The Green Parrot's own history starts in 1890, with a grocery Antonio Sanchez opened at the corner of Whitehead and Southard in Key West. By that account it stayed a grocery for about fifty years and became a bar around the start of the Second World War. As the Brown Derby it served submarine crews from the Key West naval base, 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 in shutters, which gave the room the open air shape it still has. Jim Bean bought the bar in 1983 and owned it for twenty seven years, and the live music it is known for grew up in his time.
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 bought a two thirds share the next year. The bar's motto is A Sunny Place for Shady People. It closed for Hurricane Irma in 2017, then ran a landline out of the bar so that about five hundred people could queue up and call their families.
Getting there
24.5541, -81.8031
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