Bayfrontin’ the Bicentennial
What One Downtown Miami Park Can Teach Us About the Other

“It’s a space that invites the public in.” — Wendy Wischer

Artist Wendy Wischer documented some of the instant art her New World School of the Arts students made from items they found at Bayfront Park. Photos by Wendy Wischer

By Rebecca Wakefield

There are few local sights more beautiful and secret than the tiny green jewel in downtown Miami known as Bayfront Park. The 32-acre spit of public land is trapped between garish Baysideland and the imposing Intercontinental Hotel, home of the ridiculously expensive buffet lunch. Office buildings and condos rise west of its Biscayne Boulevard border, giving the park an oddly sunken feel. To the east curves a gorgeous blue bay populated with islands and all manner of seaworthy vessel (cruise, freighter, gambling and pirate).

Inside the park is an amphitheater, an enormous baobab tree, a rock garden, statues of Christopher Columbus and Claude Pepper, a WWII Memorial, a Challenger memorial, the much-demonstrated-around Torch of Friendship, and sculptures by Isamu Noguchi, who was hired in 1980 to update the place with features such as a promenade and the huge pagoda-like cascading fountain.

The 18 people who run Bayfront Park from day to day are dedicated, cheerful types who keep their tiny kingdom in excellent order. There are beach chairs available on a sandy patch under palm trees, free yoga classes, and even a weekly kickball game. If there is anything wrong with the park, it is these two things – it is too small, and, in bureaucratic parlance, underutilized. The latter problem is due largely to the fact that few people actually live downtown. That will change.

Miami is going through one of its periods of expansion, when speculators of all sorts contemplate the selling points of every square inch. Much has been said about Miami’s lack of inviting public spaces, especially along the waterfront. Persuasive arguments have been made about Miami’s addiction to the sucker’s bet that massive buildings designed by fancy architects and financed by the public will magically produce the community cohesion we sorely lack. It took the Miami Heat’s waterfront arena nearly two decades to begin delivering on that promise. If the Performing Arts Center does in my lifetime, I’ll buy season tickets and shut the hell up.

While I’m on the subject, what about Parrot Jungle Island, an expensive, inadequate tourist attraction that most locals try once and never again? Seriously, $28 per adult, $23 per child, plus $7 for parking and an endless merchandizing onslaught to visit a lackluster assortment of stressed-out birds in a concrete jungle next to an overpass? What average family is gonna shell out for that more than once? We got rid of Watson Island’s perfectly good fish markets and diverted development money for poor people to create this boondoggle?

Why don’t we learn? Recently the Miami Herald ran a story about the problem with the plans to move the Miami Art Museum and the Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium to Bicentennial Park. The problem, as described in the story, is that there isn’t enough cash, even with the $275 million we gave them, to actually do it. There isn’t enough support from the private sector, whether philanthropists or the mega art-collectors who would loan out their stashes to put MAM in the world-class category suggested by the price tag.

In general, I’m pro-museum. I like the idea of being able to stroll through a tree-lined park into the mind-altering cool of a great gallery or two. I like the idea of thousands of schoolchildren from all over far-flung Miami-Dade getting to experience the melding of art and nature. Bicentennial today is just 30 acres of derelict wasteland on the waterfront, waiting for a vision of some kind to descend. That said, this plan is potentially an expensive, wasteful, and elitist use of an irreplaceable public resource.

How many of Miami’s unwashed masses would really come to the park on a consistent basis, pay the not inconsiderable admission, and gawk at the art and/or science? If that does not happen, Bicentennial Park becomes merely a beautiful playground in which the wealthy can party and congratulate each other for being world class. The key is that buildings do not in themselves make a park or a community. People do.

In contrast to this future, check out what the city has done with Bayfront Park. The park opened in 1925 and, like so much of Miami, was a completely artificial creation. Its acreage was obtained by pumping the bay out of it. Its first brush with notoriety came in 1933, when a diminutive but determined Italian anarchist attempted to shoot President Franklin Roosevelt dead roughly on the spot where patrons currently perform feats of yoga three times a week. He missed and bagged the then-mayor of Chicago instead.

Over the years, according to historian Paul George, the park managed to weather the various building fads of civic titans who thought a library or a convention center ought to be erected. Bayside took up about half of the park when it was built on the remains of the old Miami Marina in the 1980s.

Wildly disparate acts — from Snoop Dogg to Carlos Vives, Juanes, Buju Banton, Jimmy Buffett, Pearl Jam, Arturo Sandoval, Metallica, Kid Rock, and Isaac Hayes — have played in the park. I once took my parents to Bayfront for a vodou festival. A gregarious fellow smoking a funny cigarette in the rock garden offered them a tour of the various altars to the vodou pantheon arrayed among the trees.

“When any group in Miami wants to make a statement about who they are, they do a concert at Bayfront Park,” observes executive director Tim Schmand, a genial bureaucrat with the soul of a sociologist.

Schmand started out as a volunteer some 15 years ago and was gradually suckered into running the place. He’s enthusiastic to a fault. He wanders the grounds several times a day, absently picking up minute pieces of trash his maintenance crew missed. He attends the yoga sessions religiously and has checked out the Thursday night adult kickball league, which is in its second season at the park.

And when the public has unorthodox notions of using the park, he’s generally delighted. One example is Wendy Wischer, a local artist (and in full disclosure, also a friend) and adjunct teacher at the New World School of the Arts. Wischer has been taking groups of her sculpture students there for eight years to create environmental art pieces reminiscent of the work of Andy Goldsworthy.

The students (who in years past have included local art stars like Bhakti Baxter and Jiae Hwang) walk the five blocks from their school, armed only with string or tape. When they get to Bayfront, Wischer leads them into the coral rock garden, where each student has to construct a temporary art installation using only what can be found there, such as flower petals, tree branches or stones. “It’s a piece about spontaneity,” she explains. “It helps them figure out whether they work better in a last-minute situation or really planning it out. And it’s just a lovely way to spend a day, in a little oasis in the middle of everything. It’s a space that invites the public in.”

Schmand loves it when he stumbles on such ephemera. “It’s all about moments of surprising beauty,” he says. “These delicate little pieces are great. There’s no better lab for it than outdoors in Miami.”

Even a park itself could be considered a transient installation. Schmand and the trust to which he reports have plans to adapt to Miami’s growth. A lot of the ideas sound good, such as building a children’s playground near the yoga pavilion, planting more trees for shade, and adding a farmer’s market in the winter season. Others seem odd but harmless, such as a flying trapeze operation and a hot air balloon, both of which will begin later this year.

In the longer term, Schmand says he’s considering renovating the rock garden and possibly adding a small restaurant on the parking lot next to it. When I frown at that, considering Bayside is so close, he reassures me that it won’t happen unless there’s a real demand for it.

“I want to feel the residents before we do something irreversible like a restaurant,” he says. “I know it’s a park, but the goal is to make it a great public space.”

Comments? E-mail wakefield@miamisunpost.com.