The Hemingway House: Why Pauline's Uncle Bought It, How the Cats Got Six Toes, and What's at the Bottom of the Pool

Behind the main house at 907 Whitehead Street, a wrought-iron staircase climbs the side of a coral-rock carriage house to a screen door you cannot walk through. Behind the door is a Royal typewriter on a brass cigar-maker's table, a deer head from Hemingway's 1933 East African safari, and the room where he wrote — standing up, five thirty to noon, seven days a week — Death in the Afternoon, Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber." Most of the people walking past it that morning are looking the other direction, into the garden, where a cat named after Howard Hughes is drinking from a tiled porcelain urinal.

That's the Hemingway Home and Museum in one paragraph: a tropical house built by a shipwreck salvager, one of the most productive decades of 20th-century American prose, a federal lawsuit, and sixty cats with extra toes. It is the single most-visited paid attraction in Key West. Here's what's in there, who built it, what he wrote in it, and the small adjustments that make the visit worth your $19.

The house that limestone built

907 Whitehead Street sits directly across from the Key West Lighthouse. The house was built in 1851 by Asa Tift, a marine architect whose actual money came from the wrecker trade — the legally licensed business of salvaging cargo from ships that piled up on the Florida Reef. Wrecking made Key West, briefly, the richest city per capita in the United States.

Tift picked the second-highest point on the island, sixteen feet above sea level, and rather than truck in materials, he quarried the limestone on the lot itself. The hole he left in the ground became the home's basement — still the only basement in the entire Florida Keys, and still dry today. The walls are eighteen inches of native coral limestone. It's the same material logic that built the Castillo de San Marcos up in St. Augustine: quarry the ground you're standing on, build the walls thick, watch the hurricanes pass.

When the Hemingways arrived in town in 1928, the Tift house was boarded up, tax-delinquent, and on the market for $8,000. Hemingway loved it on the walk-through. Pauline filed it away.

How a Pfeiffer ended up paying for it

Ernest Hemingway showed up in Key West in April 1928, on a P&O ferry from Havana with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer. Their Model A Ford — a wedding gift from Pauline's uncle — was late getting onto the Miami-to-Key-West ferry, and they squatted for three weeks above the Trev-Mor Ford dealership on Simonton Street while they waited. Hemingway used the three weeks to revise a draft of A Farewell to Arms. That is the kind of luck Key West has historically afforded its writers.

Pauline came from real money. The Pfeiffers ran a pharmaceutical wholesale empire out of Piggott, Arkansas, and her uncle Gus Pfeiffer — who effectively played the role of Hemingway's quiet Medici through the entire decade — had already paid for the Model A and the Spanish honeymoon, and would shortly pay for the African safari. In April 1931, Gus wired $8,000 to buy the boarded-up Tift house at 907 Whitehead as a delayed wedding gift. The renovation took more than a year. Pauline replaced the original ceiling fans with chandeliers (a Murano-glass piece still hangs in the dining room) — which, in a pre-air-conditioning tropical house, was the first of several decisions Hemingway would quietly resent. The structural parallel here is the Bonnet House in Fort Lauderdale: built in the same decade, by another wealthy in-law, for another collector-couple, now another single-property literary-historic shrine.

They moved into 907 Whitehead in December 1931. He stayed until September 1939, when he told Pauline he was leaving her for the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. Pauline kept the house until her death in 1951.

What he wrote there, and the room you can almost see it in

The writing studio is on the second floor of the carriage house, accessible only from the outside, via the wrought-iron staircase. Hemingway had a catwalk built from his second-floor bedroom to the studio so he could work in his pajamas without his guests seeing him; the catwalk is gone now. The studio is preserved as a tableau — viewable through the screen door but closed to foot traffic, a small mercy because forty thousand annual visitors would scuff the Spanish-tile floor to dust inside a year.

His routine was unvaried. Up at five thirty. Coffee. Up the iron staircase. Wrote standing, on the cigar-maker's table, with the Royal portable Pauline had given him one Christmas. Aimed for five hundred words. Stopped, mid-paragraph, at what he called "a good solid place" to start the next morning. Down the staircase by noon. Lunch with Pauline. Afternoon on the Pilar — the 38-foot Wheeler Playmate he bought in 1934 for $7,495, financed by an Esquire advance from Arnold Gingrich. Evenings at Sloppy Joe's.

Between 1931 and 1939, in that one room, he wrote Death in the Afternoon (1932), the short-story collection Winner Take Nothing (1933), Green Hills of Africa (1935), the two East-African short stories — "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" (both 1936) — and To Have and Have Not (1937), the only novel he ever set in the United States. The first chunks of For Whom the Bell Tolls were drafted here too, before he finished it at Finca Vigía in Cuba. By any honest measure, that's one of the four or five most consequential ten-year addresses in American literary history.

The pool, the penny, and the urinal

In 1937, with Hemingway in Spain covering the Civil War, Pauline built a swimming pool. She had her reasons. The boxing ring in the side yard — Hemingway sparred there with sailors and visiting friends — had to come out to make room, which conveniently broke the strongest visual reminder that her husband was a man who got himself into a lot of fistfights. The pool ran 24 by 60 feet, about 80,000 gallons, originally fed by saltwater pumped from the Atlantic. It cost $20,000 — at a moment when the entire house had cost $8,000. It was the first in-ground pool in Key West and, by some accounts, the only pool within a hundred miles.

