No Name Pub

No Name Pub opened in 1931 as a general store and bait and tackle shop on Big Pine Key, on the road that led to the No Name Key ferry. The first Overseas Highway had opened three years earlier with a gap in the middle of it: drivers boarded a car ferry at Lower Matecumbe, crossed some forty miles of open water, landed at No Name Key and drove on to Key West, passing this door on the way. An eatery was added in 1936. When the highway bridges finally closed the ferry gap in 1938 the traffic moved to the new road, and by the mid-1950s the store and the tackle shop had both shut, leaving behind only the bar and the restaurant that had grown up beside them, on a road that now led nowhere in particular. Sometime in the 1970s customers began stapling signed dollar bills to the walls, and the habit never stopped. Every surface inside, ceiling included, is layered in bills carrying names, dates and messages left by people who went out of their way to find the place, with estimates of the total on the walls running to around ninety thousand dollars. Staff periodically strip sections off and give the proceeds to local charities. The pub's own motto is that it is a nice place if you can find it, and the pizza is what most people order once they have.