The heart of Miami

[Photo: Jeff Greenberg] Fairchild Tropical Garden

By HERB HILLER

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 1, 2001

Some visitors may be more concerned about its soul, but Florida's waterfront jewel has more to offer than notoriety. Just ask its civic saviors.

Vision keeps trumping reality in Miami, despite the scandalous headlines:

Versace assassinated at the gates of his palace. City swept by waves of corruption. Men in their bulging underwear (nothing else) gyrate atop public bars. Prostitutes strut the boulevards.

Sodom and Gomorrah?

Maybe, but G-rated dreamers, like everyone else seized by Miami's beauty, keep redeeming the city.

In the face of ruin, it's this swerve toward redemption that makes Miami compelling. A game of chicken played for the city's soul and economy that gives the place an edgy cachet, a sexy notoriety unmatched by any other place in Florida. Grown-up tourists love it. It is real life as theater in this most self-absorbed of cities.

Tracing its visionaries provides a virtual tour through Miami. First stop: Staten Island, 1874.

In the teeth of a freezing gale, boat builder Ralph M. Munroe looks out his waterfront window. In the harbor, the sloop Ava is pounding on hull-splitting debris. Munroe heroically rows to the distressed vessel, climbs aboard and brings Ava and her crew of three to safety. For this bravery, Ava's owner invites Munroe to a place in Florida called Jack's Bight.

Three years later, Munroe arrives aboard Ava from Key West. In South Florida, the memories are fresh of warring Seminoles and of cruel wreckers who lured coastal freighters onto reefs in order to ransack their cargos. At Jack's Bight (which Munroe later renames Coconut Grove), he finds the place to carry out his Emersonian vision of starting civilization over again in wilderness:

He creates a community that lives off the land and off winter visitors who sample "the Grove," a form of early ecotourism.

Though Coconut Grove was incorporated into Miami in 1923, for more than a century its human scale, its leafy character, its love affair with bicycles and leisure style have made it a favorite place for locals and tourists to mix.

Weekend events in big, grassy Peacock Park still beckon the Frisbee set. Cafes and plant shops attract crowds to wide sidewalks. The village has acquired a glitzy patina, but residential lanes still curve around coral rock walls topped by umbrella trees and spiky bougainvillea.

The above-ground Charlotte Jane Memorial Cemetery and the Bahamian-style houses recall the island origins of 18th century settlers. June's Goombay Festival is one of the largest African-American galas in the nation.

Munroe's 1891 Biscayne Bay home is on 5 acres of hardwood designated the Barnacle State Historic Site. Munroe built his one-story house and then enlarged it to two stories about 1908. It is open to the public. In a glass case is the brochure that Munroe composed for an adjacent property he ran as a cottage resort.

"Insofar as possible," the brochure states, "the hotel atmosphere is eliminated."

Deco vs. 'dozers

Munroe's successors have repeatedly rescued the city by conceiving standards to see it through hard times. Consider the Deco District.

In the 1970s, after Mickey Mouse ran off with most of the tourism cheese and left Miami contemplating rind, Miami Beach hoteliers pushed for casino gambling.

But the city ultimately followed a different course, guided by the vision of an art historian, the often shrill, uncompromising Barbara Capitman. In her shapeless dresses, she repeatedly threw herself in front of bulldozers about to knock down her beloved Ocean Drive hotels.

Who could have imagined architectural preservation overcoming greed?

What emerged, of course, was South Beach -- and a kind of urban people power that revived cities halfway up the Florida coast.

Now in the heart of South Beach itself, Lincoln Road has been reborn.

Ellie Schneiderman came along when Lincoln Road was as dead as the reputation of Morris Lapidus. The late Lapidus is the acknowledged architect of swank who, in the 1960s, redesigned the road's first comeback as a pedestrian mall, full of fountains, benches and gardens.

For years ballyhooed as Fifth Avenue of the South, Lincoln Road had succumbed in mid century when hotels opened shops in their lobbies and kept guests hostage by including meals in vacation plans. Shoes on the cheap and discount drugs moved onto the road.

Schneiderman, a potter, began installing artists in the low-rent storefronts. For years after 1985, when they opened Art Center/South Florida, the artists ran a gantlet of bag ladies and down-and-outers who slept on the benches and used the water fountains as urinals. But by the '90s, Ocean Drive's extraordinary success needed someplace to spill over.

Schneiderman's art spark flamed. And Lapidus had regained his cachet.

Hip restaurants now fill in for departed delis, a bank building from the 1920s is now a Banana Republic. Here are Senzatempo contemporary furniture, Moseley's selling linens for 65 years, Ninth Chakra, Victoria's Secret, House of Beads, a French perfume museum.

There are endless cafes, so cheek-by-jowl that when waiters show up, you cannot be sure whether they are from the Thai restaurant or the Italian one.

Also here, despite the stratospheric rents, are about 40 artisans' studios, many open to visitors, and 1,000-square-foot exhibition space, available because Schneiderman made sure the artists bought the buildings.

From orchard to enclave

George Merrick's feat was turning his family's guava and citrus groves into Coral Gables.

