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Best Magic City Icon

Bank of America Tower

The array of lights illuminating the 47-story Bank of America Tower quite literally provides a beacon in a city that too often seems to lose its way. Public officials are hauled off in disgrace at an alarming rate. Racial and ethnic tensions threaten to boil over at any moment. Cold-war passions still dominate civic life. But on any given night we can glance up at the Miami skyline and see the tower bathed in soothing bands of colors: red, white, and blue on the Fourth of July; red on Valentine's Day; orange and green to salute UM's football squad; icy blue with giant snowflakes at the winter holidays. We gaze upon it and instinctively our mood softens. Beyond that, the structure's history entails the kind of bumpy ride that is the Miami experience. Designed by famed architect I.M. Pei, it was inaugurated as the headquarters for David Paul's CenTrust Savings Bank in 1987. CenTrust collapsed, and Paul went to prison for gutting the institution. The Resolution Trust Corporation has sold it twice since then. Current owner is National Office Partners, which considers the building's illumination to be a serious matter. "We view this as a civic-pride thing, really," says property manager Jay Windsor. Two workers require nearly four hours to change the colored lenses on nearly 400 1000-watt lights. But one glance at the incandescent glow over a darkened Biscayne Bay and you can see it's clearly worth the effort, a reminder that no matter what else, we live in a beautiful place. Sometimes that's enough.

Best Ensemble Cast

The Laramie Project

Artistic director Michael Hall did South Florida theatergoers two favors this season. First he brought the socially relevant and riveting docudrama The Laramie Project to his stage. It was the first production after the play's off-Broadway debut. Second he assembled a troupe with the range and experience to make the production not only important theater but good theater as well. Dressed in drab brown tones, the ensemble of eight portrayed more than sixty characters, from townspeople to ranchers, doctors, reporters, and friends of Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die by two local boys in Laramie, Wyoming. With fluid and subtle transitions, these characters switched roles seamlessly, revealing an unforgettable cross section of small-town America and a staggering array of attitudes. The Laramie Project featured Kim Cozort, Jason Field, Laurie Gamache, Jacqueline Knapp, Pat Nesbit, Mark Rizzo, Robert Stoeckle, and Michael Warga.

Best Hotel

Mandarin Oriental

Known the world over for opulent accommodations, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group constructed its latest masterpiece adjacent to downtown on overcrowded Claughton Island, also known as Brickell Key. A November 2000 opening introduced Miamians to a heretofore unknown brand of low-key luxury. More than $100 million was spent on the wedge-shaped building, which includes a serene lobby accented by elegant bamboo trees, 329 expansive rooms decorated with modern furniture and plush fabrics (bamboo floors in suites), bathrooms covered in Spanish marble, and balconies that overlook Biscayne Bay, the Atlantic Ocean, or the Miami skyline. Add to that a state-of-the-art gym, a charming swimming pool with Jacuzzi, a lush full-service spa, the splendid restaurant Azul, and the more-casual but equally enticing Café Sambal. Rates that range from $550 to $4000, and recent guests Spanish rulers King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia suggest a stay that few simple folk can afford except in the off-season.

Best Farmers' Market

Coconut Grove Farmers' Market

The operative word is organic. This is the place to find it fresh and in a pleasant, natural setting. Cactus fruit and mustard greens, rutabaga and nectarines. Flax seeds and bee pollen to lift you up. Rows of tight green asparagus bundles, Brussels sprouts and broccoli. A rainbow of peppers like you won't believe: purple, green, red, yellow, orange. Fantastic mushrooms: oyster, portabello, shiitake, and crimini to name a few. Fruits to fit your moods. A variety of oils, butters, and freshly baked breads. Perfectly reasonable prices and a diligent staff of Birkenstocked twentysomethings to offer a helping hand. What more could you ask for?

Best Theater For Drama

Coconut Grove Playhouse

What made Coconut Grove Playhouse stand out this season is the same phenomenon that made the birth of the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup a hit -- the pairing of two things that normally don't go together. In this case two kinds of theater: the big-name, high-profile stars and full-scale productions the mainstage puts on, and the more intimate and diverse productions found in the Encore Room. This season each produced an outstanding show: Art and A Bicycle Country. Yasmina Reza's award-winning Art took satire beyond the limits of comedy into the hilarious drama of the human heart and its feckless sidekick, ego. The excellent acting and superb script transformed the Playhouse's mainstage into a blank canvas redolent with the gradations of comedy and drama essential to interesting theater. Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz made his Miami debut of A Bicycle Country, and the Encore turned out to be the perfect space for three balseros adrift at sea. The Encore's theater-in-the-round staging for the set heightened the sense of confinement, especially in the second half of the play, when the stage becomes a makeshift raft. (Set designer Steve Lambert used a hydraulic system to rock the stage as if it were on water in a subtle yet effective visual device.) While the playhouse has been teaming up its mainstage and Encore Room for at least a decade now, this season hit an especially winning combination.

