Type "things to see on Sugarloaf Key" into a search bar and the algorithm will still send you looking for a bat tower. Roadside America lists it. Tripadvisor has a review page for it. Lonely Planet describes its Aztec-inspired silhouette rising over Mile Marker 17 like it's still standing there today. It is not. Hurricane Irma toppled the Sugarloaf Key Bat Tower in September 2017, and Atlas Obscura now lists the entry as permanently closed, kept online purely as a historical record. If you live here, you already know this. You've probably redirected a lost tourist away from Bat Tower Road at least once.
That gap between what the internet says is here and what's actually here is worth sitting with for a minute, because it points to something true about how this key works. The thing that made Sugarloaf recognizable was never really a fixed structure. It was always a story people kept repeating long after the physical version of it disappeared. And right now, the same pattern is playing out again, except this time it's happening to something that's still very much standing: the coffee shop at Mile Marker 15.
The Landmark That Isn't There Anymore
Richter Clyde Perky had a real estate problem in 1929, not a supernatural one. He owned the town he'd named after himself at MM17, and he couldn't sell lots or fill his fishing resort because the mosquitoes were bad enough to make breathing outdoors unpleasant. He'd read about a doctor in San Antonio who built roosts to attract mosquito-eating bats, so he paid for the plans and the "special bait" and built a 30-foot tower on his property. The bats never moved in. The bait, whose formula died with its inventor, never worked. The tower stood anyway for 88 years, a genuinely strange piece of Keys history, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, until Irma's wind finally did what decades of hurricanes hadn't.
Nine years later, the tower's absence hasn't slowed down its reputation. It still shows up in trip-planning searches, still gets circled on printed maps, still pulls cars down an unmarked side road near the Sugarloaf Airport sign looking for a monument that's rubble now. Locals stopped expecting to find it a long time ago. What's interesting is what filled the vacuum, because nothing did, not physically. The actual landmarks that define daily life here were never the tower. They were five miles up and down the highway the whole time.
What Actually Marks the Spot Now
Baby's Coffee opened at MM15 in 1991, and for most of its life it operated the way small highway institutions do: consistent, a little quirky, known by regulars and road-trippers rather than by anyone doing formal marketing. That changed in February 2024, when Joe and Carnella Bracciale bought the business from its longtime owners, Gary and Olga Teplistky. The Bracciales were direct about their intentions in an interview with Keys Weekly at the time: they had no plans to sell, and their priority was preserving what made the place work rather than reinventing it. Joe Bracciale called Baby's a pillar of the Keys, crediting the original owners' roasting expertise and the sense of community they'd built over three decades.
What's happened since is the part worth paying attention to if you live here. Rather than sitting still, Baby's filed permits this year for a second location, this one in Key West's Old Town at 518 Fleming Street. According to coverage from WhatNow published in June 2026, co-owner Carnella Bracciale said the new shop was targeting a July opening, timed deliberately to Hemingway Days, the city's biggest annual tourism draw. That's not Baby's leaving Sugarloaf. The MM15 roasting room isn't going anywhere, and the daily commuters who stop there on their way into Key West aren't losing their spot. But it does mean something has shifted: the thing people associate with this stretch of highway is now exporting itself into the middle of Key West's busiest week, carrying the Sugarloaf name into a part of the Keys that has never needed to borrow credibility from anywhere.
Compare that to the bat tower's story. A physical structure got built, failed at its one job, stood around as a curiosity, and vanished the first time weather got serious about it. Baby's built something that didn't depend on staying in one place to keep being real.
The Other End of the Road
Five miles south at MM20, Mangrove Mama's runs on a similar logic, just with more turnover. The building itself dates to the early 1900s, originally a stop and station-agent residence for Flagler's Overseas Railroad before it survived the 1935 Labor Day hurricane that destroyed the rail line around it. It became a gas station, then a grocery store, then in 1979 a bar and restaurant when Gary and Nancy Bell bought the property. The name came from Bell's fishing skiff, which he kept docked out front, and which locals eventually just started calling the whole operation.
Ownership has changed hands repeatedly since, most recently under Jeff Gagnon, Annie van Eller and Beth Connor, who took over after a stretch when, by their own account, the restaurant had drifted away from the people who lived nearby. Gagnon told Keys Weekly directly: "Unfortunately, locals haven't been coming here and we want to change that." Their fix wasn't a full overhaul. It was bringing back specific dishes regulars remembered, adding a tiki bar and a pontoon-boat stage, and building a live music schedule that now runs Friday and Saturday nights. The patio still takes dogs. The building is still the same one that watched the railroad get wiped out more than ninety years ago.
That's several different ownership groups keeping one name alive across more than four decades, which is a strange kind of permanence when you think about it. Nobody's pretending it's the same restaurant it was in 1979. It's the same idea, run by different people, in the same building, which has turned out to be a much sturdier form of landmark status than a wooden tower ever was.
The Weekend Nobody Photographs
There's a quieter thread tying all of this together, and it runs through the water instead of the highway. Get Up and Go Kayaking operates guided clear-kayak tours out of Sugarloaf Marina, close enough to the old bat tower site that you could walk it. Their two-hour trips take paddlers through mangrove tunnels inside the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, the same backcountry that gave Perky his mosquito problem in the first place. Guides point out stingrays, small sharks and sea turtles through kayaks with clear hulls, in water shallow and still enough that wildlife spotting is closer to guaranteed than lucky.
It's a small irony worth noticing. Perky spent $10,000 in 1929 trying to engineer his way around this same backcountry so tourists would stay. A century later, people drive out specifically to be in it, guided, unhurried, paying for the privilege of the exact terrain he saw as an obstacle. A typical weekend routine here doesn't involve a landmark at all. It involves a coffee at MM15, a paddle through the mangroves, and dinner with a band playing at MM20. None of it required a monument to hold it together.
The Actual Landmark Was Never a Building
If you live on Sugarloaf Key, none of this is a surprise exactly, but it's worth naming out loud: the thing that makes this stretch of highway recognizable was never a fixed structure standing in one spot. It was continuity, carried by people who kept showing up and kept a name alive even as everything around it changed hands, changed shape, or blew down in a storm. The bat tower is gone and stayed gone. Baby's Coffee and Mangrove Mama's are still here, and one of them is about to be somewhere else too.
That's the version of Sugarloaf Key worth knowing, whether you're the one giving directions to a lost tourist or just deciding where to grab coffee this weekend.
If you're thinking about property here, or anywhere else in the Middle and Lower Keys, the team at Island Welcome Real Estate knows this stretch of highway the way locals do, landmark by landmark, name change by name change. Start Your Island Search whenever you're ready.
