Yesterday I watched on TV as the Marlins won their final game of the season, beating the Phillies, a team that a week ago looked as if it might win the division. After the game, players lingered on the field holding babies, watching their toddlers run in the grass, signing autographs for fans. They looked like a true hometown team - though one that gets little attention from the local sports media - and I wished them the best for 2022.
Walking around the island last night we ran into a young woman we hadn’t seen before out walking her dog. I asked her, as I tend to do, where she was from. Judging by the accent, and her looks, I was thinking Martinique.
“Paris,” she said, and I immediately wondered why 90% of the French people one meets in the U.S. hail from Paris. Are Bretons and Alsatians so set in their ways that they can’t conceive of leaving?
At least the dog was original: a Catalan sheep dog. It was a breed we had never seen before, had never even heard of. He was an animated ball of light brown fur.
“They’re very intelligent,” the woman said in French. “They used them to carry messages during the Civil War.”
Edified, we wished the woman a pleasant evening and continued our walk.
Yesterday I wrote a letter to the mayor:
When I was the travel editor of the Sun-Sentinel, a job I held from 1989-2008, I wrote a column about the then disputed Hyde Park Market site (now home to Icon Las Olas). I suggested that, because Fort Lauderdale had no public gathering spot – outside of the beach – it would be the perfect place for one. I had just returned from a trip to Mexico, and in every city and town there had been a plaza where, throughout the day and early evening, people strolled under shade trees, ate food from vendors, chatted on benches, sometimes listened to music from bandstands. The empty lot on Las Olas, I suggested, could be planted with trees, set with chess tables, dotted with food stalls, and furnished with a bandstand for noontime and weekend concerts representing South Florida’s rich ethnic diversity. Because of its strategic location on Las Olas, it would serve as a meeting place for locals and tourists.
That didn’t happen. Instead, Icon Las Olas filled the lot, giving the city one more high-rise. Its waterfront restaurant now blasts music so loudly residents of neighboring buildings can’t sit on their balconies.
A few blocks away sits One Stop Shop, a parcel of land with great potential in the city’s most vibrant neighborhood. Its banyans and oaks are treasures most cities would kill for; to destroy them would not only be criminal, it would be stupid. (Imagine Savannah without its trees.) Turning the place into an entertainment complex would also be wrong; the city has plenty of music venues – indoors and out – and still not one place for its citizens to gather in a casually festive environment, a place where young and old, families and singles, tourists and locals can relax, mingle, eat cheap foods, and experience a sense of community. An entertainment complex is exclusive, charging admission and appealing to a specific demographic (and not all of them); an urban park is free and open to everyone. With intelligent planning, from talented landscape architects, One Stop Shop could be turned into the lively plaza I once envisioned for Las Olas. It would give Fort Lauderdale what it has long needed, and something no other city in the region has. It would be a gift to residents, and a model for planners around the country.
Watching the devastation in Louisiana I keep thinking – as I’ve done with the wildfires in California and Oregon, the smoke in Minnesota, the record heat in Washington, the floods in Tennessee, the tornadoes in Illinois, the hurricane in Connecticut – of the old song Our Day Will Come.
The sadness of neighborhood networking forums, if you’re a writer, is seeing how badly most people write.
Yesterday we went for brunch at Java & Jam on Las Olas. Our table was directly beneath a speaker, out of which hits from the ’80s blared. And I wondered: Do we need Bruce Springsteen screaming in our ears on Sunday morning? Isn’t he more of a Saturday night guy? How many waiters and waitresses are risking early hearing loss simply by working in South Florida restaurants? How much more soothing, and appropriate, would have been the Ink Spots crooning “Java Jive”?