Long-time preservation activist Nancy Liebman, now a member of the Miami Beach City Commission, identifies one disturbing characteristic that sets Miami apart from preservation-minded communities such as Charleston and New Orleans: a shared sense of self-respect. "These people realized right away that they liked their community," Liebman asserts. "The people there have enough pride to protect their community and not allow wholesale demolition to make downtown parking lots." (Dade residents tempted to theorize that a collective lack of pride is due to something in South Florida's water supply need only look a few miles northward to neighboring Fort Lauderdale, which by comparison seems history-obsessed.)
There have been moments in Dade's preservation history when the bonding force of shared experience has won the day, or at least eked out a partial victory. The fight to save the old Edison High School (now Miami Edison Middle School) on NW Second Avenue at 62nd Street is an example. "We were dealing with so many people who have memories of that site," recalls historian Arva Moore Parks. When former Edison students comprising a multiethnic cross-section of Miami banded together to protest the school board's planned demolition, the board ultimately was moved to save some of the building's historic features, including its gymnasium and theater.
Revealingly, the most successfully fought preservation battles have been waged by communities. Also in Miami, grassroots efforts in the neighborhoods of Buena Vista, Morningside, and Bayside all have resulted in historic-district designation, requiring that proposals to alter the exterior of any building within the district A even a building that hasn't been deemed historically significant A be approved by Miami preservation chief Sarah Eaton or by the Historical and Environmental Preservation Board. (Demolition, however, still cannot be prevented.)
But such accomplishments are attained only when neighborhoods take the trouble to rally. Eaton says several neighborhoods in Coconut Grove are "definitely eligible" for historic designation, if only residents would bother to ask for it. The same is true of neighborhoods near SW Eighth Street such as Shenandoah and Riverside, communities that have been around since early this century and that are rich in Cuban immigrant history. "The only way it works is if the neighborhoods support it," Eaton explains. "That's what I ask for, given the lack of staff, time, and resources, and given my experience in historic districts elsewhere."
As long as local residents fail to take responsibility for preserving Dade's past, vital elements of that legacy -- the "grandparents" Dorothy Fields so highly values -- will continue to be irretrievably lost. In response to the transient's excuse ("Miami's history is somebody else's, not mine; I just got here"), the preservationist's argument is that adopted grandparents are better than none at all.
"What Dade has done is rape its history," laments Aristides Millas. "It'll never become a great city when we erase its history.
