Word: marinas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...marina is part of Marathon, halfway between Key Largo and Key West. The town's charms are not readily apparent to a traveler, who usually sees only a six-mile treeless stretch of U.S. Highway 1, where bars and cheap shopping malls are chaotically assembled under the glaring sun, lined up with occasional fading signs offering time-share condo developments. It is hard to earn a living legally in the Florida Keys, and the local residents hold two firm contradictory beliefs: 1) zoning and planning are outrageous interferences with free enterprise, and 2) mentioning aloud the less than salubrious effects...
...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...
...marina fills seven acres, more or less, of this point of land, and even the most sentimental observer can see that it is a piece of property "ripe for development." It is humble, but every winter it was home to about 120 boats. The wooden docks were lined with boxes full of tomato and lettuce plants. Bicycles, with the chrome abandoned to rust, stood unlocked next to supermarket baskets painted to match the vessels they served. Boats with some chance of being called yachts were berthed on A and B docks. The people tied up inside the piers next...
...nonstop flight to Singapore, on which one has to unpack and repack for every meal. But the observer misses the point: the life is different, and the people are, therefore, special. Joe Pluhar, who until a few weeks ago was the owner of the marina with his wife Bobbi, says, "The people made the marina, they helped, pitched in, patrolled. We loved them." Steve Coe, who was the dockmaster for eight years, says, "This place was for regular people who live aboard and do a little cruising, it wasn't for the gold-plated 65-footers...
...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...