Key West Airport To Get New Concourse

Above, a portrait of Ernest Hemingway at the Hemingway
Home and Museum in Key West. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

Before the pandemic hit two years ago, I was planning to return to Key West, Florida. The pandemic put a nix on that idea.  

I first visited Key West during a cruise one-day stopover in 2019 while en route to Havana, Cuba. The planned trip would have had me flying to the Key West International Airport. 

Should I go back to Key West in 2025 or after, there will be a new concourse at the airport to use.

According to Bloomberg:

Future pilgrims to Ernest Hemingway’s home and museum in Key West may find it a little easier to get there thanks to $36.7 million of municipal bonds. 

Monroe County, Florida is issuing revenue bonds next week to help finance a new airport terminal at Key West International. The new concourse will be 48,805 square feet, and is scheduled to open in late 2025.  

Key West International is recovering now after, like all airports, it was hard-hit by the pandemic. Traffic in April of 2020 was 3% of its level in the same month a year earlier. But business in fiscal 2021 was a-booming there, rising to a record level of 659,321 enplanements, or passengers boarding aircraft.

One of the best known sites in Key West is the house at 907 Whitehead Street, which was the home of author Ernest Hemingway and his second wife, Pauline, from 1931 to 1939. The Key West International Airport actually pre-dates the arrival of the Hemingways and was where Pan American Airlines was founded in 1927, according to the offering documents to the bond issue.

In 1956, Hemingway was featured in a Pan Am advertising campaign, in which the author says, “We started flying commercially about the same time,” and refers to “the old Key West-Miami-Havana-Bahamas early days.” Pan Am went bankrupt in 1991.

While in Key West in 2019, I toured the Ernest Hemingway home and museum,

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