In a quiet, wood-paneled West Palm Beach courtroom last week, far from clattering plates and customers’ chatter, South Florida’s best-known female restaurateur tried to explain why Joe’s Stone Crab has hired so few women for high-paying server jobs. Jo Ann Bass, Joe’s president from 1984 to 1995, testified for three…
Infants ranging in age from new to 18 months spend much of the day napping in tiny cribs. Slightly older toddlers ramble to and fro with no real direction or purpose. The oldest kids — those up to five years of age — scamper around outside in a narrow playground…
In 1994 Miami-based Rodven Records issued a series of compact disc compilations that quickly began turning up in music-store discount bins and at used CD outlets, where some can still be found languishing. The discs have vaguely nostalgic titles (Yesterday … Today, Sounds from the Motherland), and homely, manila-colored covers…
The masterful fourteen-year reign of Draino, queen of the King Mango Strut, ended at 7:29 p.m., Thursday, December 19, and was handed off to Virginia Whitmore, better known as Ellen, an unemployed psychic. By all indications Ellen will be an enduring and worthy successor. Where Draino (a.k.a. Duane Sawatzki) was…
A coalition of national and state environmental organizations is demanding that the federal government more thoroughly study the potential environmental impacts of development at Homestead Air Force Base and is threatening to file suit if the request isn’t satisfied. The challenge by the fifteen-group coalition poses a serious obstacle to…
Veteran Cuban exile journalist Agustin Tamargo opens his talk show on Radio Mambi this Monday afternoon as usual, by introducing his guests, who are seated around a long table that takes up most of a small studio. First is Mario Chanes de Armas, a wiry, white-haired man who in 1993…
Scene: Two actresses are seated at a table in a theater located in a rundown part of town that is undergoing aggressive gentrification. Male artists scurry around, removing pieces of artwork from the building and contributing to the air of general disarray. The women are distraught. Their theater/art production group,…
iami is in the national spotlight again. As usual, the news is lousy. Our magic metropolis hosts millions of tourists every year, but all anyone ever hears about are the Germans who are dragged out of their cars, beaten, robbed, and run over by hoodlums. On occasion Miami’s ethnically divided…
Mark Printz kept a mistress at his rented one-story house amid the quiet loops and cul-de-sacs of the Welleby subdivision in Sunrise. Another lover lived a few doors down. His wife did not know about the latter, but she was well acquainted with the one who occupied more than half…
Captain Midnight, an irascible hermit, lives from time to time on a crumbling trawler with six yelping mutts. The captain is universally hated by his neighbors. He likes to pop up on deck wearing yellowed Fruit of the Looms and curse at novice sailors. If the sailors tack too close,…
Roughly 40 miles west of Miami, the Tamiami Trail breaks its straight-line monotony and angles northwest into the shadowy forests of the Big Cypress National Preserve. Right at that bend, a narrow, two-lane road intersects the Trail and heads south, across a drainage canal and past a dense weave of…
Over the past 200 years, members of what is now called the Miccosukee Tribe have searched, fought, and finally negotiated for a permanent home. Part of a southern band of Creek Indians who spoke Hitchiti, the tribe had migrated from Alabama and Georgia to North Florida by the Eighteenth Century…
Nurses at the Dade County Jail closely monitored the behavior of 50-year-old inmate Earl Laron Cole on November 19, 1994. He was sleeping at 7:00 a.m., they noted in the hourly log. At 10:00 a.m. he was eating. At noon he was resting. He continued to rest and sleep, lying…
The rays of the setting sun filter through a skylight in the tin roof of the Caribbean Marketplace, down an atrium past the flags of thirteen Caribbean nations, and onto the perfectly round face of Leaman Bien-Aime. “This was the central place,” the 44-year-old shopowner says wistfully, his tortoiseshell-rim spectacles…
This is a story about 55 SW Miami Avenue Road, an odd wedge of property you’ll never find unless you know exactly where you’re going or you’re tragically lost. Whereas most addresses are meant to guide the navigator, this description only confuses (an avenue road?) And following directions, no matter…
A slim, handsome man with slicked-back brown hair and roving eyes scans the Miami City Commission chambers. Glancing from one side of the hall to the other, he takes in everything. All four entrances to the room are monitored, as are the podiums, the audience, and the commissioners themselves. Before…
Jesse Kennon throttles down on his airboat, reducing the engine to a gurgle and slowing the craft to a standstill. The sun is masked by a layer of gray-white clouds, and the Everglades unfurl on all sides, vast, inscrutable, and serene. “There’s Romeo,” Kennon announces, waving at a giant alligator…
This is their haunt in Babylon, under the palms, oaks, and mango trees. Five years ago they formed a small Sunday group at lush Alice Wainwright Park just north of Vizcaya, but for the past four years they’ve congregated here at Peacock Park, a block from CocoWalk, to picnic, pray,…
Of all the stories the Miami City Cemetery can tell, very few involve ghosts. Yes, it’s the final resting place of some of Miami’s most fabled founders, but civic matron Julia Tuttle is rarely seen rising from her grave. Dr. James Jackson, namesake of the hospital, makes no clandestine crypt…
On March 23, 1996, Raul Castro addressed the 225-member Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, reading a report from the party’s politburo that stated, in part, “We are maintaining, and we will continue to maintain, that a press which is genuinely free is that which serves the liberty of…
The appearance of filmmaker and social commentator Michael Moore at the Miami Book Fair International this past Sunday was supposed to be his second South Florida trip this month to promote his book Downsize This! Random Threats From An Unarmed American. His first appearance, at a Borders bookstore in Fort…
At first glance the building at 805 Fifth St. didn’t look like much. A tidy little edifice, Spanish Mediterranean in design, but anomalous amid the Art Deco splendor of South Beach. To historians, though, it was something grander: a modest but important symbol of Miami Beach’s early commercial history, a…
