Key West’s Mount Rushmore Deserves a Real Plaza, Not a Street With an Appendage

Streets for People  |  Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown  |  Chris Hamilton  |  May 30, 2026

Picture it. The Duval Street Pocket Park, last Saturday at 1 PM. A line of happy tourists waits to take a photo with the Southernmost Point buoy. Kids running around. A musician playing nearby. A cyclist threading through without anyone batting an eye. The City spokeswoman has said the replica is even more popular with visitors than the original location. And more than a few locals in the Facebook comment threads about this project have said the same thing: leave it where it is. It works.

That’s not an accident. It works because it’s a plaza.

Meanwhile, one block south, the original site is fenced off. On May 7, the City Commission voted 7-0 to delay awarding the construction bid for the Southernmost Point Plaza project. They paused because a few neighbors — including the Morgan family, who own property near the corner — asked them to. The item comes back to the Commission on June 4.

Here’s the part worth sitting with. The design they’re objecting to is already a heavily watered-down version of what was on the table in 2023. And what was on the table in 2023 was what the residents of the Southernmost Point neighborhood themselves asked the City for in April 2021. The City listened. The City designed it with them. And then, in August 2024, for reasons we’re still trying to fully understand, the City reversed itself and watered the whole thing down. That’s the project now on hold.

Five years after the residents made their ask, the original plaza vision is still on the shelf at City Hall. The question for June 4 is whether we pour concrete on the watered-down version, or whether we use the pause to bring back what the neighborhood asked for in the first place.

I think we should bring back what the neighborhood asked for because it was a great design that worked for everyone, residents and tourists. Walk with me. We’ll look at why this iconic corner matters, what the residents put on the record in 2021 and what it led to, how it got rolled back, where the neighborhood association actually stands today, and what June 4 should look like.

Key West’s Mount Rushmore

Earlier this month, Garden & Gun magazine ran a national feature on the Southernmost Point buoy. The piece quoted Conch Republic Speaker of the House and Shop Mom and Pop Key West leader Paul Menta calling the buoy “the Mount Rushmore of Key West.” It cited an estimate of roughly 85 million photos taken at that corner over the buoy’s lifetime.

Eighty-five million. Let that one breathe.

This isn’t a corner that became important when someone planted a concrete buoy there. The location was strategically significant as far back as 1917, when an underwater telephone cable linking Key West to Havana was laid here — the small concrete cable hut built to protect the connection still stands a few feet from the buoy today. During World War II, when the Navy fenced off most local beaches, this stretch of shoreline served as a vital public beach for Key West’s Black community and a working harbor where local fishermen docked their boats.

By the 1960s, the corner had become a gathering spot for visitors and a small informal marketplace where local vendors sold conch shells and sea sponges. The first hand-painted wooden “Southernmost Point” signs went up around the same time. The concrete buoy followed in 1983. In 2015, the City added the Bishop Albert Kee statue — honoring the man who had sold those conch shells and coconuts at the corner since the 1960s, a Key West character whose decades at the spot became part of what made it the spot.

Sixty-five years of meaning layered one decade at a time, onto the same patch of ground.

This is the most photographed corner in the state of Florida. Arguably in the South. Hundreds of thousands of visitors a year line up there. Every cruise passenger walking south from the dock ends up there. Every honeymoon, every bachelorette weekend, every family vacation, every conch on a homecoming visit eventually points a camera at that buoy. It’s on tee shirts and postcards, refrigerator magnets in every shop on Duval, even on a bobblehead. It is, by any honest measure, the single most iconic landmark in the Florida Keys.

Now look at what’s there. A buoy on a beat-up apron of pavement at the end of a residential street. A seawall that Hurricane Ian damaged and that’s been waiting four years for repair. Sidewalks too narrow for the crowds. Tourists spilling into the roadway to get the shot.

That’s the Mount Rushmore of Key West? We can do better. We have to do better. And the people who live nearest to it have been telling the City exactly that since 2021.

What the Residents Asked For

April 15, 2021. Fifteen residents gathered at 401 Whitehead Street for the founding meeting of what would become the Southernmost Point Community Association. District 6 Commissioner Clayton Lopez was there. Acting City Manager Patti McLauchlin was there. The City’s Transportation Manager was there. The City listened.

The residents proposed a strategic plan for the area. From the official minutes of that meeting:

“It was suggested by the SMPC that the City generate a strategic plan for the Southernmost Point area as the area is one of the most visited locations on the island. Suggestions included that portions of Whitehead and South Street become one way and restricted to residential traffic and residential parking… Strategic planning would include a comprehensive tree strategy, expansion of cobblestone street pavement; appropriate soft lighting, street pedestrian walking, attractive trash cans… and 5 MPH speeds for residential vehicles.”

