By noon the New York Timesman was tipsy on bootleg champagne. His necktie was long gone, and he found himself stumbling up an endless flight of stairs. The whole scene was too much. Since stepping off the train in Miami two days ago, January 14, 1926, he’d been pulled and…
At least in terms of its location, there isn’t all that much to recommend the Howard Johnson Port of Miami Hotel. The view across Biscayne Boulevard – Bicentennial Park and the port beyond – isn’t bad, but nor is it anything to write home about to the folks back in…
It was the strangest sort of mass hypnosis, like Jonestown without the candy colors and the suicides. Only twelve months have passed since someone somewhere kicked sand across the line in the desert and E Pluribus Unum temporarily, tantalizingly, rang with high truth. Suddenly we were a country of drive,…
On the Wednesday in April 1988 that Kenneth E. Moore walked into his video store and asked to buy five kilos of cocaine, proprietor Sam Ferguson wasn’t hurting for cash. Ferguson had met the Delray businessman through mutual acquaintances, and for the Liberty City shop owner it was no big…
For years John Schiefer’s family took meticulous care of their prize Cadillac, a white 1973 convertible Eldorado identical to the pace car used at the Indianapolis 500 that year. The car was a gem when Schiefer’s parents gave it to him as a wedding gift two years ago. The spare…
It was members’ night at Uncle Charlie’s, and everyone was having a pretty good time drinking and dancing to the DJ’s mix of Top 40 tunes. Until about 1:00 a.m., that is, when 30 masked men burst through the door of the bar, wielding clubs. “Everybody thought they were gay-bashers…
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…
Evelyn Streiff is muttering something about her father, about the suicide he planned as a starving young lad on the Lower East Side and abandoned for a hitch with the cavalry in Kansas, back when Miami Beach was a soggy tongue of land full of critters and mangroves and, in…
For John Featherstone, the nature tours were the best part of working at Arch Creek Park. The self-taught naturalist enjoyed leading groups of schoolchildren along winding trails, the leafy brown mulch crackling beneath their feet as he’d point out the flora and fauna in the shady, eight-acre green space off…
When Miami Herald sportswriter Gary Long picked the University of Washington over the hometown Hurricanes as the number one football team in the land, he catapulted himself to public enemy number one in Miami. Long, who contributes South Florida’s only opinion to the highly respected Associated Press rankings, had the…
Lulu Hormilla didn’t even have time to panic. One instant the postal worker was dropping letters into the mailbox at a Sweetwater duplex, the next she was on the ground, fending off a Doberman pinscher that had just left permanent fang imprints on her thigh. Later doctors would tell Hormilla,…
The two women in pressed pantsuits and high-necked collars look on in near shock, tittering to themselves as Tara Solomon strolls up the steps of the Compass Cafe on Ocean Drive. Even amid the mobile mosaic of the beach-front sidewalk, the high priestess of South Beach nightlife draws stares. Tonight…
In the week leading up to Sunday, April 21 last year, a tiny notice appeared in the Miami Herald’s classified pages: “ESTATE SALE!” the ad read, “Furniture, Bric-a-brac, Clothing. 7701 Biscayne Blvd.” The address was instantly recognizable to any old-time Miamian, particularly if he were male, heterosexual, and past 50…
“Sheepish” is not a word you’d ever use to characterize Metro-Dade firefighter Douglas Jewett. During his nineteen years in the department, he has acquired a reputation as a topnotch firefighter and paramedic, but one who will step on anyone’s toes to get the job done. This is a man who,…
Pity mild-mannered Michael Wolok. Since late August the 38-year-old free-lance futures trader hasn’t dared venture forth in his rust-color Ford LTD. All his life, Wolok says, he’s eschewed such vices as caffeine, alcohol, red meat, and marriage. Now, thanks to a “bashful kidney” and a run-in with a by-the-book state…
Jack D. Gordon Democratic state senator, 35th District “The incredibly discourteous drivers in Greater Miami, especially on the expressways. The people who try to get one place ahead by switching lanes, often without signaling. I think it’s worse here and I think that it has to do with a number…
With the success of his first two novels, To Speak for the Dead and Night Vision, mystery writer Paul Levine’s future as an author seems bright. He has abandoned the practice of law, a career that not long ago earned him an annual salary of nearly $180,000, and for the…
For 26 years the hits kept coming: Requiem For a Heavyweight, The Odd Couple, A View from the Bridge, Steel Magnolias, Driving Miss Daisy, Oklahoma!, Into the Woods, Les Miserables, and many other Broadway successes headed directly to South Florida from their sold-out runs on New York’s Great White Way…
“Miami-based rock quartet Nuclear Valdez have channeled the breadth of vision, tunefulness, and integrity of their widely heralded Epic debut I Am I into an exciting and surprising follow-up, Dream Another Dream, set for a January 14 release.” So begins a November 13 press release from Set to Run Public…
The two women in pressed pantsuits and high-necked collars look on in near shock, tittering to themselves as Tara Solomon strolls up the steps of the Compass Cafe on Ocean Drive. Even amid the mobile mosaic of the beach-front sidewalk, the high priestess of South Beach nightlife draws stares. Tonight…
What do you have in mind for this New Year’s Eve? A trip downtown, perhaps, to take in the King Orange Jamboree Parade, and a stroll through Bayfront Park afterward, to dance the night away? For the better part of the past decade, the post-parade revelry drew crowds primed to…
During the 1980s, American corporate chieftains spent four times more money on fine art than did the United States government. Inspired by sudden wealth and juicy tax breaks, arbitrageurs gobbled up Old Masters, and Wall Street CEOs decked their halls with Expressionists. But today, with the New York art market…
