Here’s a question for you: What’s a bar with no name in the middle of nowhere with approximately 90,000 one-dollar bills stapled to its ceiling and walls really worth?
The past two weeks, Sue and I have been escaping the Midwest winter cold in the Florida Keys. Saturday, after a week in Key West, we were driving back toward the mainland with a planned stop in Key Largo for another week. An audio touring app we were using suggested a short side trip on Big Pine Key to a place called the No Name Pub. As the pub’s website says, “It’s a nice place if you can find it.”
We thought it sounded like a nice diversion (as if we needed a diversion from the beauty of driving along the 113-mile U.S. 1 Overseas Highway that runs the length of the Keys), so we exited as instructed and followed the app’s disembodied voice out onto the backroads of Big Pine Key, where we even caught a glimpse of some of the iconic and diminutive “key deer” that call the island home.
We pulled up in front of the pub, where a sign confirmed for us that we had, indeed, found it. Inside, as we had been told, every conceivable square inch of wall and ceiling was covered in autographed one-dollar bills. According to the app, there was an estimated 90,000 of them, deposited there by grateful barflies over the past 30 years or so. My head started to spin.
The whole thing prompted a conversation in my head about the worth of the building. Was it really worth $90,000 more than its real estate value? Were the bills still legal tender when written all over? Do the owners of the pub periodically take some of the bills down and then allow it to fill back up? Were they raising money for a good cause? Just what is the purpose and plan here? Inquiring minds needed to know! I sent a photo to my friend John (a retired banker) who questioned what the $90K in flammable paper might do to insurance rates. Imagine it all going up in flames!
According to an article I read on the bar’s website, there’s no purpose, no scheme, no underlying cause beyond the obvious. It’s just a celebration of a good thing. The owner of the pub doesn’t feel like the money belongs to him, and there are no plans for periodic removal. The money just “is,” a gift from those who pass through, a sign of appreciation for a cold beer and a hot pizza in the midst of a long drive. I think maybe he’s on to something.
The “stuff” of our lives is so often held up and measured by its monetary cost and perceived economic value, like many a photo I saw in Key West of Papa Hemingway with one of his prized trophy marlins. My initial thought of calculating the value of the bar was perhaps natural but it was the wrong question. Sometimes we are meant to just sit back and enjoy a cold one while contemplating the collective generosity of those who have come before us and left something behind.
And I think to myself, “what a wonderful world.” It would be a good place to be if we could find it.