‘It’s sad.’ Key West’s Hemingway museum cuts half its staff, citing a decline in tourism
One of Key West’s most famous landmarks is hurting due to reduced tourism during the novel coronavirus pandemic.
On Thursday, the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum, 907 Whitehead St., laid off half of its 30 or so employees.
Those workers included housekeeping, maintenance and tour guides at a business that is open from 9 a.m to 5 p.m. seven days a week, 365 days a year.
“It’s an extremely labor-intensive operation,” said Michael Morawski, CEO and president of the museum. on Friday. “For us to have 15 or 17 people on staff to do all of that is just insurmountable.”
Business is down by nearly 75%, Morawski said of the museum dedicated to the larger-than-life author who landed in Key West in 1928.
Built in 1851, Ernest and Pauline Hemingway took it over in 1931.
The Hemingway home, which sits on about one acre behind brick walls in Old Town, typically gets hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.
Admission is $16 for adults and includes a 30-minute guided tour of grounds that are home to about 60 six-toed, or polydactyl, cats. Many are believed to be descendants of a white, six-toed cat given to Hemingway.
But cruise ship passengers and many international travelers are missing at the museum these days, Morawski said. And the number of American tourists visiting the museum has been cut in half as well, he said.
The visitors coming to Key West these days live closer and can drive in, said Scott Atwell, executive vice president and CEO of the Key West Chamber of Commerce.
They’re also a “different consumer” than international travelers and cruise ship passengers who typically support an attraction like the Hemingway Home, Atwell said.
“This is the rubber-meets-the road reality of how COVID is impacting our business community and it’s sad,” said Atwell.
For now, the home will keep its regular hours but Morawski said at some point he may have to reduce hours or go to five or six days of week.
“Everybody is in the same boat,” said Morawski, of the Key West business community. “I’m not the only one who’s had to make these hard decisions.”
On Friday, the Hemingway Home began working with a reduced staff.
‘We’re all pitching in, working together and dealing with a lot of tasks we’ve never done before,” Morawski said.
The Hemingway Home and Museum is a for-profit venture. Morawski’s great aunt, Bernice Dixon, bought the property from the Hemingway estate in 1964 to open a museum.
It’s owned by a corporation whose shareholders are all in the family, said Morawski, who’s been there since 1994.
This story was originally published August 29, 2020 at 10:12 AM.
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