Walking down Lincoln Road Monday afternoon I thought of Jeffrey Bernard, who once wrote in his Low Life column in The Spectator: “I wish the police would block off memory lane.”
It had been over a year since I’d been on the pedestrian street and I was pleased to see it was as crowded as ever. But then I walked past the building that once housed Books & Books; a little later the old site of the bustling Van Dyke Café. I even felt nostalgic for the vanished Banana Republic. Passing the large H&M store, I remembered the theater it once was, and the night it was packed for an evening of poetry from two Nobel laureates, Czeslaw Milosz and Derek Walcott. There have been many improvements to Miami over the years, but a lot has been lost.