Read that paragraph again. One-way streets. Cobblestone. Soft lighting. Pedestrian priority. Slower speeds. Coordinated trash management. A real plaza at one of the most visited locations on the island.

That’s what the residents asked for. Not in an advocacy column. Not in some outside consultant’s report. In the official minutes of their own community group’s first meeting, presented directly to the City’s senior leadership and recorded for the record.

Same meeting, same residents, also flagged the flooding at United and Whitehead as a problem they wanted addressed. The community connected the dots between drainage and street redesign from day one.

Here’s the line that’s stuck with me from those 2021 minutes. Commissioner Clayton Lopez floated a clean-up campaign slogan to help educate visitors: “Your vacation paradise, our neighborhood and home.” That phrase has been kicking around the Southernmost Point neighborhood ever since. Peter Janker — who chairs the community association today — repeated it to me this week. It’s the right frame. What works for the people who live there works for the people who visit. The plaza concept comes from the residents themselves, because the residents understood from day one that a calmer, more beautiful, more functional corner makes the place work for everyone.

What the City Designed With Them

Between 2021 and 2023, City staff worked with the community to translate that vision into a buildable design. Gary Volenec, then the City Engineer, was the technical hand. He talked to the residents. He talked to the Police and Fire Chiefs — both said one-way wouldn’t be a problem. He sketched a plaza concept built around what the neighborhood had asked for.

One-way street from Duval to Whitehead. A raised flush curb — the sidewalk and the roadway at the same elevation, with the whole roadbed lifted onto a low table. Seating steps. Shade. Landscaping. Room for food trucks at the Duval end. Room for the pedestrians who today spill into traffic because the sidewalks are too narrow. Even room for delivery vehicles to the local restaurants, designed in from the start.

The raised flush curb is the design detail doing the most work. A 5 mph sign is one thing. A vehicle having to negotiate up onto a raised table is another. The street itself becomes the speed cue. Drivers feel they’re someplace different the moment they enter the block, and they behave accordingly. That’s the principle behind every successful pedestrian-priority street treatment in the country — from European woonerfs to the Duval Pocket Park to Lazy Way. Design the road to slow people down and you don’t need to keep arguing with them about it.

Volenec told me bluntly last week why two-way doesn’t work on this corner: “It is just too narrow to have two way traffic plus parking and pedestrians and bikes mixing in. Two lanes is just crazy.”

The 2023 design – the featured image at top was a draft rendering – lined up with three of the City’s own Key West Forward strategic plan priorities: sea level rise, roads and sidewalks, traffic and pedestrian friendliness. It hardened the area against rising water — which is going to keep rising whether we like it or not. And it was Key West’s own playbook applied to the island’s most-visited corner. The Duval Street Pocket Park opened in 2019, replacing a parking lot with a hybrid pedestrian plaza right at the foot of Duval — the space where the replica buoy now sits, and where it’s working. Lazy Way got reimagined as a shared street, a woonerf where pedestrians lead and cars are guests. We’ve done this. We know how. The Southernmost Point Plaza was the next chapter.

How It Got Watered Down

We’d been following this project and had a story set to be published on June 11, 2024. This is from the lede in that never published story: 

“The City is holding a public meeting on June 13 to discuss making the Southernmost Point buoy area into a plaza that’s better for pedestrians and moving vehicles while addressing safety and standing water issues. The meeting will be held at City Hall from 5:30 to 8:00 pm. Here’s how the City’s website describes the intent of the project:

“The project would incorporate a one-way limited traffic flow pattern and incorporate resilience and sustainability strategies that address climate considerations, sea-level rise, increased shade, and increased bio-habitats while continuing to accommodate the needs of adjacent residential and commercial properties. The plaza would provide more space for pedestrians and improve the experience for the large crowds that visit daily. The improvements at the Southernmost Point are prepared for a complete street concept that would support three of the Key West Forward Strategic Plan priorities: Priority 2: Sea Level Rise; Priority 3: Roads and Sidewalks; Priority 6: Traffic and Pedestrian Friendliness.”

Neighboring businesses and residents are already receiving the project very positively. We all should…”

Just before the story’s publication I got a call that the meeting was canceled, so we didn’t publish the story. We later learned this was because of pushback from a subset of residents and then in August 2024 the City Commission passed a resolution authorizing a $35,425.63 change order to BCC Engineering. The purpose: undo the one-way design and redraw it as a two-way street. The cover memo from the City’s Project Manager said only that “after discussion with community members and stakeholders, the initial one-way design will need to be revised to retain the existing two-way configuration.”

Read that line again. Community members and stakeholders. But the community group — the Southernmost Point Community Association, the body that proposed the strategic plan in the first place at its founding meeting with the City’s senior leadership in the room — was on record asking for one-way. Who exactly were the community members and stakeholders the memo referenced? The memo doesn’t say. The record doesn’t say. And the result is what we have today: the original community recommendation rolled back to please a smaller group whose identities the public record never names.