When Hemingway came home and saw the bill, he reportedly fished a penny from his pocket, slammed it on the pool deck, and told Pauline she might as well take his last cent. Someone pressed it into the still-wet concrete at the north end. It is a 1934-D Lincoln wheat penny. It is still there. The tour will point it out.

Then there is the urinal. The original Sloppy Joe's Bar sat at 428 Greene Street — now Captain Tony's Saloon — from 1933 until the night of May 5, 1937, when owner Joe Russell moved the entire operation half a block away to 201 Duval rather than pay a dollar-a-week rent hike. Hemingway helped haul fixtures. He kept the bar's long porcelain urinal, on the grounds that he had paid for it twenty thousand drinks at a time and now owned it. He hauled it home and parked it next to the pool. Pauline, less amused, tiled it in Cuban tile and converted it into a cat watering fountain. It still serves that function for the most photographed cat colony on earth.

The cats who fought the federal government (and lost)

The cats are why most of the people in your tour group are here, even if they would never admit it. There are around sixty of them. About half visibly have extra toes; the rest are carriers — the polydactyl gene is dominant, which is why the line has held across nearly a century of breeding. They are all named after famous people. The current roster includes Shirley Temple, Hairy Truman, Archie Andrews, Howard Hughes, and Rita Hayworth.

The origin story, per the museum, is that a Key West sea captain named Stanley Dexter gave Hemingway a white polydactyl kitten named Snow White. Ship captains historically prized six-toed cats — the extra digit functions like a thumb-grip on a rolling deck — and Hemingway, who was accident-prone enough to once shoot himself in both legs trying to gaff a hooked shark, took to the good-luck angle.

The federal lawsuit is real. In 2003, the USDA declared the museum an "animal exhibitor" subject to the Animal Welfare Act — because admission was charged and the cats were used in marketing — and threatened $200-per-day-per-cat fines. The museum spent nearly a decade arguing it wasn't running an exhibit, just a literary site that happened to have pets. On December 7, 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit ruled against it: the cats affect interstate commerce because the gift shop sells cat-themed merchandise. The USDA won. The museum installed taller fencing, hired a night-keeper, and complied. The cats were unaffected. There is a pet cemetery on the west side of the property. Some of the gravestones have human names. The most photographed says, simply, Willard Scott.

How to actually visit

The Hemingway Home and Museum is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., 365 days a year. Admission is $19 adult, $7 for kids 6–12, free for kids 5 and under, with a 3% card surcharge. No advance ticketing — you walk up, pay, take the next 20–30-minute guided tour (they leave every fifteen minutes), then wander the grounds. The whole visit runs 60 to 90 minutes.

There is no on-site parking. Metered spots on Whitehead, South, and Olivia are typically full by 10 a.m.; the Park-n-Ride garage at 300 Grinnell Street is the closest reliable lot, a ten-minute walk. Most visitors come on foot, bike, or rideshare. If you're staying overnight rather than day-tripping in — and you should be — your hotel is probably within walking distance.

The single highest-leverage move is showing up for the 9:15 a.m. first tour. Cruise ships dock at Mallory Square or Pier B and disgorge hundreds of guests onto Whitehead Street between 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m.; the house genuinely jams. The upstairs bedrooms get loud and, on a humid August day with sixty cats in them, gamy. The studio screen door is hard to see through over a crowd. The pool deck — where the penny is — becomes a conga line that doesn't move. At 9:15, none of that is true.

When the answer is no

The Hemingway House is the single most-visited paid attraction in Key West. That doesn't always make it the best use of your morning.

For a family of four — two adults, two kids 6–12 — admission runs $52. For that you could split a backcountry flats fishing charter, do a half-day reef snorkel with Fury or Sebago, or put two adults on the Yankee Freedom ferry to Dry Tortugas National Park (~$220/adult, includes lunch, snorkel gear, and a full day at Fort Jefferson — by most honest accounts the best single day anyone spends in the lower Keys).

Many Key West veterans will quietly tell you the Truman Little White House — 111 Front Street, ten minutes away, $26.99 adult, a fifty-five-minute tour run largely by ex-Navy historians — is the more rigorous historic-house in Old Town. About ninety percent of the Truman's artifacts are original; you can stand in the room where the National Security Act was drafted. The Hemingway tour, by contrast, leans on charm, polydactyl mythology, and a handful of objects (typewriter, pool, urinal) that genuinely cannot be reproduced anywhere else.

The honest framing: if you're choosing between Miami and Key West for one Florida day and you pick Key West, skip Hemingway and do the Tortugas. If Key West is one of three days in the lower Keys — and it should be, because day-tripping the Keys is a known mistake — the Hemingway House is essential. Go at 9:15, give it ninety minutes, keep moving. It's worth $19, not $200. And it is, somehow, never not worth seeing the urinal.