parties all the time. Ellie Sharp, who spent the past six years at the marina with her husband Pat aboard their 39-ft. sailboat, the Tranquillity II, liked to collect everyone's aluminum cans, sell them and use the money for the regular Saturday hamburger cookouts. In the winter, when the weather was right, 25 or 30 people would wander down to the end of the dock...
People played bridge on the patio furniture, and in the mornings Fran Markham used to conduct an exercise class. The view looked down the channel to the Atlantic Ocean and across to Boot Key, a tangled thicket of low-lying mangrove. The harbor is one of the few protected anchorages on the ocean side of the Florida Keys; it has been a major stop for anyone cruising to the Bahamas...
...road to Boot Key Marina reflects an earlier, but no more graceful, state of Marathon's history. In a moldering trailer park a resident sits listlessly on top of a motorcycle, airing her black eye. Towers of lobster traps fill a fish yard. A dilapidated fish market offers the catch fresh from the fleet. The water in the harbor is a long way from crystalline...
...gentrification of Boot Key Marina has begun. At the end of March the Pluhars sold it to a man named John Theurer. Rumor swept through Marathon that the selling price was over $2 million. Nobody knew much about the buyer. Up and down Highway 1, in the banks and the bars and the early-morning breakfast places, people were telling one another that he was part of the Theurer family that had made its money in truck- trailer manufacturing. "To be fair, no one knows what he is going to do with the marina," said a longtime resident, sitting...
Around 700 people a day are now moving into Florida, and the state is caught in an inexorable conflict between progress and indigestion. At Boot Key, almost everyone decided the crunch had caught them. "All he had to do was tell us what he was planning," said a former regular Tuesday afternoon bridge player. "But not only could we not get a commitment, we felt intimidated." The camaraderie of a community had been destroyed. The exodus began...