South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Key West lost the time capsule buried 50 years ago
KEY WEST — Key West just celebrated the city’s bicentennial with parties, a festival and drone fireworks launched at the waterfront.
Locals also put together a time capsule. It’s inside a sizable hulk of granite at Mallory Square and filled with personal mementos, books and letters from residents. The plan is to open it in 50 years.
But Key West doesn’t have the best record with the time capsule thing.
While planning for Key West’s 200th birthday as a settlement, March 25, people began talking about another time capsule — the one planted 50 years ago when the island marked its 150th birthday.
But that time capsule remains a mystery.
Turns out, nobody can find it.
“We know the general vicinity,” said Paul Menta, chairman of the bicentennial celebration committee.
That would be a spot downtown that in 1972 was a future park and development called Old Town Square. Now, almost every speck of that area, between where Front and Duval streets meet, is now built up as a tourist hub.
“Is there a building sitting on top of it?” Menta wondered about the half-century-old dig. “It was private property.”
The 1972 time capsule was part of a groundbreaking by developers who planned to build 21 shops and a small gazebo, the Key West Citizen reported at the time.
“The park area will cover about half of the total site which contains about 122,000 square feet,” reporter Wendy Tucker wrote.
The plan back then was to open the time capsule in 150 years to mark Key West’s
tricentennial.
“Nobody remembers where it is, that’s the thing,” said Alex Vega, 69, the first to bring up the missing time capsule.
Vega knows his history. A retired thirty-year veteran firefighter, his family goes back more than a century in Key West. He’s president of the nonprofit Old Firehouse Preservation, which runs the Key West Firehouse Museum.
But he wasn’t there to witness the time capsule burial 50 years ago.
“I was 20 years old and I wasn’t thinking about time capsules at that age,” Vega said. “If I’d have been there, I’d remember where it was.”
The time capsule location is paved over today.
“They can’t find it in 50 years, much less another hundred,” Vega said. “If they build a hotel or something, they might get lucky and find it.”
Chances are, the time capsule is still buried, said Corey Malcom, director of archaeology at Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West.
But is it a lost cause? Malcom specializes in finding old artifacts people say are long gone, like ancient shipwrecks and, in 2002, an unmarked cemetery of African
refugees who died in 1860 after being freed by the U.S. Navy from slave ships.
So he recently walked around the former “Old Town Square” area, at Front and Duval streets, searching for evidence, carrying hope that the time capsule could be recovered.
He didn’t find anything. “If it’s there, it’s under a building,” Malcom said. “It’s now under a Tervis tumbler shop.”
A few locals told Keys Weekly they could search for the time capsule with ground-penetrating radar — which is how the African refugee cemetery was found. But the cemetery at Higgs Beach is under sand, Malcom noted, not pavement.
Key West people have every expectation that the bicentennial time capsule for 2072, which resembles a monument, won’t disappear. Four local children — ages 9 to 12 — were named ambassadors of Key West to be present when it’s opened and share their stories of growing up on the island.
“That’s why I put mine above ground,” Menta said, of the new time capsule. “We sealed everything. The worst thing that happens is you’re going to need a snorkel mask to see it.”