In his Mediterranean-styled city, Merrick created a standard so high that despite the land scams that became synonymous with South Florida for decades after, Coral Gables became a model for doing things right.

It is a city that each year spends $90,000 to buy trees, a city of liberal incentives to maintain its Mediterranean look, of restaurants equal to the best anywhere, of pampering apparel shops and jewelry stores, art galleries and, in Books & Books, maybe the best bookstore in Florida.

Prosperous neighborhoods extend south along LeJeune Road, which turns into rock-walled Old Cutler Road. A bicycle and jogging path wends past Matheson Hammock, with recreational trails into upland forest, a beachfront swimming lagoon and the Red Fish Restaurant, notable for its old coral rock building with tables by the water.

Next door is Fairchild Tropical Garden, dedicated to research, education and conservation while serving as one of South Florida's enduring visitor attractions.

Two city landmarks are beloved above all.

The Venetian Pool, opened in 1924, is that rarity: a public pool that survived integration and still attracts residents and visitors alike. Its style is quintessential Gables, quarried from lime rock, looked over by a pair of stone towers and ornamented with a Madame Butterfly bridge, Venetian lanterns, a pecky cypress loggia and wrought iron grillwork.

A mile south is the Coral Gables Biltmore, the crown for Merrick's marriage of lavish spending and classical style that has towered 26 stories above his city since its completion in 1926. It's a registered National Historic Landmark.

Fashion and emus

Two visionaries are working their redemptive magic in side-by-side mid-Miami districts.

Along 40th Street, laid to rest 20 years ago when the Design Center of the Americas opened in Dania, design showrooms are back.

Crime had sent the showrooms packing. But Craig Robins has brought to 40th Street the vision and bucks that he used to help revitalize Miami Beach after la belle Capitman. At recent count, he had already bought, fixed up and leased 18 buildings to a global roster of design showrooms.

Like the deco hotels along Ocean Drive that have become public art, so, too, have the showrooms along 40th Street.

Sleek chrome, nickel and porcelain bath designs show in the windows at Waterworks. Mansion-sized antiques fill the four-story atrium in the old T.V. Moore building. The most public of indoor spaces is Power Studios, where, behind a pair of immense medallions on NE Second Avenue, a hip restaurant and club combine with recording studios, an outdoor cinema and an art gallery.

Robins himself is installing oversized art in the atriums of his buildings. Check out the full-sized gondola raised in the form of a high-heeled shoe behind his DACRA offices at the corner of NE Second Avenue and 40th Street.

In the midst of Little Haiti is the luxuriantly tropical, 2-acre yard that Ray Chasser calls the Earth n' Us.

Chasser's haven persists less threatened by code enforcement than by a destructive beetle that arrived in South Florida with African honeybees. But here is a palapa, fountains, a tree house and a shed where Chasser works with a computer and a couple of helpers in a semi-official way to get crack houses out of the neighborhood, to teach urban gardening and to welcome tours when bus drivers don't go right past, figuring they've got to be in some wrong place.

Chasser works in below-the-knee shorts and a slightly stained, white T-shirt, with a bandanna around his head and sandals on his feet. He sports a salt-and-pepper beard and glasses -- a tropical, new age Dr. Dolittle.

All around are organic gardens, green with asparagus, purple with eggplant, fragrant with ylang ylang, healing with longue chat for sore throats.

Here, too, is a goat, dropped off by a dogcatcher, and peacocks. There is a yellow albino boa that, but for its cage, would happily embrace the mutt fowl and guinea chicks.

The female emu came after local TV's Channel 7 reported the wingless bird high-stepping around South Dade. Chasser then traded a mother goat and her two kids to a Baptist church for a male emu. The pair hang with the pigs. Chasser has not bred them yet. He makes omelets of the eggs.

Neighborhood couples play volleyball on Sundays beside a work in progress, a 54-foot-long boat hull. It is close by the four-part compost bins and great piles of chopped and stacked wood that Chasser hauls in and sells to restaurants.

He is working things out with code enforcement officials for the long haul. He expects some sort of agreement akin to that for the more orderly Kampong, an 1870s effort to copy an Indonesian village. Kampong, on the residential fringe of Coconut Grove, later belonged to botanist David Fairchild, founder of Fairchild Gardens. Now it is a low-key research facility, another of those odd assets that belie Miami's sinful image.

These days, Chasser's own sustainable environment qualifies for approval as some artful civic pride. Nobody thinks it is particularly wacko. Rather, everybody who knows him loves him.

On the redemptive side, he is sooo Miami.

Freelance writer Herb Hiller lived in Miami for 35 years before relocating to Georgetown, in northern Florida.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Contact the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, 701 Brickell Ave., Suite 2700, Miami, FL 33131; call toll-free 1-800-933-8448; the Web site is http://www.tropicoolmiami.com.

For tours of Ray Chasser's the Earth n' Us, contact David C. Brown & Associates; call (305) 663-4455 or e-mail db3227@aol.com

Worthy guidebooks to cross-reference are: The National Geographic Traveler: Miami & the Keys, $22.95; Hidden Florida, published by Ulysses Press, $17.95; and Florida, by Chelle Koster Walton, published by Compass American Guides, $19.95.

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