It being the time of year when hope gets a steroidal shot in the arm, we thought it might be illuminating to (temporarily) put aside our predilection for nit-picking and pose one constructive question to a wide variety of South Floridians. Money is no object, we said — spend as…
A coalition of national and state environmental organizations is demanding that the federal government more thoroughly study the potential environmental impacts of development at Homestead Air Force Base and is threatening to file suit if the request isn’t satisfied. The challenge by the fifteen-group coalition poses a serious obstacle to…
This is a story about 55 SW Miami Avenue Road, an odd wedge of property you’ll never find unless you know exactly where you’re going or you’re tragically lost. Whereas most addresses are meant to guide the navigator, this description only confuses (an avenue road?) And following directions, no matter…
At first glance the building at 805 Fifth St. didn’t look like much. A tidy little edifice, Spanish Mediterranean in design, but anomalous amid the Art Deco splendor of South Beach. To historians, though, it was something grander: a modest but important symbol of Miami Beach’s early commercial history, a…
The appearance of filmmaker and social commentator Michael Moore at the Miami Book Fair International this past Sunday was supposed to be his second South Florida trip this month to promote his book Downsize This! Random Threats From An Unarmed American. His first appearance, at a Borders bookstore in Fort…
Maison Paco Rabanne. The words alone, soft as an Hermes scarf, evoke images of European elegance and luxury — jewelry and servants and fine food and everything smelling sweetly fragrant. Now think of a high-rise condominium with that name: sprawling units with floor-to-ceiling windows and wrap-around balconies overlooking Biscayne Bay…
At about eight o’clock on the evening of October 26, three elegantly dressed European gentlemen commandeered all of Dade County’s public broadcasting frequencies and began to sing very loudly. For the next two hours, radios and televisions tuned to WLRN-FM (91.3), WDNA-FM (88.9), WLRN-TV (Channel 17), and WPBT-TV (Channel 2)…
One of the islands in Biscayne Bay just north of the Julia Tuttle Causeway appears to have come down with a bad case of mange. Once bushy and verdant, it’s now relatively barren. The island’s most prominent feature is a yellow backhoe. “We’re basically giving the island a face-lift,” explains…
He did time for corruption. He made deliveries for a florist. He spewed out page after page of autobiographical prose. And all the while, his sordid past has plagued him like a lousy case of heartburn.
The passage below, excerpted from Alex Daoud’s unfinished memoirs, is set at the Howard Johnson hotel on Alton Road in Miami Beach. Federal agents are preparing Daoud for a meeting with Abel Holtz, chairman of Capital Bank. Their rendezvous location is nearby: the Forge restaurant. A recording device and microphones…
There are more than a few travelers in this world who wouldn’t shed a tear upon learning that airlines throw out tons of uneaten food every day. Even chow that has gone unserved by the end of a flight is given the heave-ho. This wasteful practice doesn’t warm the hearts…
This is not a joke: The City of Miami Beach has intentionally reduced the number of parking spaces available on weekends. Toward midnight on Friday and Saturday, at about the same time that half the population of South Florida is crossing the causeways for some unabashed frivolity, city workers assiduously…
After weeks of police planning, passionate debate, and bomb threats, the controversial Rosita Fornes show at Miami Beach’s Jackie Gleason Theater of the Performing Arts won’t, in fact, go on. An attorney representing Fornes’s producers told New Times earlier this week that they planned to send a letter to the…
There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Miami Beach tourists could almost roll out of their hotel beds and fall into the sea. In the early Seventies beach erosion was so severe that there wasn’t much beach to speak of. In some places that famous band of sand…
Veteran observers present at the December 21, 1994, Miami Beach City Commission meeting may have known the mayor was about to erupt. His characteristic tics — the unconscious shoulder shrugs, the merry gaze triangulating from the audience in the commission chamber to the speaker to the documents in front of…
Never in the history of mankind has so little cellophane engendered so much hatred. The battleground: Miami International Airport. There, along the horseshoe of concourses, three baggage-wrapping concessionaires have been locked in bitter competition for the past year. The conflict has featured spying, public quarrels, and one alleged case of…
Metro Commissioner Art Teele was at the microphone when the ruckus began in the rear of the Liberty City auditorium. An old, hunched black man, wearing terry cloth sweatpants and an untucked T-shirt and topped with an explosion of white hair and a smear of red lipstick, had wandered into…
The WTVJ-TV (Channel 6) transmission tower soars exactly 1767 feet into the sky over South Dade. That’s 313 feet higher than the Sears Tower, the hemisphere’s tallest building. Nearly one-and-a-half times the height of the Empire State Building. Or, to apply local architectural measuring sticks, two First Union Financial Centers…
By Kirk Semple It is a disturbing fact of urban life that we while away a good deal of our time packed into vertically moving boxes, forced to endure the awkward rituals and mind-numbing boredom of confinement. We speak, of course, of elevators. Blessed be the elevator passenger who has…
It’s that time again, when local politicians crank up the rhetoric, express their profound concern, promise the impossible. And regardless of whether they’ve officially declared their candidacies, Dade’s mayoral hopefuls are at the vanguard, plumbing the depths of credibility with their pretty come-ons to potential voters. Among their talking points:…
Carload by carload they come, judges and politicians and attorneys and cops, some enthusiastically, others ambivalently, to toast a man who just a week earlier was the most powerful law enforcement official in South Florida but is now an unemployed lawyer most famous for an alleged taste for nude dancers…
To the untrained eye, the mass of turfy green may have appeared to be just another strange sea plant common to Looe Key reef in the Florida Keys. No big deal. Food for the fish, perhaps, or somewhere for them to hide. To Bill Matzie, though, it was, in his…
