Audubon House & Tropical Gardens

Audubon House & Tropical Gardens sits on Whitehead Street in Old Town Key West, and its story starts in the garden rather than the house. Audubon came to the Keys in the spring of 1832 and found 18 bird species nobody had documented before. He spent weeks on this property working outdoors, and one of the paintings he produced here is his white-crowned pigeon, shown perched among the orange blossoms of a Cordia sebestena. He named that tree after his host, Captain John Huling Geiger, and Geiger tree is what Floridians have called it ever since. One still grows in the front yard.

The house itself came about fifteen years after Audubon's visit. Captain Geiger was a harbor pilot and, more profitably, a wrecker, in an era when salvaging ships off the Florida Reef was the biggest business on the island and made a number of Key West men extraordinarily wealthy. He built this place in the 1840s in American Classic Revival style and raised his family here. The furnishings inside are period pieces that show how a prosperous Key West household actually lived, and the collection includes 28 first-edition Audubon works from Birds of America, displayed in both the large elephant folio and the smaller octavo formats.

By the 1950s the house had fallen apart and was headed for demolition. In 1958 the Mitchell Wolfson family bought it, restored it with help from shipbuilders who knew how to work the old joinery, and opened it as a museum in 1960. That rescue turned out to matter well beyond one building. It was the first project of its kind in Key West and it kicked off the historic restoration movement that saved much of Old Town, which is a reasonable thing to think about while you are walking around a neighborhood full of nineteenth century houses that almost were not there.

Outside, close to an acre of gardens wraps the house, laid out with brick paths and planted with orchids, bromeliads, an herb garden, dense tropical foliage and an 1840s style nursery, with a koi pond tucked into it. It is one of the quietest places in Old Town, which is not a small thing a block off Duval. The property also hosts weddings and private events, and there is a gallery and museum store on site.