This Saturday marks the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Andrew’s unwelcome visit to South Florida, a devastating rampage that traumatized thousands of families and resulted in billions of dollars in damage. For many people in Dade County, Andrew’s depredation has yet to be fully resolved. One extraordinary example of that has…
The Loading Zone in Miami Beach — with its interior walls lined with wire display cases containing leather jackets and chains for sale — hardly seemed the right setting for a clinical discussion of safe sex and HIV. The fifteen people gathered on a Monday night in the dingy light…
The half-block stretch on the north side of Bird Road beyond 68th Avenue is known as a gathering place for gay men, mostly young gay men. A windowless and signless bar that closed about six months ago is bounded by an adult bookstore on the west and a funeral home…
Allapattah is an unlikely place to find a kingdom. A mostly industrial landscape dotted with paint-chipped garages, dingy warehouses, and an endless line of pawn shops and used-car lots, the north Miami neighborhood bears the distinctive marks of urban blight, and it wears them with neither shame nor pride. It…
At the corner of NW 10th Avenue and 23rd Street in Allapattah, chips of orange- and cream-color paint litter the base of America’s Finest Baseball Park, flecking the detritus that rots there. Shards from bottles and from the broken stadium office windows glisten among the wet clothing, pigeon carcasses, and…
Insurance-claims specialist Richard Wickliffe has seen just about every auto-theft insurance fraud Dade County con men can dream up. There’s the chop shop fraud, in which an automobile owner reports that his car has been stolen after he has actually sold it for parts. There’s the car-in-a-canal scam, in which…
The August meeting of the Sweetwater City Council has been called to order in the town’s cozy wood-paneled council chambers. TV cameras are trained on the dais, where the seven council members, the city attorney, the city clerk, the mayor, and the mayor’s lawyer sit. The meeting is getting under…
During his fifteen years on the city’s police force, Ofcr. Michael Flynn has worked some of Miami’s meanest streets. But until one day in Morningside in early March, he had never had occasion to fire his gun in the line of duty. “I’ve worked narco-undercover, riots, and been shot at…
Not long after the invention of carjacking, alert South Floridians noticed another hit-and-run phenomenon: the advent of the drive-by novel and the home-invasion travelogue. As practiced by such notable out-of-towners as Joan Didion (Miami), T.D. Allman (Miami: City of the Future), and David Rieff (Going to Miami), the nonfiction version…
Award-winning artist Milton Schwartz charts the course of Western civilization on a growing sheaf of manila file folders that he keeps in a desk drawer. Each of the folders is covered inside and out with a crowded collage of words and pictures. Schwartz’s meticulously arranged constructions reveal a sublime world…
Waste Management garbage truck number 258 makes its way to the gate of the company’s Miami depot on NW Tenth Avenue, then heads loudly north toward Liberty City, hinged metal clanking, diesel engine groaning through the silent streets. Pulling into a parking lot at the Sugar Hill Apartments on NW…
You can’t blame Roads residents for feeling a bit besieged. Burglaries, car thefts, and vandalism all seem to be on the rise in this quaint residential Miami neighborhood. But for people like Miami Roads Neighborhood Civic Association president Joe Wilkins, the dawning of June 23 was cause for optimism. At…
Info: Playing With Fire That roaring inferno you see was started intentionally, and if it can be kept under control, it’ll do more good than harm By Mike Clary The wind is variable, blowing from the southeast at about six to eight miles per hour, when the state Department of…
Squat and hefty, at first glance Miami lawyer and civic activist Dan Paul doesn’t look like a man who would take on the combined forces of the Miami Heat, the Dade County Commission, and the chairman of Knight-Ridder. But think bull terrier. When Dan Paul sinks his teeth into the…
Never in the history of mankind has so little cellophane engendered so much hatred. The battleground: Miami International Airport. There, along the horseshoe of concourses, three baggage-wrapping concessionaires have been locked in bitter competition for the past year. The conflict has featured spying, public quarrels, and one alleged case of…
A concrete wall separates the four-story Arquitectonica building from a squat white workshop. On the east side of the wall, young architects in glass offices create new designs for international clients. On the west side, 70-year-old Abe Rich works alone in his half of the bunkerlike structure, 800 square feet…
For a rare fifteen minutes, on-stage at the Club Tropigala in Miami Beach, the fabulous Julio Iglesias is actually taking questions by cellular phone. “What is the secret,” one caller inquires, “of your success with so many women?” The tanned and smiling singer pauses, smoothing the lapel of his tux…
When Mike Morris woke up on a park bench the night of Tuesday, July 9, this is what he saw: Uniformed police and a contingent of firefighters boarding the Tango, a 1934 custom motoryacht parked in Slip 23 on the south side of Dinner Key Marina in Coconut Grove. When…
A six-foot-high cyclone fence surrounds the New Horizons apartments in Liberty City. At the entrance to the seven-story building, a security door is always locked. After dark many of the building’s residents, most of whom are elderly and black, stay behind their locked apartment doors. They are not afraid to…
Metro Commissioner Art Teele was at the microphone when the ruckus began in the rear of the Liberty City auditorium. An old, hunched black man, wearing terry cloth sweatpants and an untucked T-shirt and topped with an explosion of white hair and a smear of red lipstick, had wandered into…
This was supposed to be Steve Clark’s election. Eighteen months ago conventional wisdom held that Clark — the City of Miami mayor turned Dade County mayor turned city mayor — would return one more time to county hall and easily outpace his younger, more energetic rivals for the coveted and…
ART TEELE: In order to make it to a runoff, Teele’s strategy is to capture 80 percent of the black vote (45,000), 25 percent of the Jewish vote (6000), 30 percent of the non-Jewish Anglo vote (19,000), and then scrape together another four percent of the Hispanic-related groups (5000). His…
