He’s the guy you see minding his own business down at the end of the bar at Bobby Dykes’s Tigertail Lounge in Coconut Grove, or Bill and Ted’s in South Miami, or the Falcon up on the river near the 27th Street bridge, or the Last Chance Saloon south of…
Mount Trashmore looms fifteen stories over a mangrove marsh to form the highest point of land in the flattest place on Earth.
Brian LaPointe arrived on Big Pine Key in 1982 with a single change of clothes, a Chevy van full of sophisticated aquatic measuring devices, and a newly awarded Ph.D. Specifically, LaPointe had come to South Florida to open a field station for the prestigious Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution, a private…
A panel of three appeals court judges has upheld an order requiring the City of Coral Gables to pay New Times $35,210 in attorney’s fees. Last Tuesday’s decision by Florida’s Third District Court of Appeal brings to $132,152 the amount of taxpayers’ money Coral Gables has spent so far trying…
While exploring an underwater cave system north of Lake Okeechobee, government hydrologist Clay Benson stumbles upon a mammoth fresh water spring, one huge enough to supply pure drinking water to thirsty South Florida for decades to come. But soon after reporting this coup to his boss, funny things start to…
Just a few short hours after Miami’s late-night watering holes dry up, another kind of cantina ushers in the day. From Cutler Ridge to Bal Harbour, knowledgeable boozers have been drinking free for years at Dade’s upscale jewelry stores. “The best jewelry stores all serve drinks,” explains a veteran downtown…
A few days before Hurricane Andrew stomped across Dade County, a gang of roustabouts went to work on Spoil Island #15 in northern Biscayne Bay. Using chain saws, draglines, barges, and bulldozers, they removed nearly all the vegetation from the fifteen-acre sandbar and fed it into mulching machines, then ringed…
Fourteen months after federal regulators seized Miami’s Southeast Bank, one of the nation’s oldest and largest corporate art collections still sits under wraps in a downtown warehouse. But now a new bankruptcy trustee says he wants to liquidate the 4000-piece collection using a novel strategy. Rather than sell the Southeast…
Musician Mitch Mestel loves his custom-made electric bass. Built eleven years ago, it has a uniquely curved neck and an unvarnished plainness. “It’s brown, mostly due to sweat,” says the 36-year-old New Jersey transplant. On Halloween night Mestel was playing at Cactus Cantina, 630 Sixth Street on South Beach, with…
Carl Weersing loved his apartment. For $550 per month, he and his pal Alfonso Yepez got a second-floor roost in the very heart of South Beach. The whole world passed by their sunny terrace near the corner of Collins Avenue and Tenth Street. One small concern soured this otherwise sweet…
A discreet warmth now fills the heart of every carpenter, electrician, and auto-body repairman in South Florida. Hardware merchants, lumber barons, and yacht salvagers are wearing secret smiles. But of all the economic winners Hurricane Andrew left behind, few know the pleasures of the catbird seat like Jolan Gamblin, South…
United States District Court Judge Federico Moreno gave the City of Coral Gables a spanking this past Thursday in federal court and upheld the right of New Times to be distributed in distinctive red boxes throughout the so-called City Beautiful. Since seizing seven New Times boxes and 400 copies of…
Just when zealous county and state bureaucrats thought they had all their ducks in a row last Tuesday, up popped Kirk Swing, bandy-legged homunculus, noisy organizer, ecological heretic. Swing installs large neon signs for a living but yearns for wilderness. Lately he’s taken to toting a faded snapshot in his…
In 1969 thousands of giant African snails invaded Dade County, eating lawns and shrubs, and edging hungrily toward the vegetable fields and nurseries south of Kendall. “It was nasty,” recalls Maeve McConnell, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services. “You’d crunch as you drove down the…
A Miami lawyer who is dying of AIDS has sued a physician and a fellow attorney, saying the two conspired to illegally obtain hospital records, then gossiped about his medical condition to his co-workers and social acquaintances. The lawyer, who filed suit May 15 under the pseudonymn John Doe, claims…
Last Tuesday at a warehouse in West Dade, six old men broke open a storage crate. Their lives – more than half a century of aviation history – spilled out on the concrete floor in disarray. “I can’t imagine anyone packing this stuff like this,” said Kelvin Keith, one of…
With a force-five hurricane bearing down on fictional Biscayne County, homicide detective Jeff Kohl roosts in his favorite ficus tree with the tools of his trade: a .38 revolver, a glass of vodka, a jar of pickled okra, and a Walkman loaded with sitar music. Addicted to hot peppers and…
Every newspaper vending box in the universe should be painted beige and brown, never red or purple. Each should be the same size, with lettering no taller than a matchbook. And the newspapers they dispense should show proper respect for humble servants of the public trust. Thanks to their elected…
The fishmongers murmured. The boat bums balked. Chikara Nakamura and Tatsuaki Miyaochi waved, bowed, and tied their 28-foot sloop to the fuel dock on Miami’s Watson Island. “We get all kinds of sailboats, but I can’t remember ever seeing one from Japan,” says Barbara Kiers, a cashier at Watson Island…
Hagridden by rain squalls, queasy in seven-foot seas, kayaker Randy Fine gave up his final bid to break the world speed record for a human-powered Gulf Stream crossing. His defeat at the hands of a rather bitchy Mother Nature occurred on Friday the 13th last month, roughly midway between Miami…
America’s shortest and busiest commercial river always has a tale to tell. In the earliest years of the Twentieth Century, the talk centered on the Tatums, a pair of rough-and-tumble brothers who were busy enraging Miami’s populace. The Tatum boys built the first bridge across the Miami River at Flagler…
Like the village that surrounds it, the Coconut Grove Playhouse has lived to middle age in more-or-less constant tension, its stage the locus of a long tug of war between art and commerce, spiritual ideals, and materialistic forces. For entire decades, as in the Thirties and Forties, the Spanish rococo…
