Nice place to put some museums: Bicentennial Park.

Activists by their very nature can be annoying. Pick a subject deserving of righteous indignation (traffic, affordable housing, other people) and any one of us can relate. But the activist is too often a person with a singular obsession, and, we suspect, a malformed humor gene.

If the activist is your friend, you can every now and then interrupt a stream of pious outrage by grabbing his cheeks and making adorable-baby noises. This approach should be followed closely by ordering another round of drinks. In public life, though, you can rarely get away with such nerve.

I write this because public parks advocate Steve Hagen is, for me, one of these people. Hagen is a model citizen in that he is well-educated on the issues and unafraid to stand up and complain about something that’s not right. Hagen pays attention to what’s going on around him, and I admire that. Too few of us bother.

That said, sometimes what happens is that when a person becomes so identified with one long, vociferous argument played out over literally thousands of e-mails, you start to tune them out. And then you miss things.

Hagen’s windmill of choice is Bicentennial Park in downtown Miami. This 30-acre spit of neglected green next to the American Airlines Arena is slated to become the new home of the Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium (to be renamed the Miami Science Museum) and the Miami Art Museum.

This will theoretically happen in 2010 and 2011 because a few years ago, a majority of voters asked to support museums in some arcane way on a complicated bond issue said, “Yeah sure, culture. Sounds like a good idea.”

London-based Grimshaw Architects will design a $275 million, 200,000-square-foot Thing of Wonder to house the science museum, plus space for the Historical Museum of Southern Florida ($175 million of which comes from that bond issue we approved). The Art Thing is to be designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron and will cost $208 million ($100 million in public funds). If either of these Things is built in less than five years and at less than double its current budget, I will be pleasantly shocked.

The plans sound marvelous, truly. No doubt if it all works out, it will look splendid from the Metromover and condos like Ten Museum Park. Hagen and a number of parks-for-people advocates, however, believe that Bicentennial Park has been hijacked by a handful of wealthy socialites who think that gorgeous buildings can make up for middling-at-best programs, art collections, public participation, etc. — and finally make New Yorkers take us seriously.

The parks people want a park that is green and shady, with plenty of open space appropriate for sports and picnics and other passive uses. They point to Miami’s paucity of park space, not to mention public waterfront, in an increasingly urban city.

I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent. On one hand, the park as it exists now is not much used on a daily basis by the public, so where’s the loss? Miami could use some great architecture to offset the Zyscovich-ization of the skyline. And I’m pro-culture — the more, the better. On the other hand, what happened with the money-bleeding Carnival Performing Arts Center, not to mention Parrot Freakin’ Jungle?

So I went back and read some of those e-mails Hagen sent out, which, once you get past all the rhetoric, fairly well chronicle the history of how we got here. It’s an ugly story that illustrates what has happened in our fair city while we slept.

People have been trying to build on the land encompassing Bicentennial Park since 1972, when a plan to cover the Bayfront Park portion of the then privately owned property with a convention center, luxury hotel and a museum was nixed by a bond-issue effort that bought the land for a public park. Then of course it was neglected until the turn of the century, when then-Marlins owner John Henry thought it would be a swell site for a ballpark.

University of Miami history professor Greg Bush and others argued then, as they do now, that the city should develop a comprehensive plan for what to do with its parks and its waterfront. Bush managed to get the city to create a Parks Advisory Board, but curiously, that board doesn’t get to do much.

In 2001, the city held a charrette for the public to come up with ideas for redeveloping the park. Some 350 people showed up, but many complained that the process was rigged to favor a park with museums. When Miami voters just post-9/11 voted for another (unfortunately, it’s becoming clear) boondoggle called the Homeland Defense/Neighborhood Improvement Bond, there was $17 million tucked in there for renovating the park and helping out the two museums presumed to be built there.

Subsequently, the process moved forward largely out of the public eye. It received a big boost when voters approved the massive county bond issue. If they hadn’t, I think the fundraisers at the science and art museums would have had an impossible task to do it all with private funds, and a much harder argument to make about getting free public land. I don’t remember there being a vote about whether we wanted to do that. And who knows if they will even now be able to raise all the funds without a last-minute bail-out from our pockets?

After reading about all this, plus a lovely history of Miami’s struggle with its waterfront parks that Bush sent me, I realized the issue is not a parks or museums issue. It is a parks AND museums issue. We just love to solve our problems by building big things here, when at bottom, the problem is always the little things, i.e. people.

A bunch of the save the park types (see www.commonsensemiami.com) will be at Bicentennial this Sunday afternoon, flying kites to illustrate the passive activities an open park would encourage. They are asking the City Commission not to release $2 million in bond money to the museums in the hope that holding up the money train will give the public a little leverage in ensuring the best possible result.
In my opinion, it’s too late. There’s no way to stop what will happen in Bicentennial Park, although perhaps some of the worst excesses can be curbed. What I’m hoping is that enough people will wake up for the much larger battle looming over the Virginia Key Master Plan.

Virginia Key has it all: environmental issues, social justice issues and, not least, Jimbo Luznar issues. Key Biscayne shakers want to build a high school there. Developers want to build hotels/condos/restaurants there. Rowers want to row there. Jimbo’s fans want to drink and eat smoked fish there. It is going to be a hell of fight — one worth waging.