Audubon House - Audubon House in Key West is one of the nicest historic home and garden tours in the city/ The docent of Audubon House on our tour was extremely well-informed and gave a great speech. This is no mere tourist attraction. The people at Audubon House love their work, and they study Audubon. The know about the history of the house, and they haven't just memorized a speech. Ask any question, and if the tourguide doesn't know the answer she'll ask the boss for you. It's a real pleasure to tour this house, and we were pleasantly surprised at the non-commercialism and attention to detail, given its location at the lower end of Duval. Just around the corner are hawkish storefronts with tourist-grabbing signs beckoning cruise-ship passengers to purcahse anything from key lime pie popcicles to t-shirts with crude messages.
Audubon House also serves as a venue for weddings. The gorgeous tropical garden out back makes for instant wedding backdrop and the perfect Key West wedding. The gardens are dominated by all kinds of orchids growing on sides of trees and in pots on the ground. The foliage is lush, just how you'd want it to be for your Key West wedding.
Inside, there are valuable lithographs colored by John James Audubon himself. See the Roseate Spoonbill on the stairway up close, and you may start to feel John James Audubon fever as well. It's really beautiful and when you consider the conditions in the 1830s when he painted much of the Florida Keys' birds, it's almost amazing.
Key West in the 1830s was not an extremely comfortable place to live, even for the very wealthy family that actually lived in Audubon House. Audubon only stayed here for several weeks, as a guest of the Geigers, a prominent family of the day. Audubon would have had to endure limited variety in cuisine, hot and humid weather, and all kinds of conveniences available even at the time, back on the mainland. He was dedicated and maybe obsessed with capturing images of birds on paper, however, and we are grateful for that today, in the amazing and beautiful prints he left behind, as well as the contribution to conservation and ornithology he gave the world. |
