ISLAMORADA, Fla. – Off the coast of Plantation Key in Islamorada, you can expect to find a rather strange site.
Sitting along both sides of a short channel are a bunch of toilet seats.
Recommended Videos
This channel — aptly dubbed “Toilet Seat Cut” — is a local mainstay for many on Plantation Key.
According to Florida Keys historian Brad Bertelli, the whole issue stems back to the 1950s, when a man named Vernon Lamp decided he wanted a shortcut to the nearby Founder’s Park, which was a hot place to visit at the time.
In the bayside areas of the Florida Keys, the water tends to be much shallower and difficult to navigate, so Lamp decided to clear a path through a seagrass bed to make his own shortcut.
“He kind of carved this little cut to make his commute or his trip aboard his boat a little shorter,” Bertelli told News 6. “And he put a couple poles in it to stake the entrance and the exit.”
While the process is illegal nowadays due to the harm it poses to the environment, Lamp ultimately managed to carve out his shortcut through the bay.
But in 1960, the channel would get a new look when Hurricane Donna — one of the strongest hurricanes to hit Florida — struck the Keys as a Category 4 hurricane, killing several people and leaving destruction in its wake.
In the aftermath of Donna’s rampage, though, a toilet seat was left hanging from one of the pole markers along Lamp’s cut.
“Apparently, he was a man with a sense of humor, and he took the toilet seat home and cleaned it, painted it, and posted it back on this little cut,” Bertelli explained.
In the decades to follow, the trend caught on with other locals, who decorated their own toilet seats to place along the cut, earning the spot its modern moniker.
These markers weren’t just unique art pieces, though. They helped designate both sides of the cut so boaters didn’t accidentally ground themselves in the surrounding shallow waters.
Nowadays, Bertelli said, Toilet Seat Cut is littered with dozens of these lavatorial art projects. If a storm blows one away, another is sure to take its place.
It’s not all just a joke, though.
“Some of them honor people who passed, people who’ve died, people who’ve moved away,” Bertelli stated. “There are scores of them now.”
Visitor Tamara Scharf kayaked out to Toilet Seat Cut to explore the site with her then-fiancé nearly 10 years ago.
Around that time, Scharf said a local told her about the cut, which wasn’t widely known even within the Florida Keys back then.
“We have a good sense of humor, so as soon as we hear about it, we (were) obsessed and just had to go out there to see it!” she told News 6.
However, it’s not recommended that people go out there to put up their own contributions. It’s actually against the law to put these toilet seats up.
“It’s not legal for you to put out unpermitted navigational aids. It never has been” said Monroe County Deputy Nelson Sanchez.
Despite that, Sanchez added that no one’s been arrested yet for doing so.
“They do it very stealthily, and quite frankly, it has to be Coast Guard or somebody else to enforce the navigational aid that’s done improperly,” Sanchez explained.
Either way, Toilet Seat Cut is open to the public, so there are plenty of opportunities to take a look for yourself. While a boat might make the journey easier than a kayak or canoe, just be careful about the shallow bay waters nearby.
For more strange places and stories across the Sunshine State, visit News 6′s “Florida Fables” page by clicking here.
Get today’s headlines in minutes with Your Florida Daily: