Key Biscayners failed this past week in their effort to snare a parcel of Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Recreation Area, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. Indeed, at the ripe old age of three, Dade’s youngest municipality is behaving less like a toddler than like an uppity adolescent…
Eight months ago no one had heard of the Rolling Stone Rock & Roll Bowl, and I was just an obscure graduate student, a former New Times writer enduring a self-imposed five-year exile in the vast Midwest. Today a few dozen people — perhaps even a few hundred people –…
Like many homes in Cuba, the small ranch-style house off Bird Road that artist Jose Bedia bought when he moved to Miami with his family last summer is protected by what is known as the “Indian commission.” Its members, an assortment of small ceramic statuettes of braves and squaws depicted…
The brainchild of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner, the Rolling Stone Rock & Roll Bowl kicked off its inaugural run last fall with challenge exams at 30 colleges and universities nationwide. Six months later, after increasingly competitive regional and semifinal rounds, two three-person teams duked it out for the big…
On January 24, when Martha Ayerdis filed a discrimination grievance with the Dade County Affirmative Action office, she officially entered the murky waters through which sexual harassment allegations run their bureaucratic course. But not even the 39-year-old Ayerdis, who worked as a defense lawyer in her native Nicaragua before escaping…
The people have spoken. The votes have been cast. The outcome is clear. In a nearly unanimous display of love and support, South Floridians have selected “Oh My My, Where Am I A Miami” as their new unofficial, official song. “I can’t stop humming the refrain,” said one man who…
On March 24, Philip Michael Thomas, former Miami Vice star, transformed the Miami City Commission chambers into a cheesy nightclub and belted out his latest musical inspiration, “My, My, My, MI AM I.” Awestruck by Thomas’s creative genius, the commissioners – well known for their sophisticated taste in music…
From a historic old home to a string of failed restaurants to an empty dirt lot A the saga of Grove Calloway’s came to an ignoble end three weeks ago when bulldozers razed whatever memories were left of the historic Peacock House. By the time heavy equipment moved in, though,…
I knew it was going to be a good day when I arrived at 7:30 in the morning to find several hundred people already waiting in line, and the doors weren’t scheduled to open until 10:00,” says Russell Galbut, managing director of South Florida’s most prolific condo company. “It was…
Keith Wilson knows the importance of paper. In 1989, two years after he left the Miami police force to work for his father’s church, Wilson was falsely arrested and thrown in jail. His written complaint about the arrest led the county’s Independent Review Panel (IRP) to conclude that Metro-Dade police…
Earlier this month the Society of Newspaper Design announced the winners of its fifteenth annual Best of Newspaper Design competition. New Times art director Brian Stauffer garnered honors in two categories. For his portfolio of feature story layouts, Stauffer won a silver medal. A layout that accompanied a feature story…
Once hailed as the “magic mineral,” asbestos was widely used in the United States throughout much of the Twentieth Century. It was placed in ceiling tiles because of its superior acoustical qualities; it was sprayed onto beams and girders to provide greater strength and support; and it was piled into…
This past January county commissioners voted to accept the findings of a study showing that companies owned by Hispanics and women have long suffered discrimination in their dealings with Dade County. It was the first step in what some commissioners believe will lead to a series of laws that will…
In the spring of 1981 Leonid Brezhnev was president of the Soviet Union, Ronald Reagan was a newly installed fixture in the White House, and a particularly frigid phase of the Cold War was getting under way A just off Biscayne Boulevard in the quiet residential neighborhood of Morningside. Nearly…
Bob Knight is apologizing for getting all worked up, which for him means talking even faster than usual and raising his voice a little, but not in a way that would suggest he was mad. “Sorry for getting carried away,” says the botanist, leaning earnestly over the steering wheel of…
When Hurricane Andrew battered Metrozoo with some of the highest sustained winds registered in all of South Florida, the devastation was extensive and highly publicized. The storm wrought $15 million in structural damage, including the destruction of the perimeter fencing. Five mammals died, countless birds were lost. For several months…
The Hard Rock Cafe, four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon in late February. The occasion is a press conference for the upcoming Bob Marley birthday concert in Bayfront Park. Marley’s mother, Cedella Booker (a singer herself, known to her friends and admirers as Mother B), is here, as are several…
Michael H. Metzger, the controversial California defense lawyer who mounted a nationwide campaign to discredit the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami, shot himself in the head with his .357 Magnum at his home in rural Napa County on March 1. His death was the most recent bizarre twist to the…
Had Joe Gersten himself been here to orchestrate events minute by minute, it’s unlikely the Great Subpoena Caper could have unfolded more bizarrely. It seems clear, though, that Dade County’s favorite former-commissioner-in-exile hoped for some sort of incident, some type of media mayhem that would spring from his most recent…
Rodolfo Ulises Castrell is capable of evincing a wide range of emotions, from levity to rage, with only a slight change of expression. His eyes will narrow or widen almost imperceptibly. The lines of his mouth turn upward or downward into mirror versions of a gradual arc. But for all…
It’s about nine o’clock Saturday morning and the rain pounds down. Keith Schantz, manager of the Miami-based rock band Natural Causes, negotiates the cluttered alley behind the Stephen Talkhouse, parking in front of a half-dozen tattered derelicts huddled in a Dumpster shed. Schantz tries to get in the back door…
On this windy Tuesday, as Hugh Rodham has been traveling, first to Tallahassee, then to Tampa, to announce his candidacy for the United States Senate, clouds have gathered back in Miami, and not just in the sky. For a good part of the afternoon an answering machine has been taking…
