Office Depot, that seminal source of cut-rate office supplies, now offers an additional amenity: clerks guaranteed to speak in soothing syllables of good old American English. Miami’s streets may resound with a cacophony of foreign tongues, but amid the cases of paper clips and the reams of Xerox-quality bond on…
Sitting in her penthouse apartment overlooking Biscayne Bay, Terri Harris is telling the story of how she overcame fear. How two years ago, when she was faced with a sudden bout of anxiety, she fought back, regained control of her life, and now possesses a skill she wants to share…
Carlos Alves is talking on the phone in his studio, a high-ceiling storefront located in a building on Lincoln Road, just off Lenox Avenue. “You say you’re waiting for your artwork?” he chuckles into the receiver, speaking loudly over the rumble of construction activity outside. “Well great, I’m waiting for…
Most people never look past the gravity-defying police car. The one stuck, Spiderman-like, high on the faaade of the three-story building on the northeast corner of Biscayne Boulevard and 38th Street. Tens of thousands drive past it every day, their expressions betraying varying reactions — amusement, puzzlement, vague contempt. But…
With the return of “crazy” Joe Carollo to the Miami City Commission returns the call to abolish the city government altogether. Rather than relive one more episode from Miami’s dark and comical political history (Carollo and Jorge Mas Canosa nearly dueling over the development of Watson Island, for instance), some…
Two weeks ago we invited readers to help make public policy. We did it because we believe most Americans have more to contribute to the democratic process than simply punching a voting ballot every once in a while. The average citizen, we feel, has something important to say about the…
Throughout the summer, as Miami Beach officials negotiated one of the biggest land deals in city history, there were hints of unease. Hard-knuckled planners and high-paid attorneys dickered endlessly. Architectural experts were consulted. The citizenry was sounded. But no amount of discussion about development rights and design guidelines could assuage…
Fire sales are generally reliable indicators that a business is in financial trouble, whether the firm in question is a mom-and-pop hardware store or the Pentagon. In fact, weeks before the federal government shut down this past Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Defense sent out flyers to international purchasers of…
Of all the turkeys Fred Rosenberg ever ate, none tasted better than the one he carved on Thanksgiving Day, 1993. It certainly surpassed the bird he was expecting to be served in the Broward County jail, where, just hours earlier, he had been locked up, facing the prospect of a…
Next month, the January 1996 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal hits the supermarket checkout displays, and Miami’s own Isabel Cabell has never looked better. The wide-eyed, raven-haired 37-year-old is one of five winners of the seventh annual Oil of Olay/Ladies’ Home Journal “Why I’ve Never Looked Better” contest. This year…
This past Friday morning, November 10, New Times received two eyewitness reports from callers who said they had just witnessed a man dumping stacks of last week’s issue into Dumpsters on South Beach. Both callers said the suspect was driving a Mercedes Benz automobile. Photographer Steve Hlavac, a veteran New…
Every weekday evening just before six o’clock, Emilio Milian, Jr., slowly sits down in front of a microphone in the studio of WWFE-AM (670). His neat mustache and wavy gray hair combed back from a deep V hairline are streaked with white. Invariably he is dressed in a conservative suit,…
When David Letterman jokes about an alcoholic beverage night after night, something’s going on. Just what, exactly, isn’t clear — unlike the drink itself. Colorado-based Coors Brewing Company, the nation’s number-three brewer, devoted one and a half years — and a reported $3.5 million — to developing what it terms…
Like any right-thinking municipal bureaucracy, Miami tries to be fair to minority-owned companies when handing out city contracts. In fact, an ordinance enacted a decade ago (and amended four years later) requires that at least 51 percent of all city business go to firms owned by women or ethnic minorities…
It was a picture-perfect scene of festiveness, family, and sport. The sun shone and the happy crowd roared as multicolored bullets of fiberglass and steel hurtled around the 1.5-mile oval of the freshly christened Homestead Motorsports Complex. Er, make that the 1.5-mile oval of the freshly christened Metro-Dade Homestead Motorsports…
Ask Ron Book what makes an effective lobbyist and he’ll talk about “the sanctity of the information that you convey to people” and how “a good lobbyist is someone who thinks quickly on his feet, someone who is creative, someone who brings both sides of the issue to the table.”…
Talk show host Pedro Sevcec is tramping through the Peruvian jungle, camera crew in tow, impeccably dressed, right down to his tan safari vest. “It is a symphony of greens,” he observes of his surroundings, reaching for a poetic metaphor that nevertheless eludes his grasp, “here in the river basin…
In Miami, as in other cities, it’s not uncommon for at least two people to have exactly the same name. Check the phone book under Garcia, for example, and you’ll find more than twenty Fernandos and a full two columns of Joses. For most people, these duplications pose at most…
Ron Book is facing the toughest lobbying campaign of his career, more challenging than anything he ever did for Wayne Huizenga or Ralph Sanchez or Metro-Dade County or any of his other prominent clients. Book must try to sell the public on his own integrity. It’s not the first time…
Francisco Aruca sits alone in a wood-paneled room in a small, blue-gray building a few blocks off north Biscayne Boulevard. On the table before him are a few notes written out on a sheet of yellow paper torn from a legal pad and a clipping cut from the morning paper…
New Times has won twelve awards in the Florida Press Club’s Excellence in Journalism competition. The awards, for work published between July 1, 1994 and June 30, 1995, were presented on Saturday, October 21, in Fort Lauderdale. In competition against other weeklies from throughout the state, New Times was chosen…
Andrew Delaplaine, the editor of the South Beach weekly Wire, is huddled with campaign aides inside his cramped, book-lined office on Euclid Avenue, trying to come up with ideas for television ads in his long-shot race against Miami Beach Mayor Seymour Gelber. Standing at a computer keyboard in his standard…
