The Key West Citizen

Key West's Breaking of Lumber Shortage An Epic of East Coast

(By FRANK W. LOVERING)

(Special to The Citizen)

MIAMI, Fla., Feb. 23.--How the clarion call of the lower East Coast for building supplies was answered by the port of Key West's ready "There!" is little less than an epic.

I have been many miles by motor through the suburbs of this rightly-named Magic City since I arrived on Thursday afternoon, and wherever I have been, as well as all the way up on the railroad, I have had my eyes wide open for construction and the physical items that have to do with construction.

I have talked with many men of many minds. I have questioned fellow travellers and railroad employees, hotel clerks and guests, contractors and developers, officers and passengers on excursion boats, and all from whom I could get the facts.

The consensus of these opinions is that six weeks or two months ago, when the embargo took effect, and more recently when the sinking of the Prince Vladimar here choked the government channel and bottled up Miami harbor at the entrance to Biscayne Bay, then and just then supply ships which were directed to the East Coast docks at Key West sounded the knell of the construction slump, at least as far north as West Palm Beach and Hollywood.

Key West, with the hearty co-operation of the railroad, stepped into the widening breach and healed it to such an extent that building is going ahead today by leaps and bounds.

Miami is proud for the towns of the Atlantic ocean side of the Florida peninsula because Key West thus met these demands, and is continuing to meet them.

For though today the booms of nearly a score of lumber vessels muzzle against the string pieces of this city's new dockyard, and though there are several other vessels anchor in the harbor, with 37 more in deep water off the beach waiting their turn to enter and discharge, the cargoes these carriers bring are seemingly swallowed up in motor trucks, or heaped high on lighters for distribution within a very few miles of here.

Miami's needs today are in general being met by ships now here or coming. But every night trainloads of material from the Pacific coast via the canal, or from lumber mills on the gulf, are being distributed to the supply yards all up and down this section.

Where, in late November, there was nothing but heavy timber, 2x8, 2x10, 6x6 and 6x8 on any yard adjacent to the railroad between Jacksonville and Key West, today the yards then vacant are fairly well supplied with stocks of many kinds, and building activities are going on apace.

Good feeling, good wages, happy workmen in every trade, all these are once more forged into an activity that shows permanent, concrete growth day after day.

The great need now is for millwork of every type for interior use. Much flooring is aboard the ships in harbor here; considerable has come north through Key West. But there is an almost unbelievable scarcity of door and window frames, casings, inside and outside doors, sash, and the required run of standing finish door and window sides, sills, headers, box leads and mouldings.

Several shipments of this class of stock landed in the port of Key West and sent to the towns and cities for 200 miles to the northward, even to Miami, would make a great difference in the speed with which houses now ready for such supplies could be completed.

Besides relieving the already over-crowded novelty mills up and down the line, it would put homes on the market faster and thus help the present astonishing growth which Florida is beginning to experience since the turn of the anti-propaganda tide.

Miami and her sister communities for miles along the East Coast line both north and south, are strong in their praise of the work Key West and its people have done and still are doing to relieve the conditions which the embargo helped to bring about and which the channel blocking incident accentuated.

The publication a few days ago of a finely written and comprehensive article on Key West in Barron's and allied banking interests paper of New York and the East, has created a tremendously fine impression of the Island City that is in the making.

Northern bank men here who know the prestige of Barron's in the financial world do not hesitate to say that they know when an article of that type appears it is every line the truth.