For months, Miami Beach commissioners have been waging war against a crime wave they insist is sweeping the city. They’ve voted to curb alcohol sales and close the beach earlier, and agreed to let voters decide whether last call on Ocean Drive should come at 2 instead of 5 a.m.
In the Magic City, Spanish is so prevalent that even Donald Trump, who once chided Jeb Bush for being bilingual, attempted to speak three words of it while campaigning here last year. Nearly 77 percent of Miamians speak a language other than English at home, with Spanish being the most common, according to U.S. Census figures. Forty-three percent of people said they spoke English “less than well.”
Coral Gables takes its image seriously. The city once battled Orlando for the rights to the nickname “the City Beautiful” and this past summer sued Instagram and Facebook to uncover the identity of whoever is running a handful of social media accounts critical of the town.
In early 2016, Hialeah Police Officer Louis Herrera applied for a promotion to sergeant, feeling confident about his chances. He was excited about the job, which promised a raise and a bigger role at the department. But despite scoring well on the required exam, he was wasn’t chosen. The same thing happened when he applied again a year later.
Plenty of South Florida walls are covered with eye-catching murals, but the developers behind one Miami Beach project have another idea for filling the blank space: ginormous LED screens — one of them nearly 91 feet wide and 38 feet tall. The two screens proposed for “1212 Lincoln Road,” a Crescent Heights…
With so much #FakeNews floating around on Facebook and Twitter, the Florida-based PolitiFact has become an invaluable tool for parsing out what’s true and what’s not. The social media giant itself has acknowledged that truth, joining forces with the national fact-checking site late last year in an effort to identify…
Take a look at Miami Beach Commission candidate Mark Samuelian’s campaign platform and you might assume he’s a longtime progressive. The board director of Miami Beach United and former business consultant emphasizes his support for increasing the minimum wage, fighting climate change, and advocating for the city’s LGBT population.
Omar Rivero is standing cross-armed in his light-filled Los Angeles pool house, urging one of his employees to finish a meme about the “Republican Hypocrites of the Year,” when the news breaks: The president has just signed a memo banning transgender people from the military. “Oh, I hate Donald Trump!”…
With the monstrous Hurricane Irma just days away, much of Miami Beach heeded mandatory evacuation orders from officials and headed out. But some of the Beach’s smallest residents — the hundreds of feral cats who call the island home — have no way out. So this week, animal lover Mary Garcia…
In 1992, as Hurricane Andrew roared toward Miami, staff at Zoo Miami found an unlikely place to house the zoo’s 30 flamingos: the men’s bathroom. Ron Magill, then the assistant curator, was walking out the door after helping get the birds situated when he turned around to take one last look…
Jamira Kennedy and her fiance were sitting with their one-month-old son Wednesday morning, talking about loading up on food for Hurricane Irma, when they were startled by two loud knocks at the door. It was the police. Just days before the largest Atlantic storm in history is set to arrive…
Store shelves were running low across South Florida by Tuesday morning as locals hurried to prepare for Hurricane Irma, which is already one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes in history.
Yuri Star was working as an Uber driver when he met Morgan O’Connor, a dreadlocked former Ralph Lauren Polo model and reportedly one-third of a love triangle with Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus. Soon after carting the aspiring musician around West Palm Beach for a night, Star became his full-time caretaker.
From giant African snails to tegus to peacocks, Florida is crawling with all kinds of things that aren’t supposed to be here. Probably none inspires as much fear as the Burmese python, which for years has been ravaging the Everglades and pretty much everything that lives there.
Alfredo Ballester was sitting on his motorcycle at a red light in Little Havana when a police officer suddenly pulled in front of him and jumped out of his patrol car. To the 19-year-old’s surprise, the officer hurried toward him and tore him off his motorcycle, explaining he thought Ballester would try to flee.
When the City of Miami Beach created a MiMo architecture historic district to protect its Morris Lapidus-designed, mid-20th-century buildings a few years ago, officials considered including the beachfront stretch along Collins Avenue from 53rd to 63rd Street. But there was a problem: The huge condo towers on either side of the street create “an almost continuous ‘canyon’ wall effect on both sides…”
Ryan Masti could hardly believe what he was hearing. The soft-spoken college senior who’d grown up on a farm in a speck-size New York town listened breathlessly as a World Patent Marketing rep told him the company wanted to partner with him on his invention. In fact, the man told…
In 1937, a young black man named John McBride was shot in the stomach by a car full of white men rumored to be members of the Ku Klux Klan. Hospitals in the area near the Pompano Beach shooting at first refused to admit him. A black physician, Dr. Von D. Mizell, ultimately persuaded one of them to take him in. But the hospital later insisted on moving McBride to a rundown sanitarium, where he soon died.
When a South Florida Uber driver shot and killed an armed attacker late last year, Jose Mejia thought the company should have congratulated the guy. Mejia, who’s also a local driver, couldn’t believe it when the man’s job was called into question instead, thanks to an Uber policy barring firearms.
Every morning for the past seven years, Ethel Domiguez has fed the cats living in the tangle of vegetation on the beach behind her Collins Avenue condo building. But when she went down to the beach yesterday, she was horrified by what she saw: Workers were bulldozing everything. Most…
Florida has a well-earned reputation for being a lawless swamp. But give credit where it’s due: In its 172-year history, the Sunshine State has seen fit to regulate a few things, including some truly bizarre bans.
For nearly 20 years, Memorial Day in Miami Beach has been synonymous with Urban Beach Week, an informal hip-hop event that draws hundreds of thousands to the city for a days-long party. But that changed this year.
