Donna MacDonald’s first day as executive director of the Miami Coalition for the Homeless was a harbinger of events to come. She assumed the post on Monday, August 24, 1992 — the day Hurricane Andrew propelled homelessness to new proportions in Dade County — and promptly faced her first crisis…
About 100 residents of the James E. Scott Homes gathered last Monday in an auditorium near the Liberty City housing project to discuss how they might avoid eviction. Most lived with relatives who had been arrested for serious crimes, thus violating their lease agreements with Dade County’s Department of Housing…
To celebrate completion of the $224 million expansion of downtown Miami’s elevated transit system — the Metromover — county officials in late May threw open the gates: free rides for everyone until September 30. The penurious and the curious alike have had a chance to experience the high-tech, automated system…
A few years ago a small North Carolina cable company launched a bold experiment in television. For the first time in broadcast history, viewers were provided with around-the-clock coverage of…a fish tank. A fish tank, in point of fact, full of fish. Though FishTV received little critical acclaim (none, actually),…
A group of bare-chested green men with African features and leaves for hair are gathered together in a large, unfinished island landscape propped against the wall in the back room of Edouard Duval-Carrie’s Miami Beach house. Palm trees line the lush, painted shoreline, their slim trunks positioned in a row…
The news filtered through South Florida’s environmental community like polluted runoff into the Biscayne Aquifer. Mary Williams, the top state-level environmental official in the region, was being transferred to the home office in Tallahassee. After nearly two years as director of the southeast district of the Florida Department of Environmental…
Earlier this month Joe Duffey, director of the U.S. Information Agency, sent Congress a copy of his long-awaited report about TV Marti. It was Duffey’s recommendation that Radio Marti’s sister station, designed to beam news and entertainment programming into Cuba, should remain on the air. In itself the recommendation wasn’t…
Art Teele wanted agenda item 6(A)9 dispensed with, and quickly. While his colleagues on the Dade County Commission shuffled through papers at their June 21 meeting, the chairman was already calling for a vote on the item, which authorized the commission to award a five-year, $35 million security contract for…
On February 12, 1968, hometown fans at Sabina Park in Kingston, Jamaica, upset with an umpire’s call in a sporting match between the West Indies national team and a visiting squad from England, express their outrage by launching beer and rum bottles onto the playing field. Ignoring appeals by both…
To the untrained eye, cricket looks like a lot of standing around. Which it is. But it’s more. It’s a lot of standing around with a purpose, the purpose that links all competition: to pummel the opposition. Cricketers just happen to do this for the most part with their hands…
The eighth item on the agenda at this past month’s meeting of the Metro-Dade Community Relations Board regarded the touchy subject of business cards. Seated around a long, narrow table in a cramped Government Center conference room, the 26 board members learned that it is against county policy to distribute…
Cable-TAP invites you to produce community programming,” teased a flyer distributed to nonprofit and educational groups around Dade County. To the operators of the Miami Beach-based Alliance Film and Video Cooperative, Cable-TAP’s offer of airtime for a TV series seemed like the ideal opportunity to showcase the work of local…
For more than a year basketball fans have fretted over whether the Miami Heat will remain downtown when their lease with the Miami Arena expires in 1998. Heat management claims the arena, built for the franchise six years ago at a cost of $46 million to city taxpayers, is not…
Lost amid the sordid tales of sexual harassment are the other allegations about Larry Hawkins now under investigation by the Florida Commission on Ethics. Though less sensational, they are just as revealing. Perhaps the most serious of these involve Hawkins’s former employment with Seitlin & Company, a local insurance firm…
Nearly 70 years ago, when it was built, the small red cottage on NE 89th Street was a well-to-do child’s toy, a playhouse constructed by a father as a gift for his nine-year-old daughter. Next week a wrecking ball is slated to turn it into a back yard. “After twelve…
David Ruffner figured his new tattoo would displease his dad, a conservative tax attorney with an office on Brickell Key Drive. So for six months the seventeen-year-old Palmetto High School senior endeavored to keep the oozing five-inch skull on his right shoulder blade a secret. It made no sense to…
About a month ago, during a wide-ranging, three-hour interview, Dade County Commissioner Larry Hawkins spoke about allegations that he had sexually harassed a woman who worked for Vietnam Veterans of America. Until recently Hawkins had been a member of that organization’s board of directors. Paula Ramsey, the San Francisco woman…
You know the girl is dead meat as soon as she shows up on-screen. Even before the swarthy killer’s ominous theme music kicks in, before he skulks (dragging his bad leg) into his victim’s cheap Miami Beach motel room, before she starts to scream and he falls on top of…
An ever-growing beast lurks deep within the Miami-Dade Public Library’s main branch downtown. Hatched there in 1986, it has been pulsing with life ever since. But while the creature dwells within the walls of the library, it is not of the library. The creature has a name. It is the…
Even fishing gets old. But this was a new one on me. “Bro, I just caught a 30-pound fish, about three feet long, using a blueberry for bait in the lake by the horse track.” Of course it was Zap talking. I searched my memory. Had I ever fished at…
It’s always a privilege to see a great performer at the peak of his form. Those who have witnessed Baryshnikov dance or Michael Jordan defy gravity on his way to the hoop understand this, and the experience remains permanently etched in their minds. Here in Miami, connoisseurs of another endeavor…
In the Big Time Productions studio space in the old Paris Theater on South Beach, two trendily clad girls are scampering around on a scaffold, lip-synching the backup vocals of “Money Makes the Monkey Dance,” the first track on Nil Lara’s soon-to-be-released four-song CD. The models are accompanied by a…
