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…
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…
In the clubs and restaurants of Miami’s Jamaican community, they still tell stories about the Mighty Viking. Stories, mostly, about his death: “He’d just been with a lady, you know, and he went to take a shower. That’s where they got him.” “The Mighty Viking — that was something the…
If there was one single issue all the candidates for the North Bay Village Commission agreed on, it was that the way to a person’s vote was through his stomach. As highlighted two weeks ago in the New Times story “Village People,” the 1992 race for votes in North Bay…
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…
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…
From the outset, this was not a routine Immigration and Naturalization Service raid. For one thing, the timing was all wrong. The three INS agents arrived at Gula Gula more than an hour before the restaurant opened. The setting made no sense, either. Rather than bursting into the kitchen to…
The street can be a risky place; movement is the only constant. So Marcia Gelbart Walkenstein took it in stride when, two weeks ago, a work crew finally scraped off the mosaic of hundreds of photographs she’d pasted on the side of a building at Washington Avenue and Fifth Street…
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…
“So many great things happened to us up there. I’m so sick of this whole thing,” laments Ken “Snowman” Minahan, the guitar-playing half of the traditional barrelhouse, boogie-woogie blues duo of Piano Bob and the Snowman. “It’s really sad that the thing everybody’s going to remember is the nonsensical stuff…
The Florida Press Club has announced the winners of its 1992 Excellence in Journalism competition. New Times received five awards in the statewide weekly newspaper division. Staff writer Greg Baker won first place in the feature-writing category for his stories “For Goodness, Snakes,” “The Rap Trap,” and “Shrimp City.” Staff…
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…
About this there can be no argument: hours after his May 1 run-in with two of Miami Beach’s finest, Roger Zayas wound up with one doozy of a shiner. Less certain is to what extent Zayas’s black eye will bruise the carefully cultivated relationship between Miami Beach police and the…
August 20 was a typically steamy Thursday in Miami, before anyone was paying much attention to a tropical storm called Andrew gathering in the Caribbean. Right on time, at 6:03 p.m., Lufthansa Airlines Flight 462 from Frankfurt, Germany, carrying 282 passengers, taxied up to gate E-23 at Miami International Airport…
When Hurricane Andrew roared through South Florida, it forever changed the way we think about natural disasters and how we expect officials to deal with them. More than six weeks after the storm, those winds of change are threatening to tear apart the Metro-Dade Fire and Rescue department with allegations…
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…
There is something cruel, and yet almost comical, about the case of Tommie Sikes, an ex-stunt man and cocaine deal maker. From his prison cell, Sikes is suing his former attorney, Alvin Entin, alleging that through a “typographical error,” Entin failed to secure for his client a comprehensive immunity agreement…
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…
There he is — the guy with the strawberry-blond mustache who tried to electrocute his own mother in the bathtub. And the nurse, now dead, who always wore a flower in her hair. The cowboy with a twisted smirk who invited preteens to his room. The sweet-faced woman whose husband…
On July 20, State Attorney Janet Reno sent a four-page letter to circuit court Chief Judge Leonard Rivkind proposing the formation of a new Youthful Offender Court. Such a court, Reno explained, would allow a judge to draw upon “a full range of adult and juvenile sanctions” in sentencing young…
Joan Green’s story of woe in the wake of Hurricane Andrew is, in many ways, sadly typical of many thousands of South Dade residents and business people. Her tropical fruit groves southwest of Florida City were ravaged. Looters then tried to steal what was left. A few miles away, the…
