Green Parrot Bar

Antonio Sanchez opened a grocery at the southeast corner of Whitehead and Southard in 1890, and something has been trading in the building ever since, which is the basis for the Green Parrot's claim to be the oldest bar in Key West. It was a grocery for the first fifty years of that. It became a bar around the start of the Second World War, working as the Brown Derby and serving submarine crews from the naval base a few blocks away, and it stayed a Navy room until the Navy drew down in the early 1970s. Judy Sullivan bought it then, renamed it the Green Parrot, and knocked the glass block out of the window openings to put shutters in, which is how a closed grocery room became the open-air bar it still is. Jim Bean bought the bar on his birthday in 1983 and ran it for twenty-seven years, building the live music room it is now known for. He died suddenly in 2010, and his longtime partner John Vagnoni brought in Pat Croce, the Philadelphia entrepreneur and former president of the 76ers, who keeps a house on the island. Locals call it the last little piece of old Key West. It has come through two world wars, the Depression and a long run of hurricanes, though not without shutting: it closed for Hurricane Irma in 2017, then ran a landline out of the bar so that several hundred people could queue up and call their families.