Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami’s Brain Matter Yes, Miami is a trash-strewn city of desperate extremes, plagued by inadequate educational opportunities, job prospects, and public services. It’s a city fragmented by racism, corruption, and apathy. But Miami is also a city of endless reinvention, a…
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami’s Brain Matter It’s the women who keep ramshackle, decaying Overtown held together as it waits (and waits) for the revitalization promised almost since the day it was destroyed. And nobody works harder or longer than the grandmothers, the elders who…
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Are You Poor? Do the Math Miami Portrait Top-Ten Poorest Cities Poverty Quiz Good Surveys Make Good Neighbors Compare & Contrast American Cities If you’re a single mom raising children under five years old in Miami, chances are you’re poor. According to the 2000 U.S. Census,…
It’s no secret that the United Teachers of Dade hates WPLG-TV (Channel 10) reporter Jilda Unruh. In the past year Unruh has aired a number of stories about the powerful union and its leader, president Pat Tornillo. They’ve ranged from exposés on Tornillo’s meddling in school district health-care contracts, to…
It started with an anonymous letter sent last June to parents of students at Florida International Academy, an Opa-locka-born charter school with a troubled past. “The Verdict Is In!!!!” screamed the letter. “Ms. Mitchell Must Be Fired!!!!” The letter went on to allege that Ms. Mitchell, the executive director of…
In 1959, the year Merrett Roscoe Stierheim moved here to work in government, life in Miami, if not exactly fair for all citizens, was at least simpler. A Long Island, New York transplant to what was then a segregated Southern town, Stierheim arrived just in time to witness the startling…
In October 2001, when Merrett Stierheim narrowly won an interim appointment as superintendent of the Miami-Dade County Public Schools despite a smear campaign heavy on ethnic politicking, he might well have been thinking, “Here we go again.” As county manager (twice) during its most trying moments, interim Miami city manager…
Two days before the Miami-Dade County school board met to decide whether to extend superintendent Merrett Stierheim’s contract or cobble together a national search before the contract ran out in October, a local real estate developer sent an e-mail to a colleague, assessing the situation. “I don’t believe it is…
Former Miami New Times columnist Jim DeFede tells me that the main difference to his opining on the foibles of this wicked town from his considerably more comfortable ($$) seat down the street at the Miami Herald is that he won’t be able to use the word “fuck” in a…
This past February 9, when roughly 25,000 reggae fans descended on the Virginia Key Beach Park for the 9th Annual Bob Marley Caribbean Festival, the only visible blights on an otherwise successful day were choked parking lots and lots of rain. But the event ran smoothly, greased as it was…
The Memorial Day hype is washing over Miami Beach like a wall of water kicked up by some distant earthquake. And as often happens when a place becomes submerged in oceans of hype, nothing is as it seems — Luther Campbell being the prime example, but that’s another story (see…
On the day the music died for Miami’s classical fans, headaches began for one radio station’s general manager. Not Mike Disney, new GM at Party 93 (WPYM-FM), the once venerable WTMI-FM (93.1) that on January 1 went and floozied itself up as a dance-music outlet to woo a younger crowd…
It’s a balmy March midafternoon in the red-hot center of South Florida’s raffish, tourist-trap debauchery — South Beach. Washington Avenue, to be precise. Club Madonna, to be even more so. Of course, the hallowed lust emporium is closed now, in the middle of the day. The mirrored walls reflect nothing…
In Miami irony is as much a part of the landscape as gridlocked traffic and palm trees. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Knight Ridder, the media conglomerate that fled downtown Miami in 1998 for new digs in California after 24 years on Biscayne Bay, is now engaged…
On a typically sweltering subtropical day in October, two pale-faced men just shy of 40 years old step off a plane at an eerily empty Miami International Airport. They note this to each other in a language unusual even in this crossroads of the world as they stroll ever so…
The ceiling in Iris Pollack’s apartment, just inside her front door, appears to be falling down. The petite redhead apologizes for the mess, embarrassed but also outraged by the peeling plaster and the water stains around the living room. “Every time it rains, the ceiling leaks,” she sighs. “I have…
The Pitch Minivans and SUVs line SW 64th Street, the quiet lane that runs past Snapper Creek Elementary School and into the heart of Kendall. The early evening is softly descending as several dozen parents shuffle in and sit at long rows of fold-up tables with attached benches in the…
Bruce and Rick Rutsky are at their table in Rose’s section at Denny’s by 8:00 a.m., clamoring for their bowls of oatmeal and bananas. The two huge, grizzled and grimy men look like tractor-trailer drivers who just rolled off the turnpike, briefly injecting color into the usual bland crowd. But…
Miami in 1955 was a young town full of gin joints, aging mobsters, scruffy fishermen, Southern gentility, a swinging Harlem South in Overtown, and a little pre-Castro Cuban flavor. It was a good time for many. Land was cheap, dreams were big, and most zoning problems were fixed with a…
Margaret Soltis pauses midsentence to choke down a bubble of emotion and look distractedly at the young man playing the piano a couple of yards away. “Sorry,” she apologizes. ““America the Beautiful’ always gets me.” The song catches Soltis at a vulnerable moment, just as she is describing the corporate…
When South Beach kicks out the last of its unwashed weekend masses into the graying light of dawn, they often drift across the causeways to that downtown Miami warehouse district known as Park West. They queue up in lines of 50, 100, or 200, eager to join the gyrating throngs…
Tattoo is sitting in his patrol car under a tree, watching small groups of kids crawling to class as slowly as ants across Douglas MacArthur South High School’s parklike campus. Seventeen acres of near-pastoral charm slapped into a lower-middle-class slice of Kendall Lakes West: “Mac South” is what the self-deprecating…
