| 2.16.06 |
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My Funny Valentine
By Rebecca Wakefield It was much too cold this past week to concentrate on politics. Thus I spent the week making ham and cheese arepas and tossing the leftovers to the seagulls and pigeons that rule the neighborhood, along with the feral cats. On the upside, I discovered that the Winter Olympics are apparently going on right now. Did that sneak up on you, too? In this spirit, a friend invited me to go skating from Key Biscayne to Bayside in Miami, on a highly recommendable course tracing Brickell Avenue. We dressed as if competing in the Italian Alps and he used street hockey wheels and ski poles to race up the bridge on the Rickenbacker Causeway. I opted to ride my bike. Our route took us past the Arquitectonica-designed Atlantis and other relics of the Miami Vice-era condo boom, a funky vista broken by occasional older homes, graceful churches and gumbo-limbo trees. The area around Brickell Key was a ghost town of newer excess — completed speculator havens like Jade and projects in various stages of construction. Plywood panels still covered the numerous holes left in several buildings by Hurricane Wilma. Farther along, we rode past MetMiami, a downtown project where a Tequesta Indian burial ground was discovered a couple of years ago, but not revealed to the public until the Daily Business Review uncovered it last month (disclosure: I sometimes freelance for the DBR). The paper’s Terry Sheridan wrote about the concerns of several archaeologists, including one fired by the city of Miami, that downtown developers and city officials were willfully ignoring the significance of finds at MetMiami and the Related Group’s Brickell Icon. Both projects are quite close to the famous Miami Circle, but the developers clearly learned from that battle and solved the PR problem by hiring the prominent archaeologist who excavated that site to “monitor” their activities and pick out what bits and pieces he could from the dirt piles. Oh, it’s more complicated than that, I’m sure, but I was thinking about this in the context of the larger development boom I recently learned about in the Miami Herald. Turns out, there’s been this whole real estate explosion happening here for the last five years. I wish I’d known about this before blowing my inheritance on booze and parking tickets. The Herald did a nifty job with the computer analysis of property transaction records to write about the hot market — now on a downward trend. Damn. See what you miss when you don’t pay attention? Speaking of my favorite local daily and public service, the Herald marketing department was kind enough to send an e-mail encouraging me, as a reader, to stock up on various tchotchkes of undying passion for Valentine’s Day. They are nice like that. (I opted instead for a pact with a friend to give up my greatest vice, Diet Coke, if he gives up cigarettes.) I also enjoyed all the e-mails I received in past months encouraging me to become a charter member of the Performing Arts Center. The center is conveniently located across from the extensive Knight Ridder land holdings, vastly more salable now what with the development boom. What a wonderful investment KR made in 1990, donating a piece of land to the PAC, not to mention numerous glowing Herald editorials advocating its precise placement there, rather than any of the more sensible alternatives. “…The new Miami Performing Arts Center will be one of the best things ever to happen to our city,” the marketing department gushed into my mailbox. “… A beautiful Plaza for the Arts that will be both a wonderful stage for outdoor performances and one of the city’s most inviting public spaces, and Miami Performing Arts Center will soon transform our city into one of the great cultural capitals of the Americas.” Too bad about those parking garages, though, the lack of which the Herald dutifully chronicled recently. I was going to ask Knight Ridder’s sometime real estate advisor, Philip Blumberg, about that, but he’d left his phone in his pants and his pants in a different car. Kidding. Actually felt bad taking a cheap shot at our crack-smoking former Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce chairman after getting a call from a friend this week who said, “Rebecca, I’m getting a job with the school system and there’s an outside chance I might be put in Dade County lockup tomorrow after they run a check. Would you be available to bail me out?” I dutifully took down the number of a bail bondsman, but it turned out not to be necessary. Back to the bike ride. The layers of humanity built on the swampy banks of the Miami River are fascinating and ultimately always doomed. On the upside, if global warming predictions are accurate, Miami will be under water in a hundred years anyway. Imagine how beautiful the PAC and the yet-to-be-built Miami Art Museum will be as new reefs for divers. I will be tooling around the boat show this weekend, looking for new housing. I’m getting way out in front of the Herald on this one. Think they have anything in a nice Chinese junk? Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com. |