Buy A Complex Of Submarine Pits
[Image: Courtesy of Sotheby's].Back to opportunities in real estate: if you were tempted by the Minneapolis skyway but you're saving your money for something a bit warmer throughout the year, consider snapping up the "Submarine Pits on Boca Chica Key."
[Image: Courtesy of Sotheby's].As Sotheby's describes the carved landscape of submarine docking pens, the pits can be found amidst "approximately 122 acres of vacant land just north of Key West."
Here's the site on Google Maps.
[Images: Courtesy of Sotheby's].They're basically just deep slots blasted through the coral and limestone, barely visible beneath the water line in the form of somewhat ominous black strips where the ground drops away.
[Images: Courtesy of Sotheby's].The site is zoned as a "Commercial Fishing Special District," perhaps implying some future reuse of the submarine pens as exotic fish farms.
But imagine all the weird opportunities here for submerged foundations, underwater hotel rooms, or other half-aquatic facilities—even something like the Danish National Maritime Museum by BIG—looped in and around these linear, Nazca-like features.
[Image: The Danish National Maritime Museum by BIG; photo by Luca Santiago Mora via Dezeen].From Sotheby's:
This parcel was used by the Navy Air Station to house its submarine war ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis and has a very colorful and distinct history. Perfect for marine use and development in a great location. Property includes seven finger cut coral canals that are 90 feet wide and over 25 feet deep, plus a deep water basin with dredged entry channel that provides passage to Boca Chica Channel (Oceanside) and Key West Harbor (Bayside).The asking price?
[Images: Courtesy of Sotheby's].A mere $21.2 million—but then these drowned geoglyphs in the semitropical sun can be all yours.
(Spotted via Curbed Miami. Previously on BLDGBLOG: Buy a Skyway, Buy a Fort, Buy a Lighthouse, Buy an Underground Kingdom, Buy a Prison, Buy a Tube Station, Buy an Archipelago, Buy a Map, Buy a Torpedo-Testing Facility, Buy a Silk Mill, Buy a Fort, Buy a Church).
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I'd transplant a lot of filter feeders into the space, and do anything else to quickly and safely make the water turn clear. After that, line the fingers with crossing bridges, or with shipping containers at the ends, with a window facing down the canal.
I guess it depends on the things that grow in that section of canal, but some glass bottom pontoon boats made into hotel rooms could be fun even.
It's an intriguing space, but not a former submarine base. Something didn't seem right. The entrance channel is narrow, too narrow for a US submarine of the 1930s to make a turn, never mind a submarine in the 60s.
Turns out that the submarine base was on the far side of Key West, and the parcel that's for sale was the site of a never-completed housing development.
I had the great good fortune to visit Tarpon Belly Key in 2000- the site of a former shrimp farm, where two giant trenches had been excavated through the island as "growout trenches".
Of course the shrimp farm failed, now the island is uninhabited except for mosquitoes, and swimming in the trenches is terrifying because who knows how deep they go and what horrors they contain.
The 8 acre key is a little more affordable than the submarine base- $.9M
Of additional interest is the spy blimp tethered to nearby Cudjoe Key, keeping an eye on Cuba.
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