Escape from Monkey Island: The True Story of the Jungle Neighborhood's Wild Monkeys

In a previous post I wrote about the wild monkeys of the Jungle neighborhood.

There has been an update to this post:
Hey Hey We're the Ring-tailed Monkeys.

Jungle historian David Anderson has shed additional light on the story. David gives tours of the Jungle Prada Site and knows more about the neighborhood's history than anyone that I know.

As it turns out, a colony of monkeys migrated to the Jungle neighborhood in 1926 from Monkey Island in Pasadena, a few miles south of the Jungle. The monkeys had been abandoned when the Pasadena developer abruptly left town after the collapse of the Florida land boom.

Source: USF Digital Collections, Hampton Dunn Collection

David writes:

I hope you're doing well.  Every once in a while I enjoy catching up with your blog, and one of the posts I read discussed monkeys on the loose in the neighborhood.  I can shed more light on that.  I was recently looking for something in Walter Fuller's book when I came upon the story...

He says that Jack Taylor (developer of the Rolyat Hotel aka Stetson Law), "decamped hastily and without ceremony when the Boom fun was over." So much so that..."on an island in fairway Four of the Pasadena Golf Course a monkey house with some 20 simian representatives.  So precipitously was the organization dismantled that no provision was made for the feeding or liberating of the animals."

Fuller says he rescued a bunch of tropical birds and gave them to friends, and... "The monkeys were turned loose, promptly migrated to the Jungle.  They made Jungle Prado their headquarters.  They effectively stripped the roll paper roofing off the building, prankishly threw wadded pieces of it at passersby."

Then he says that he "induced the sailors on a foreign vessel berthing in Tampa" to "accept them."   He said one man captured one but got "painfully and dangerously bitten on the hands and arms for his boldness."

That's all Fuller says about it.  It's on page 173 of his book.

I hope that sheds a little more light on the mystery monkeys.  I wonder (if Fuller's story is true) if there could have been any that hung around the area after this.

Keep up the good work

Source: USF Digital Collections, Hampton Dunn Collection

The Pasadena development was a a short distance south of the Jungle. It was quite fantastic and its golf course included a monkey colony on a man-made island near the fourth fairway. The colony was populated in late 1924. Almost immediately the monkeys escaped.

St. Petersburg Times, Dec 19 1924

No one had anticipated that monkeys would swim off the island, but soon the lake was teeming with them. Before long they were frolicking on the course.

Some of the golf course caddies were enjoined to re-capture the monkeys. The St. Petersburg Times story reported that one of the caddies who seemed to possess "monkey agility" was sent up a pine tree where 10 monkeys were perched. He was able to capture one of them, "the others dodged down the trunk, slipped through the waiting pursuers on the ground and scattered again." Eventually, most were caught and a large cage was built on Monkey Island to prevent further escapes.

When developer Jack Taylor abandoned the Pasadena project in 1926, the monkeys were left to fend for themselves. In his book Bubble in the Sun, Christopher Knowlton quotes Walter P. Fuller as saying "to my dying day, I will remember the silent troop of monkeys on an early foggy morning proceeding single file down the seawall of my Boca Ciega home [at 450 Park Street North]. They ended up in the Jungle; lived there happily for several years."

Advertisement for the Pasadena development with a map showing the location of Monkey Island:

St. Petersburg Times Dec 6, 1925