Both of our cameras are at Sloppy Joe’s Bar, 201 Duval Street. The bar has been on this corner since 1937, and it arrived in a hurry.
Joe Russell was a Key West native, a charter boat captain and, during Prohibition, a rumrunner who ran a speakeasy on the side. On December 5, 1933, the day Prohibition was repealed, he went legitimate and opened a bar at 428 Greene Street.
It went through three names. It opened as the Blind Pig. When Russell added a dance floor it became the Silver Slipper. The third name came from his best customer.
Ernest Hemingway arrived in Key West in April 1928 and became one of Russell’s regulars and a close friend. Russell piloted Hemingway’s fishing trips aboard his 32-foot boat, the Anita, and was his fishing companion for more than twelve years. Hemingway called him “Josie Grunts” and later used him as the model for Freddy, the bar owner in To Have and Have Not.
Hemingway knew a bar in Havana, run by José García, that sold liquor and iced seafood. The melting ice kept the floor permanently wet, and its customers called the place Sloppy Joe’s. Hemingway thought the name would suit Russell’s bar too. It stuck.
The bar’s own history tells one more story about the pair. When a Key West bank refused to cash one of Hemingway’s royalty checks because of the way he was dressed, Russell cashed it for him.
In 1937 Russell’s landlord, Isaac Wolkowsky, raised the rent from three dollars a week to four. Russell refused to pay it. He bought the former Victoria Restaurant, half a block away at the corner of Duval and Greene, from Juan Farto for $2,500.
On the night of May 5 his customers picked up the furniture, and their drinks, and carried the entire bar down the street. Service never stopped. Sloppy Joe’s has been at 201 Duval ever since. The original site on Greene Street is now Captain Tony’s Saloon.
The new building dated from 1917 and gave Russell what was then the longest bar in town, along with Cuban tilework, ceiling fans and jalousie doors that opened the room to the street. A 119-pound sailfish caught by Hemingway hung on the wall. Behind the bar stood “Big” Skinner, a 300-pound bartender who worked there for more than twenty years.
Hemingway left Key West in 1939. Joe Russell died suddenly in June 1941 while visiting him in Havana.
The writer left some things behind. In 1962, the year after Hemingway’s death, his widow Mary opened a storeroom at the back of the bar and found uncashed royalty checks, guns, hunting trophies, photographs and original manuscripts, including parts of To Have and Have Not. She let the owner keep a few pieces to display.
The families of Sid Snelgrove and Jim Mayer bought the bar in 1978 and still own it. In 2006 the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
To see the bar as it looks right now, open Cam 2. The dates for these traditions are on our events calendar.