Best Eligible Bachelor

Dan LeBatard

A repeat victory for the no-longer-so-boyish Herald columnist, who last won this award in 1996, following his arrest for disorderly intoxication at Johnny Rockets restaurant in Coconut Grove. (Charges were later dropped.) Five years later the still-single sportswriter has joined George Clooney, Derek Jeter, and Matt Damon as one of People magazine's "100 Most Eligible Bachelors." In the magazine LeBatard squats over a pool table and admits he's "never been in love." People made no mention of "I Am the Hunter," the notorious 1800-word essay LeBatard wrote for Cosmopolitan in 1997. "Men like me travel in packs, pursuing perfume, and we find the chase more intoxicating than everything after it," LeBatard admitted. "We dabble in relationships for the same reason we dabble in hunting: There's an incomparable rush wrapped in the search and discovery. But then, when the last bullet has been fired and the gun is spent, when the conquest is complete and the game is done and we get to see what we've done close up, all that remains is the blood and the smell and a mess to clean up. Doesn't mean we won't go hunting again, mind you. We drink after a bad hangover, don't we?" Hard to believe the guy hasn't found a mate.

Best Reading Series

Writers on the Bay

For more than fifteen years, the creative-writing program at Florida International University has been producing one of the more lively and interesting reading series in South Florida. Housed at the North Campus of FIU, the series runs in the spring and fall of each year and is free and open to the public. Among the authors who have recently attended are the distinguished poets Maureen Seaton, Rebecca McClanahan, and Lorna Goodison, and novelists Bruce Jay Friedman, Miles Harvey, and Andrea Barrett.

Best Hasty Retreat

Joe Carollo walks out on Haitian legislator

Many politicians, hoping to impress an increasingly influential voting bloc, attended the March 10, 2001, Fanm Ayisyèn Nan Myami (Haitian Women of Miami) fundraising banquet at a local hotel. Miami Mayor Joe Carollo was scheduled to award a key to the city to the featured speaker, Marie St. Fleur of Boston, the nation's first elected Haitian-American state representative. St. Fleur is a forceful advocate of programs to combat domestic violence and protect battered women. At the banquet St. Fleur spoke at length on the subject, at one point invoking Eleanor Roosevelt's words: "A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water." And on St. Fleur went, oblivious to the controversy surrounding Carollo's recent arrest for allegedly hitting his wife -- with a tea canister no less. Although the mayor's staff later denied that Carollo's next surprising move was prompted by St. Fleur's words, he suddenly arose well before she had finished her speech and left the banquet room, key to the city and all.

Best Tour

The Mystery, Murder, and Mayhem Bus Tour

If you're gonna build a city in a swamp, expect slimy creatures. In Miami we actually import them. Mobsters, murderers, mayors -- it's just part of the attraction for tourists. Two or three times each year historian Paul George takes a lucky group on a bus tour to visit some of Miami's most infamous ghosts. He packs a lot in three hours around the city and Miami Beach, but still doesn't come close to fitting it all in. There was the time in 1895 when Sam Lewis went on a murder spree in Lemon City. A hundred years later developer Stanley Cohen was murdered in Coconut Grove by his wife's hit man. Famous mobster Meyer Lansky used to walk his dog along Collins Avenue. In 1968 developer Robert Mackle dropped a $500,000 ransom from the bridge leading to Grove Isle in Coconut Grove, this in hopes of freeing his kidnapped daughter, who had been buried alive. Andrew Cunanan committed suicide in a Miami Beach houseboat after murdering Gianni Versace. The assassination attempt on FDR in Bayfront Park. The notorious River Cops stealing drugs and leaving bodies in their wake. The list goes on. Call the museum for more information. Reservations are required, and seats go fast.

Best Conspiracy Theory

Miami actually is controlled by a secret cabal of gay Cuban men known as Los Pollos Tropicales. (All right, we made up the name, but we're pretty sure about the rest of it.)

Best Of Miami®

Best Of Miami®

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