Cruise ships have been coming to Key West for half a century. Here are the big moments

Key West has been a featured destination for the cruise industry for so many years that it’s hard to imagine the island without ships pulling into port.

Nearly 1 million cruise ship passengers arrived in Key West in 2019, the year before the COVID-19 pandemic started. But the industry’s ties to Key West go back more than a half-century, and that’s about how long island residents have been arguing whether they’re worth welcoming.

They spar over the impact on the environment. They question how much passengers spend while in town.

Here’s a look at Key West’s complicated relationship with cruise ships

1969

▪ The first cruise ship, the Sunward, arrives in Key West at either the Navy’s Outer Mole pier or Pier B.

1984

▪ Cruise ships continue to trickle in. The Norwegian Caribbean Lines’ Sunward makes a once-a-week visit to a dilapidated pier at the Truman Annex.

▪ Between 1969 and 1984, Key West receives 266 port calls, according to city records.

▪ The City Commission orders improvements to the city-owned dock at Mallory Square to make it a full cruise ship docking facility.

1986

▪ In the fall, a record number of big ships make Key West a port of call.

▪ Beginning Oct. 1, six cruise ships visit weekly, and two other prestige ships, the Vista Fjord, and the Saga Fjord from the Cunard Line, make single trial cruises to Key West.

▪ For the past two years, four ships have docked in Key West weekly. “Five years ago we didn’t have much of a port, just a basic idea that we wanted one,” says Chuck Hamlin, Key West’s port and transit authority director.

1987

▪ Mallory Square sunset performers boycott their daily “Sunset Celebration” in protest of the Southern Elegance, a 251-foot, three-story ship they say blocks the view of sunset.

▪ Charles Hamlin, director of the city’s Port and Transit Authority, said: “We’ll get in excess of $200,000 a year from that boat. That includes 50 cents a foot per day in dockage fees, and a $2 disembarkation fee for each passenger. We expect $90,000 worth of parking” at the adjacent city lot.

▪ In future years, cruise ships will rarely be allowed to dock at Mallory during the sunset.

1992

▪ Key West’s increasing popularity as a port of call for cruise ships stirs a debate within the tourism industry.

▪ The city expects to collect about $460,000 in disembarkation fees from cruise ship passengers. Next year, the city expects to get twice as much, based on scheduling inquiries from cruise companies.

▪ The city also plans a major upgrade of Mallory Square to help serve the big boats.

1998

▪ Cruise ships have come to mean big money to Key West. The fees the city collects from them represent 15% of its municipal budget, the Miami Herald reports. For the past seven years, city leaders have been able to hold down property taxes because of cruise ship fees.

1999

▪ The number of passengers that cruise ships bring to this island has almost quadrupled since 1990, to about 650,000.

▪ As many as four ships a day anchor at piers.

▪ In the 1999 fiscal year, 415 cruise ships called on the port of Key West, sending 597,009 passengers, the city reports.

▪ Frommer’s guidebooks rank Key West the best cruise ship port in the Caribbean while Newsweek awards the island a prize for “most spoiled vacation spot.”

▪ More than 150 people pack Key West’s Old City Hall to persuade the City Commission to kill a plan for a fourth cruise ship berth. The debate lasts until midnight. Two residents wave fishing poles, urging leaders to leave the site as a recreational pier.

▪ Key West Mayor Sheila Mullins says cruise ship passengers only benefit certain businesses. “If we have all our eggs in the cruise ship basket, we’ll end up like St. Thomas, where when people get off a cruise ship all they see is other cruise ship passengers,” Mullins tells the Miami Herald.

2003

▪ National Geographic Traveler — estimated readership 5.7 million — ranks Key West as a destination that is “Getting Ugly,” on a list that includes it as a victim of “crowding, poor planning, and greed.” Key West’s ratio of one year’s tourists to permanent residents is now 55-1, the Miami Herald reports. “The Key West that brought us here and made us stay here is slowly dissolving,” said Shirley Freeman, former Monroe County mayor. “Tourism here is not managed. It’s just a headless monster that keeps growing.” Key West was heavily criticized for its influx of cruise day-trippers, coral reef die-offs, spring-break-like atmosphere and an overriding sense that the city’s character was lost.

2008

▪ Businesses in Key West are hurting from the economic recession. Key West leaders and merchants keep a close eye on a proposed change to a federal law that would make it nearly impossible for cruise ships to stop in Key West.

▪ Cruise ships in the last fiscal year brought more than 800,000 passengers to the city for four to eight hours at a time.

▪ Without the cruise passengers, Duval retailers would be suffering far greater, the Miami Herald reports, even though the average passenger doesn’t spend as much as overnight guests. But cruise ship passengers don’t tend to buy art and other major purchases during short port calls.

2013

▪ The Key West City Commission lets voters decide whether to seek a study on dredging the harbor to make room for larger cruise ships. The issue goes to voters on a ballot referendum.

▪ The ballot question: whether to ask the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to do the study. But the election turns into a fight over the cruise line industry’s hold on Key West.

▪ In November, voters reject the study by 73.5 percent.

2020

▪ In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the cruise ship industry shuts down. Business owners and city leaders prepare to find out what will happen to the local economy without cruise ships, which in 2019 brought nearly one half of the island’s two million visitors.

▪ In November, voters in Key West approve all three referendums limiting cruise ship activity. They want no more than 1,500 people disembarking per day, want to prohibit cruise ships with a capacity of 1,300 or more persons from disembarking, and want to give docking priority to cruise lines with the best environmental and health records.

▪ The referendums pass by at least 61% of the vote, with the docking priority decision getting 81% approval.

2021

▪ Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signs new legislation that overturns decisions by Key West voters to limit cruise ships by size and capacity.

▪ In late November, the first cruise ship arrives in Key West since the cruise industry reemerged after a 20-month shutdown due to COVID-19. Hundreds of people gather at Mallory Square, in view of the Celebrity Cruise Line ship, which would have been banned had the voters’ wishes been upheld.

2022

▪ Another protest at the waterfront at Mallory Square greets the Celebrity Constellation’s arrival. Activist group Safer Cleaner Ships vows to keep fighting to keep out large cruise ships.

▪ In March, the city of Key West starts negotiations with Pier B. Development Corp., owned by the Walsh family. Pier B has a longstanding deal with the city, which gets a piece of the passenger disembarkation fees the company collects. Pier B offers to put some limits on its cruise ship business, such as not accepting ships on several holidays.

▪ The Key West City Commission unanimously agrees to steer cruise ships to the privately managed Pier B instead of accepting them at two piers the city manages. This will cut cruise ship traffic from about 21 ships a week to seven, Mayor Teri Johnston said. The commission’s decision means only one ship will be in town at a time, ending the days of two or three-ship days.

▪The commission puts on its April 5 agenda a new proposed agreement with Pier B. Safer Cleaner Ships plans a protest at City Hall before the meeting, saying the new deal allows “larger cruise ships than Key West has ever seen.”

This story was originally published April 3, 2022 at 6:00 AM.

Gwen Filosa

Miami Herald

Gwen Filosa covers Key West and the Lower Florida Keys for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald and lives in Key West. She was part of the staff at the New Orleans Times-Picayune that in 2005 won two Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She graduated from Indiana University.