Juan Penton stands amid the debris of his ruined shop, seething with anger. Hunks of ceiling are strewn about the floor, deck chairs lie turned on end, and piles of furniture rot in the corners. The air reeks of mold, and the dust has grown so thick that Penton’s feet…
There are two protagonists in Rolando Llanes’ soon-to-be released documentary, White Elephant: There’s the man, Jose Aleman Jr., and his venue, Miami Stadium. Both spent 51 years on this Earth. Both were once handsome displays of wealth. Both are associated with some of the biggest players of the Twentieth Century…
Iron Boy Filed Under: Flotsam In the early Twentieth Century, a slender Shaolin master named Gu Yee Cheung dazzled audiences in Guanzhou, China, by stacking sixteen bricks, without spacers, and shattering them with a flick of his Iron Palm. Today Gus Rubio, who runs an expansive Kung Fu studio on…
Last night, Mayor Manuel Marono took a thin victory over candidate Marcos Villanueva in yesterday’s Sweetwater mayoral election. Marono won by just under a hundred votes…
Osama’s thug? The trial of Jose Padilla is off and crawling: yesterday, after three weeks of legal wrangling (the whole process usually takes a day), lawyers from both sides sat down and agreed on a jury. It took them a while to do that, as well. The rules were as…
It’s a posh address for the uber-wealthy, home of the Rodeo Drive of Miami and wintering spot for the likes of Viagra pitchman Bob Dole. Bal Harbour is also an unlikely home to a feud over public beach access, pitting surfer-types against mega-developers and bureaucrats…
After a few months of ragging on Miami for its pathetic/nonexistent bike lanes, mean drivers, sluggish progress, and general muddle-headedness when it comes to making the city bike-friendly, the Bike Blog resolved to spend a week posting nothing but good news. But not this week. This morning, I received an…
“Mommy, why do we cost $500?” Last Friday, a pack of sagging suburban Cuban-American couples flooded an elegantly designed cubbyhole in the Aventura Mall to pay tribute to Lladro –the famed Spanish tchotchke baron. The hand-crafted porcelain figurines are cherished from Bermuda to Bangladesh. Indeed, when U.S. forces stormed Uday…
Crew: He’s just about had it Miami-Dade school superintendent Rudy Crew was on National Public Radio’s News and Notes last Friday, a show that explores current affairs from an African-American perspective. Referring to recent disputes between Crew and the school board, NPR’s Tony Cox asked him at what point he…
The journey began at Calvin’s house. It was simply the most fucked-up house on NW 22nd Avenue. A towering sea grape tree hunkered out front. Cardboard had been stuffed in many of the windows. I wandered up to the front door where a sagging Bahamanian woman sat rocking on the…
Margo Pellegrino looked unsure about swigging from a champagne bottle proffered to her Monday morning, but she didn’t stop to think about it. Sure, booze probably isn’t the best thing if you’re planning to paddle your outrigger canoe 25 miles or so up the Intracoastal Waterway. But, what the hell…
It’s Pat! We get no end of fundraising e mails sent to us at the Miami New Times. As touching as many of them are, there’s just no way to shine a light on all of the worthwhile causes. But eleven year old Patrick Pedraja is a special case. Patrick…
Driving through the intersection of NE First Avenue and Twelfth Street, near the I-395 on-ramp, a large banner hung on a chain-link fence caught my attention. It read: Space Made Downtown Happen. “Space and this new district attracted not only locals, but also tourists from all over the world, and…
Riptide is introducing a new feature that will allow readers to ask restaurant reviewer Lee Klein questions concerning the local dining scene. Is it true that Daniel Boulud will be opening a namesake establishment in downtown Miami? (Yes.) Can you get me chef Klime Kovaceski’s palacinka recipe from the now-shuttered…
Today, from 3 to 6 p.m. the waiters, cooks and housekeepers of Fisher Island are staging a protest at the Ferry landing off of MacArthur Causeway. Approximately 1000 underlings are pissed off, it seems, that their super-rich overseers have decided not to provide them with a living wage and health…
Meet the South Beach Man Whore. He hasn’t been on the blogosphere for long, and apparently before he appeared, he was a proud resident of LaLa Land. Amid posts about receiving massages, blow jobs, and T-shirts from women that he paints to be clueless, he says: I’m thinking, “wow, she…
All Hail, the King of the Smurfs Filed Under: News Thousands of Miamians were forced to wonder this past Saturday: Why in God’s name was George W. Bush providing the commencement for a former community college in the middle of West Kendall? Commencements were taking place simultaneously at Miami Dade…
On February 11, shortly before 6:00 p.m., a heavy-set African-American man clad in a Department of Juvenile Justice-issue black and gray uniform wandered through a near-deserted common room at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in the Florida panhandle. The bespectacled guard, identified by DJJ as 23-year-old Alvin Speights,…
Sweetwater, Florida was founded by a band of Russian circus midgets just before the outbreak of World War II. Hoping to transform their patch of lush swampland into an international midget haven, they threw up a handful of tiny houses and planted vegetables. Floods and wartime belt-tightening put the kibosh…
Early one afternoon in June 2003, a bushy-haired, 28-year-old sergeant from Miami sat down on the hard floor of a steamy, furniture-less room in Ar Ramadi, one of the most dangerous locations in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle. The space, on the second floor of the city’s government center, had been previously…
When’s dinner? We didn’t give Johnny Vinczencz a very enthusiastic welcome back in our review of Johnny V South Beach, but that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate his long-time, big-flavored contributions to our local dining scene. After all, since the mid-1990s the man has been boldly going where no chef…
Miami’s recent explosion of murders among black youths is about to go prime time. CNN recently took an interest in Queen Brown, host of “What’s Going On?”, an anti-violence program Sundays at noon on WTPS-AM 1080. Brown started the show after her 24-year-old son, Eviton, died this past October when…
