Pictured in this month’s newsletter of the Dade County Police Benevolent Association is a tightlipped police officer bound in handcuffs, a blindfold, and a ball and chain. He is superimposed over a backdrop of the U.S. flag, and beneath him is the caption: “NOW! GO OUT AND DO A GOOD…

The autumn sun filtered through the hurricane-battered branches of Fairchild Tropical Garden, illuminating a scene of ecological and communal merriment below. Thousands of people had turned out for the Ramble, the garden’s annual horticultural festival on December 5 and 6, to celebrate the damaged Eden’s gradual recovery post-Andrew. They bought…

Legend has it that years ago the engineer who designed I-95’s Golden Glades interchange was hunted down at his modest apartment late at night by a horde of angry citizens carrying torches and sawed-off tailpipes. Roused from his sleep, the man was strapped behind the wheel of a failing VW…

Sixty-year-old Louise Blair has heart trouble, asthma, and ulcers, and she hasn’t got a single tooth left in her head. Her 64-year-old husband Frank isn’t doing any better. He’s diabetic, choked with emphysema, fragile after two heart attacks, and he doesn’t trust his numb legs to take him beyond the…

Of all the images that capture the horrors of Hurricane Andrew, there may be few more enduring than those that depict the heaps of mangled metal and trash where mobile home parks once stood. But even in the days just following the storm, as residents scrambled through the wreckage of…

For those brave and unfortunate drivers who still suffer the MacArthur Causeway, the Florida Department of Transportation has some good news and some bad news. The good news: The department has finally selected an architect to design the causeway’s landscaping. The bad news: You won’t see a tree until the…

Officer Carlos De Varona of the Miami Beach Police Department already had followed the speeding Ford Explorer a mile across the MacArthur Causeway when he radioed headquarters. “He’s westbound,” he told the dispatcher as he slalomed his marked cruiser through the dense lunchtime traffic on September 22. “I don’t know…

Anywhere else in Miami Beach, the black-and-orange poster advertising roasted duck would be just another brash entreaty to passers-by with a penchant for poultry. But on the front of the World Famous Chicken Factory on 41st Street, the sign is evidence of a territorial war. Another sign is plastered less…

There are only two places where eight-year-old Keaudra Weatherington feels safe: behind the locked door of her apartment in a rundown and barren Liberty City public housing project, and among the flora and fauna of an abundant tropical ecosystem she helped build in the courtyard of Charles R. Drew Elementary…

After Hurricane Andrew paid its battering visit, a few vendors managed to straggle back to the Coconut Grove Farmers Market. The Thai family returned to sell their tofu and shrimp fritters. The masseur came, too. Likewise the incense seller, the Zen baker, and the tie-dyer. Hunkered beneath makeshift tents and…

He was a down-on-his-luck youngster facing a bleak future when the scouts found him in eastern Iowa, running with the wrong crowd. Beneath his rough exterior, they detected a courage and dignity that couldn’t be taught, the instinct and poise of a born champion. So they decided to give him…

Swamilike, the man they call Tomato Richard is seated peacefully in a folding lawn chair beneath an oak tree in Coconut Grove, his thin legs crossed so tightly they’re braided, a flip-flop dangling from bony toes. He’s holding forth in his crackly tenor about the spiritual pleasures of the farmers’…

An unsettling stillness has befallen the Miami coast. Swimmers have abandoned the beaches of Key Biscayne and Virginia Key. Sailboats and windsurfers no longer ply the bay, the marinas are lifeless, and there isn’t a fishing boat in sight. Rotting fish and natural sponges clog the shoreline from Coconut Grove…

It was another lesson in imprudence, taught in this tortuous miasma of hucksters and schemers called South Florida. And everything seemed so legitimate. Here were two smooth-talking guys wielding the name of Mickey Rourke like a magic wand, putting in a last-minute order for a pair of boxing trunks and…

Sometimes a harrowing screech precedes the collision. Sometimes there’s nothing except the sudden, wrenching explosion of metal meeting metal and the disconcerting rain of shattered windshield glass. So say those who work near the intersection of SW Seventh Street and South Miami Avenue. Anyone who travels regularly through that doomed…

As you head over the apex of the Intracoastal Waterway bridge on the MacArthur Causeway and swoop down across Watson Island in your rented Chrysler LeBaron convertible, top down and gleaming white, it no longer matters that you haven’t slept a wink since leaving home in Birmingham, England, 21 hours…

It’s early afternoon, only hours before the opening bash at the newly restored Marlin Hotel on Miami Beach, and the place is alive. The traffic outside on Twelfth Street backs up behind semi-trucks unloading sound and stage equipment, and young, suave workers from Jamaica, Britain, New York, and Miami bustle…

The late-October sun was still asleep as Lawrence Allen and Tania Figuerola set out for the Keys and talked about things that only lovers know. They discussed their relationship, how in a giddy seven months they had reached profound depths of intimacy usually reserved for characters in romance novels. And…

On February 1, readers of the Miami Herald learned that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee had made a public appearance in one of Dade’s most beautiful parks. An extraordinarily public appearance. “Two Metro-Dade police officers reported finding Albee, 63, naked in Crandon Park on Jan. 19,” read the story, filed…

Crack all the jokes you want about household engineering and inefficient repairmen, but Irving Spiegel isn’t laughing. For three years, he and his employees at Mirror Poster Printing in downtown Miami waded through shoelace-deep effluent while a procession of bumbling Metro-Dade and private plumbers continually unclogged their commodes. The problem…

In the dimly lighted courtyard of the Bayside Motor Inn on Biscayne Boulevard, newly arrived Haitian refugees cluster in doorways and against walls, speaking softly in Creole. Mona Coicou wanders through the shadows from room to room, looking for her sister, once a judge in Port-au-Prince. “I spoke to her…

If there was ever a test of your sobriety, manual dexterity, and trust in others, it’s launching yourself onto Dade’s unsympathetic roadways astride a bicycle. As any cyclist new to Miami finds out soon enough, this ain’t Holland. In fact, one need only look at the area’s fatality and accident…