Saturday I gave my tour of Miami – for the first time in a while – to our Belgian neighbors. We started in Coral Gables: Biltmore Hotel, where we saw a bride and groom posing for photos (pictures on Instagram), the Venetian Pool, and Books & Books. An autographed copy of The Joys of Travel still sat on the shelf, waiting for a good home.
From there we drove up Ponce de Leon to SW 8th Street. After cafecitos at Versailles, we headed down to Dominoes Park. Ball & Chain was as lively as always but the colorful cigar shop a few doors down from the Tower Theater had its shutters pulled tight. “First time I’ve seen that,” said a tour guide as he led his much larger group up the street.
My plan was to take a stroll through Brickell City Centre, but Maïthé had been there so we drove under it, then over the Miami River into downtown. Maïthé suggested a drink somewhere, so I parked in front of the Langford Hotel and we took the elevator to the roof, where the waiter was so rude, and the atmosphere so uninspiring, that we got back in the car and headed up Brickell – where I pointed out Bayside, the Freedom Tower, the American Airlines Arena, Zaha Hadid’s still unfinished condo tower, the Arsht Center, the old Bacardi headquarters – and then over into Wynwood, which gave me another beautiful parking spot right in front of Bakan. We joined the crowd at the bar and watched the sunset.
Our last stop was the Design District for dinner at Estefan’s Kitchen. I showed our waitress my photo of Gloria, who, we were told, comes by most Friday evenings. For dessert we walked up the fairytale passageway to Aubi & Ramsa, the intimate bar that sells only ice cream. I got Belgian chocolate laced with Jack Daniel’s.
Sitting on an outside bench at Sawgrass Mills is the closest I get in South Florida to feeling like the English essayist Charles Lamb, who “often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullest of joy at so much life.”
One of the nice things about living in Florida is that you can never become those old folks who retire to Florida.
Drove to Books & Books Saturday for the launch of Making Good Time: True Stories of How We Do, and Don’t, Get Around in South Florida (editor Lynne Barrett). Then drove back yesterday to hear Lyn Millner present her excellent history of the Koreshans, The Allure of Immortality.
Returning home I read in the anthology, and was surprised to find no stories about driving to Books & Books.
I generally don’t believe in curses, but I make an exception for Marlins Park.
The financial scam that contributed to its construction doomed the stadium from the start. Opening day in 2012 – when Tropicana dancers accompanied players onto the field for their introductions, and then-owner Jeffrey Loria appeared in a golf cart with an ailing Muhammad Ali – didn’t help the art-filled ballpark in Little Havana. Within weeks the manager, Ozzie Guillén, was quoted in a magazine speaking highly of Fidel Castro.
The team’s most promising and charismatic player, pitcher José Fernández, was killed in a boating accident at the end of the 2016 season. Other top players were lost in trades, even – especially – after Derek Jeter became a co-owner. Jeter messed not only with the roster but with the art, moving Homer, Red Grooms’ whimsical home run sculpture, outside the stadium, despite a letter of protest from the artist. (Granted, Jeter had already traded the team’s biggest home run hitters.)
Since moving to their new home, the Marlins have not had a winning season. Attendance this year, for the second year in a row, should come in well under a million. And that’s with new $5 tickets and “improved” food options.
This week one of the traded players, Christian Yelich, returned with his new team, the Milwaukee Brewers. He promptly fouled a ball off his leg, fracturing his kneecap and ending his season and his MVP chances. It was a wrenching moment, and it demonstrated that even players who leave the Marlins aren’t immune to the curse.
I’m still thinking about that description of Miami as “aesthetically vulgar,” probably because I find the metropolitan area stunningly attractive, both the “old” – the orange tile roofs of Coral Gables, the ficus-draped lanes of Coconut Grove, the egg-white hotels of Miami Beach – and the new: the glass towers rising along the river and Biscayne Boulevard. Its parking garages are more dazzling than most cities’ skyscrapers. (The New Yorker wrote a glowing review of the Herzog & de Meuron one on Lincoln Road.) And much of the beauty – the causeways, the palm trees, the palatial islands – is reflected in subtropical water.
Like most cities, Miami has its unglamorous sections, though one of these, Wynwood, has been turned into a tourist attraction through a proliferation of brilliant murals. Other neighborhoods, like Little Havana, make up for in interest what they may lack in beauty. A Sunday morning drive through Little Haiti will produce an assembly of elegant hats.