Three city managers. Three engineering directors. No consistent commission champion across the four-year arc.

What’s on the Commission’s agenda for June 4 is the result. A two-way roadway narrowed from roughly 25 feet to 20 feet, with the buoy crammed onto a narrow paver arc against the seawall. Yes, new drainage and a rebuilt seawall — both genuinely needed. But compare the 2023 rendering with the 2025 rendering and the contrast is brutal. One is a public space. The other is a street with an appendage where people can take photos.

Here’s the part worth knowing. I asked Gary Volenec last week whether reviving the original 2023 design is still possible. His answer: “They didn’t throw away the design, so yes, you could go back to it. And yes, it will be a bit more expensive.”

The plan is sitting on the shelf at City Hall. Reviving it is real, not rhetorical. The question is whether the Commission has the will to do it.

The Most Credible Neighbor in the Room

Peter Janker is President of the Southernmost Point Community Association — a title that became official at the group’s most recent meeting when his neighbors nominated him on the spot. His association represents about 90 owners, renters, part-timers, all the local neighborhood businesses including the Butterfly Museum and people who walk dogs in the neighborhood. Its founding document is the April 2021 minutes I quoted earlier — the strategic plan recommendation the City received with full attendance from its senior leadership.

In other words, Janker isn’t a neighbor who happens to agree with the case I’m making. He’s the leader of the group whose 2021 recommendation became the 2023 plaza. That plaza is his document.

The association’s official position is to vote yes on the current compromise. They’ve taken three separate consensus checks among the membership, asking whether their concerns about the project should stop it from moving forward. Three times the answer was no. They’ve decided to support the project on the table as a pragmatic step — finish something meaningful now and continue pushing for additional improvements over time. Janker himself has told the City he hopes this project is followed up with more. As he put it when we spoke: “Missing this opportunity to proceed would be bad.” And of the petition opposing the project: “The petition if accepted would be a disservice.”

But personally — and Janker has been clear with his association about where he personally stands — he still wants what the City designed in 2023. He wants one-way. He wants 5 mph speeds (his group compromised down to a 10 mph ask). He’s compared what this corner could become to the transformation of the San Antonio Riverwalk — a ditch that became a world-class destination. And he wants the City to commit to maintaining this corner the way it maintains Mallory Square.

“This area needs to be treated like Mallory Square,” he told me. “It isn’t my vision. I believe in consensus. Personally, I want one-way also.”

Here’s the question worth asking. If the president of the neighborhood association that proposed the plaza in 2021 personally still wants the original — what is the Commission actually preserving by approving the watered-down version?

Where the Petition Misses

The petition opposing the project — now at 153 signatures on Friday the 29th — has been driving a lot of the conversation on local Facebook pages. Its lead organizer, Marcela Morgan, is the neighbor whose appeal brought the project to a halt on May 7. So, it deserves to be engaged directly, not dismissed.

Marcela Morgan and the petition signers are well within their rights to speak. Anyone who lives near a public works project gets to show up at City Hall and say their piece. That’s how this is supposed to work. And on at least one point, the petition lines up with what the engineer who designed the original plaza, the head of the neighborhood association, and the comments crowd in the Key West Locals Facebook group have been saying — the current narrow two-way design is the wrong answer. Morgan herself, in her own Facebook post, asked the question out loud: “Why not a one-way?”

Why not, indeed. Where we part company with the petition is on the answer to her question. The petition says do less — fix the drainage, repave, leave the rest alone. We say do more, because more is what the neighborhood association formally asked the City for five years ago. More is what’s right for Key West.

The petition’s most original argument is that this is “an area only tourists really use,” so the City shouldn’t be on the hook for the $3.3 million share of the project. Huh? Every public investment in Key West comes with a chorus of but what about my street, but what about the potholes, but what about Higgs Beach. Think of the children. Those are real questions. They aren’t reasons to keep building the wrong thing at the most photographed corner in the state. And they’re especially not reasons to override the founding recommendation of the neighborhood association whose vision the project was built around.

Tourism isn’t a special interest in Key West. It’s the operating system. The Tourist Development Council’s budget, the City budget, the property taxes paid by every business downtown — all of it runs on visitors. Mount Rushmore aka the Southernmost Point Buoy is the downtown Golden Goose’s most photographed asset. Of course, the City pays to maintain it, the same way it pays to maintain Mallory Square, Duval Street, the Historic Seaport and Higgs Beach. “TDC should pay more” is a fine argument. “The City should pay nothing” is abandonment.

Where We Should Land

Two choices, really. The 2023 plaza or what’s on the table now. Build the right thing or build the wrong thing for the next twenty years.

