One Sick Trickle

The two streams meet at roughly the intersection of NW Fifth Street, North River Drive, and Seventh Avenue. It was near there, on the east side of the canal, that pioneer William Wagner built a mill in the 1850s to produce starch from the tubers of the native coontie plant. An army veteran, Wagner had moved to the infant settlement of Miami to open a sutler's store to serve military troops. He also built a homestead house near the creek. (Preservationists relocated the structure, the oldest-known home still standing in Dade, to Lummus Park in the 1980s.) At the time, the area was a wilderness of pine woods, the creek's waterline thick with mangrove. In fact, Wagner's settlement was so far out in the boonies that by the time the City of Miami was founded in 1896, his property still lay outside the city limits.

In 1913 a German immigrant named John Seybold, who had amassed a tidy fortune as a baker, snatched up a large swath of property around the mouth of the creek. On the land to the west he platted an exclusive subdivision named Spring Garden. He also straightened the lower reach of the creek -- from the river to Eleventh Street -- and (not a humble man) renamed it the Seybold Canal.

Gardnar Mulloy, who is now 83 years old, has lived in Spring Garden nearly his entire life. The home he grew up in was built by his father and was one of only three in the neighborhood during his childhood (Seybold's was one of the others). North of Spring Garden was the Miami Country Club's eighteen-hole golf course. Otherwise the area was completely undeveloped, the edge of the Everglades only two miles to the west (near present-day 27th Avenue). "Seminole Indians used to come through here. We would look at them in awe as they would go downtown to buy stuff," says Mulloy, an attorney and former professional tennis player who won the men's doubles championship at Wimbledon in 1957. "They'd come down from the Everglades on foot sometimes, or sometimes they'd come down in canoes. We just looked at them. They'd grunt and we'd say hello and they'd grunt."

Mulloy and his buddies would fish and swim in the creek. Sometimes they'd follow the waterway across the golf course and north into a huge pine forest. "It was wilderness up there," he recalls. "We used to go up and camp there. We thought that was quite a hike, up around 36th Street. There were only a few houses up there -- farmers, more or less."

Filmmaker Richard Stanton also recognized the wild beauty of the creek. In 1919 he chose Spring Garden and the Seybold Canal to film a movie called The Lucky Charm (later renamed Jungle Trail) starring silent-movie star William Farnum. For the project craftsmen built a movie set in the form of a Hindu temple. (The set inspired Seybold to build a house for himself boasting dome towers. The house still sits on the canal at Eleventh Street -- in a state of neglect and decay, however, despite its historic designation.)

The six-block-long Seybold Canal today is distinct from the rest of Wagner Creek for one main reason: It's a working waterway. Small-boat storage and repair warehouses line the east side; modest single-family homes of Spring Garden sit opposite. Speed boats, luxury yachts, lobster skiffs, and a houseboat claim the seawalls. The activity, though, barely conceals the environmental problems: A constant procession of trash leisurely drifts out to sea; aluminum cans and car and boat parts clutter the canal bottom.

North of Eleventh Street, Wagner Creek slides between low-income apartment buildings and a City of Miami's vehicle-storage area, through a culvert beneath State Road 836, next to parking lots in front of the State Attorney's Office, then zigs and zags through the Cedars Medical Center complex. Along the creek's course, the contents of a household or two have found a soggy, resting place: bedsprings, globs of clothing, cosmetics, a refrigerator, baby strollers, an infant car seat, a child's bicycle with training wheels, car tires, and, of course, shopping carts -- enough to stock a Publix. Plastic bags and fast-food wrappers, bound by puslike slime, have snagged in the low-hanging branches of exotic trees that have driven out nearly all the native species. The creek's banks are coated in Styrofoam: Coffee cups are dumped on the asphalt parking lots by well-caffeinated commuters on their way from car to office; wind and rainwater do the rest of the work.