Hemingway haunts #2 - Sloppy Joe's bar

The official beginning of Sloppy Joe’s Bar, the famous and infamous Key West saloon, was December 5, 1933–the day Prohibition was repealed. The bar was destined to go through two name changes and a sudden change of location before it would become Sloppy Joe’s, seen by millions of visitors to Florida’s southernmost outpost.

Key West being a bastion of free thinkers even in the thirties, Prohibition was looked on as an amusing exercise dreamed up by the government–and Joe Russell was just one of the enterprising individuals who operated illegal speakeasies. Even Ernest Hemingway, who made Key West his home at the time, slipped over to Russell’s on occasion to buy illicit bottles of Scotch, and the two struck up an enduring friendship.

When the government’s Great Experiment ended a dismal failure, Joe Russell became a legitimate saloon-keeper-proprietor of the Blind Pig, a droll rundown building that Russell leased for three dollars a week.

The rowdy, come-as-you-are saloon was renamed the Silver Slipper upon the addition of a dance floor, but that didn’t matter–it remained a place of shabby discomfort, good friends, gambling, fifteen-cent whiskey, and ten-cent shots of gin.

It was Hemingway, a favorite patron of Russell’s bar from the start, who encouraged its name change to Sloppy Joe’s. The new name was adopted from Jose Garcia Rio Havana club selling liquor and iced seafood. Because the floor was always wet with melted ice, his patrons taunted this Spanish Joe with running a sloppy place… and the name stuck.

In its early days in Key West, Sloppy Joe’s boasted several trademark “fixtures” besides Hemingway. There was “Big” Skinner, the hearty black bartender who tipped the scales at 300 pounds and served Sloppy’s customers for more than two decades.

Read more about this historic dive at - https://sloppyjoes.com/history/

Tomahawk