Audio By Carbonatix
Late afternoon at Big Q Fish Place: a time when cafe cubano used to flow freely and hungry wage earners, just off work, filled the counter stools looking for a snack. Today, though, the small riverside restaurant is empty, save for one lonely diner hunched over a lunch of black beans and rice. And he’s not paying.
He’s the owner.
“You see this street, empty like this?” asks Henry Quintero, pointing with his fork toward NW Fifth Street near NW North River Drive. “Right now it’s traffic time. But there’s no traffic at all.” Quintero’s bushy black eyebrows drop in consternation as he turns back to his plate.
Since September 1991, when the state Department of Transporatation closed the bridge over the Miami River at NW Fifth Street for repairs, commuter traffic between downtown Miami and East Little Havana stopped passing the restaurant, located on the northeast side of the river, 50 yards from the bridge. Instead, traffic has been detoured to bridges at Flagler Street, NW First Street, and Twelfth Avenue, and as a result, Quintero figures business at his restaurant has dropped off 75 percent. He’s thinking about closing the Big Q down. “It’s killing us,” he says, again gesturing toward the bridge, its halves stuck upright in a mocking salute.
It’s a measure of Quintero’s frustration that he is pondering a move even as DOT promises the bridge will be open by March. Then again, he’s heard similar assurances before. When DOT engineers announced in the summer of 1991 that they were going to rehabilitate the temperamental, 67-year-old span, they said it would take only six months. The project was scheduled to be the first in a series of bridge rehab projects on the river, and was to include the replacement of the control house, electronics, hydraulics, and electrical system.
“The project has been heavy with miscalculations, admits DOT spokesman David Fierro. “The term ‘comedy of errors’ sure crosses my mind.” Once construction began, Fierro says, engineers discovered several unanticipated problems, including cracking concrete and a deteriorated gear system. These problems required a redesign of the control house and the custom manufacture of new parts. In addition, the design firm, David Volkert and Associates, had made some mathematical mistakes in its initial plans, which delayed the project further. “We spent a lot of time — DOT, the design firm, and the contractor — basically redesigning a rehabilitation project in the middle of the job,” says the DOT spokesman. “There were a lot of things we didn’t know that we found out as we went along. The design firm could have been more thorough initially, but their assessment was in keeping with industry practices.” (A spokesman for David Volkert and Associates refered all inquiries to DOT.)
The project has been a waste of money as well as time. DOT originally budgeted $1.5 million for the rehabilitation, but that figure has increased by nearly $400,000 already. “There still might be additional claims in the mill,” warns Fierro. “The books haven’t been closed on this one.”
Bitterness isn’t in short supply among neighborhood merchants and residents, who have lost patience with DOT’s official explanations for the delays. While the work has meant a minor inconvenience to commuters, it has hurt businesses on both banks of the river. On the southwest side, Santiago Presno’s auto parts store has been in business for 32 years at the confluence of NW Eighth Avenue, Fourth Street, and South River Drive. But Presno says this is the first year he hasn’t made a profit, and adds that he has only managed to survive by hiring two relatives and paying them meager wages. Like restaurateur Henry Quintero, Presno says he may be forced to relocate his shop.
The frustration has led many neighbors to ascribe racial motives to the delay. “If this was in Coral Gables,” opines the Big Q’s Quintero, articulating a commonly held theory, “the bridge would’ve been opened already.” They have taken their complaints to local and state politicians and have maintained a steady barrage of phone calls to DOT.
If the transporatation department doesn’t complete the rehabilitation of the bridge by the spring, it may begin to feel serious heat from quarters beyond the immediate neighborhood. The construction of a new Brickell Avenue Bridge is scheduled to begin in May or June, severing yet another important trans-river roadway. An overlap of the two construction projects would overload the remaining bridges and make crosstown journeys a worse nightmare than they already are.
