turtle soup

I intended this ghostly image of the tower because it speaks to an historical footnote.
Throughout human history and especially since Europe's exploration of the "new world" in the 1500's, Green Turtle meat has been considered good eatin'.
In 1896 a French chef named Armand Granday moved from New York to Key West and opened a turtle soup cannery - apparently the the Rockefellers, Astors and other elements of the burgeoning American snob culture were willing to pay good money for turtle steaks and consommé.
The turtles were were captured off the Cayman Islands, shipped live to Key West on schooners and released, sometimes 800 at a time, into Granday's "kraals" (the African word for corrals) where they would live until the cannery workers were ready to
butcher them.
So what about the tower?
Well, Granday's cannery was still operating in the 1960's when Florida's economic base was shifting from turtle murder to tourism. Cannery management reasoned that it just wouldn't be good PR for the cannery axmen to be seen doing their work by groups of squeamish tourists and so the cannery built the tower as a diversion. The idea was, charge admission to the top of the tower where the tourists could look down and thrill at the sight of all the turtles swimming around in the kraals. Then, on their way out, the cannery could sell the tourists turtle soup or steaks from the gift shop at the base of the tower.
All that went on until 1971 when the American government banned the killing of Green Sea Turtles. By the time I got to Key West in the year 2000, you could no longer climb the rusty old tower and more recently, for safety reasons, it has been taken down. The cannery building now houses the very fine Turtle Kraals Restaurant which is one of my very most favorite places to eat.