Sloppy Joe’s Bar Key West Hemingway T-Shirt Y2K

December 5, 1933 — the day Prohibition was repealed — Joe Russell stopped running rum and opened a legal saloon on Greene Street in Key West. Ernest Hemingway, five years into island life by then, made himself a fixture; Russell once cashed a royalty check no bank manager would touch, and turned up later as a character in To Have and Have Not. The name came from Hemingway too, borrowed off a Havana bar owner.

Then May 1937. A rent dispute, and Russell bought a building two blocks away outright. The bar moved overnight to Duval Street and customers carried their own drinks down the street while it happened. Service never stopped. Hemingway was in Spain and said only what there was to say: only in Key West.

Which is how a bar becomes a landmark, and how a landmark ends up on a tourist tee ninety years later — the graphic doing the work a plaque would do anywhere else.

Every souvenir is somebody’s alibi for a good week.