The Cozy Corner in Miami Springs is buzzing this Wednesday morning with what seems like half the town. Strong coffee washes down decadent piles of eggs, bacon, and French toast, seasoned with the latest conspiracy theory racing through the city shortly before an election that just might change everything.
Steve Satterwhite
Downtown Miami Springs: Preserving the village flavor is a hot topic this campaign season
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Or maybe not, offers Chuck, a grizzled railroad engineer and 56-year Miami Springs resident who's been swearing for years he's ready to move out of this quaint burg before the rest of Miami-Dade County swallows it whole. "Don't get me wrong," Chuck ruminates. "It's a nice little town. But if they think putting in some trees and adding a couple of stories to these buildings is going to “revitalize' the town -- " He trails off and points out the diner's front window to the shops that inhabit the modest downtown. "If you want to buy a pair of shoes, why would you come here? There's three malls just on the way to the turnpike. It's not like we're in the middle of nowhere."
What Miami Springs is in the middle of is both a geographical quirk and an identity crisis. An April 3 election will result in at least three and possibly five new faces at city hall. The election also may serve as a referendum for some 6000 voters regarding the city's adopted plan to revitalize its business district. Whatever the outcome a small group of outspoken residents opposed to the plan already has formed a political action committee called Save the Springs, aimed at putting on a future ballot two city charter amendments limiting the power of the city council to increase building heights and sell or lease public property. Philosophical combatants have been blasting away at one another for months in the hometown paper, the River Cities Gazette, and at city hall. At one meeting a councilwoman was provoked to declare that opponents of the plan should be driven out of town.
Joe Solla, a local attorney with an office in downtown Miami Springs and a frequent Cozy Corner patron, volunteers a positive spin on the debate. "The nicest thing I can say about our small-town controversy is, they get all --" He pauses thoughtfully before continuing. "They want to kill each other because they like this place so much. Sometimes they forget that they're all coming from the same place." Solla adds that Miami Springs is like the town that time forgot, a circumstance that has given rise to opposing views among protective residents. "Narrow-minded," quips a Cozy Corner waitress. "Stodgy," corrects Solla. "I prefer stodgy."
Aviator and town-builder Glenn Curtiss set all this in motion back in the Twenties when he conceived of a tiny Middle American oasis that would be the antithesis of Hialeah sprawl. Loosely packed into three square miles bordered by Hialeah and Miami International Airport are a publicly owned golf course, a small town center, and about 14,000 residents, more than half of whom migrated across the Miami Canal from Hialeah. Quiet residential streets of mostly single-family homes form a neat patchwork that crisscrosses the triangle-shaped municipality.
Miami Springs technically is a city, but everybody who lives there calls it a town, and the place does have a kind of Mayberry feel to it. In the mornings and afternoons, folks of all ages stroll down the tree-lined greenway in the median of Curtiss Parkway. Red, white, and blue signs advertising the fifteen candidates running for mayor or one of four city council seats are staked in manicured lawns and plastered to shop windows.
All this is as it should be, people tell one another in coffee shops and beauty parlors and at city hall. "We are a bedroom community, and we pride ourselves on that," says Assistant City Manager Jim Borgmann. "It's a nice, quiet atmosphere. I've lived here for 42 years. The elementary school I went to is two blocks away. Sometimes I look out my office and think, Forty years and I've made it two blocks." To most of the outside world, however, Miami Springs is nothing more than a pass-through on the way to somewhere else. The downtown business district is suffering from a lack of customers, some storefronts frequently change tenants, and there are several run-down, vacant buildings, one of them owned by the president of the local chamber of commerce.
But now that the city has a $750,000 state grant for downtown redevelopment burning a hole in its pocket, vociferous debate has opened over just what vague words such as redevelopment and revitalization will really mean to residents and business owners. Fred Suco, a Miami-Dade Police Department detective by day and Save the Springs treasurer during his free time, thinks he knows the answer -- and it isn't good. "Why would you destroy what's there in the name of redevelopment?" he questions.
Suco is wary of a plan, innocuously titled "Our Town," drawn up by consultants and approved by the city council this past February. The long-term vision suggests the sort of treatment that has worked to varying degrees in other towns, such as slowing traffic, widening sidewalks, planting trees, and having business owners renovate storefronts to conform to a unified theme. There are other suggestions, such as increasing office and retail space, adding apartments above downtown businesses, and building parking garages. Suco and a handful of other residents believe that while some of these ideas are good, the potential is great for monstrous development to overtake Miami Springs.