YES: The 2023 plaza. The design built around the community’s own 2021 recommendation. One-way, calmed, raised flush curb, cobblestone, soft lighting, slower speeds, integrated drainage. The thing the residents themselves asked for, and the City designed with them. Gary’s framing: slower vehicles, pedestrian priority, no conflicts. Janker’s personal preference. The full vision.

NO: The current two-way compromise. Gary doesn’t want it. Janker doesn’t personally want it. The community didn’t ask for it in 2021. The petitioners reject it too, for their own reasons. The only argument for it is finish-and-move-on — which is the official position the Southernmost Point Community Association has taken: accept what’s on the table, then push for additional improvements later. We understand that posture. We just disagree with it. Pouring concrete on a corner the City is going to live with for the next twenty years isn’t the moment to settle for less than the residents themselves asked for.

A word on the alternatives in the air. Paul Menta — owner of Key West First Legal Rum Distillery, leader of the Shop Mom and Pop Key West group, and the local-business voice who told Garden & Gun this buoy is the Mount Rushmore of Key West — has been watching this corner for four years. Because of construction, South Street has effectively been operating as a one-way during the entire build, with drivers entering from Duval and heading toward Whitehead. Paul has walked it and biked it for months. Even in season. “I have seen no problems with traffic or anything else,” he reports. “I do think it should be one way coming inbound.”

That’s powerful evidence — from someone with standing in the neighborhood and the local-business community — that one-way works here in real conditions. Paul has proposed a middle-ground design: permanent one-way inbound, with the buoy reoriented to face seaward from Whitehead so the photo line forms on the wide Navy-side sidewalk and away from residential homes. Some of the residents on the affected blocks like that idea too — a group of homeowners from South Street, Whitehead, and United sent the City a list of questions on May 14 asking, among other things, that the tourist line be relocated to the Navy fence along Whitehead. It’s a thoughtful proposal. But it requires the City to reopen the engineering drawings — to reconfigure the parking, restripe the lane, possibly widen the sidewalks once a lane is removed. Once you’re redesigning, the question isn’t how little can we change? The question is why would we redesign to anything less than what the residents already asked for and the City already designed?

A light note on a fourth option some readers have raised: leave the buoy at the Pocket Park where it’s already working. It’s a real option. The Saturday photos prove it. But the residents at the original site have been clear and consistent — going back to the 2021 minutes and through every association meeting since — that they want the buoy returned to its original home. Janker tells me 90% of the neighborhood feels the same way today. The cable hut, the 1960s photographs, the closest land point to Havana — the people who live with this landmark every day have made their call. Pocket Park as a fallback if absolutely nothing else is possible. Not where we lead.

What June 4 Should Look Like

City Manager Brian Barroso warned the Commission on May 7 that further delay could jeopardize the more than $1 million in Tourist Development Council funding tied to the project. I appreciate the City Manager wanting to land the plane. That’s his job.

But let’s be real. The TDC pulling funding from Mount Rushmore over a process question is not a real risk. It’s a talking point. The TDC isn’t going to walk away from the highest-traffic tourist site in the county. They’re going to wait for the City to get it right.

Land the plane, yes. But on the right runway.

Here’s the ask:

One. Don’t approve the bid as-is. Use the pause. It’s an opportunity.

Two. Direct staff to revive the 2023 plaza design. Gary Volenec confirms the plan hasn’t been thrown away. The neighborhood asked for it in 2021. The City designed it with them. Build it.

Keeping Key West Key West

Picture it. 2027. The original buoy home on a real plaza. Cobblestone the residents asked for in 2021. The one-way they asked for. The slower speeds. The trees, the soft lighting. A Mount Rushmore that finally looks worthy of being the Mount Rushmore of Key West.

The Pocket Park keeps being the Pocket Park. The original site becomes the destination it always should have been. Mallory Square treatment for the most photographed corner in the state. Five years late. But right.

The Duval Pocket Park was the win of 2019. Lazy Way moved the conversation in 2022. The Southernmost Point should be the win of 2026 — or 2027 if the Commission needs another six months to do it right. That’s the right trade.

The Commission asked for more time. Use it.

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Chris Hamilton is the founder of Friends of Car-Free Key West & Duval Street/Historic Downtown, a local advocacy group championing sustainable mobility and vibrant public spaces. Subscribe to the blog and follow on Facebook, Twitter, and Substack for updates. All stories are cross posted at KONK Life News. Originally from Washington, D.C., Chris spent over two decades leading nationally acclaimed initiatives in transit, biking, walking, and smart growth for Arlington County, VA’s DOT. Since moving to Key West in 2015, he has embraced a car-free lifestyle downtown, dedicating his time to non-profits and community projects. Explore all Streets for People column articles here.