Lucali
True to its roots, Lucali is D.U.M.B.O. hip: they didn’t even bother to put in floors over the concrete substructure
Versailles Cuban Restaurant
Every candidate for national election must pass through Iowa and New Hampshire. And every candidate must also pass through Versailles. To carry Versailles is metonymically to win the favor of the Cuban exiles, a group that still wields considerable power throughout Miami. Candidates as far removed as Mitt Romney and Bill Clinton have held court there. […]
Wynwood
…A decade later, Goldman properties looked around at a hip, increasingly safe neighborhood, and said there’s gold in them thar hills: they financed Wynwood Walls, a graffiti exhibition, and encouraged graffiti artists to paint the town. Restauranteurs and shop owners routinely commission designs to cover their walls. At the time of this writing, almost every smooth surface in Wynwood has been sprayed with color…
Cocoanut Grove
The trees grow wild in the Coconut Grove (Cocoanut Grove), memorials to the wild men that built this place; renegades and scofflaws, veterans of the Seminole wars and Bahamian pirates, and maybe a snowbird or two to foot the bill. Mr. Brickell once promised the Grove’s first Commodore that “you will live to hear the […]
King Mango Strut
Imagine playing college ball in a sane world. Imagine going to normal classes, meeting normal expectations, going out on normal dates, and finding time for practice and games as part of a healthy, normal life. Imagine your friends all over the country doing the same. Now imagine that to celebrate the new year, all the […]
Parrot Jungle Trail: Half a century of giving runners the bird
For many years, in the middle of a rich Miami suburb, stood a fifty-foot statue of a parrot. Think of the great assembled bones of Tyrannosaurus Rex that loom over visitors to the Smithsonian, but now imagine something twice as tall, and in the form of an obnoxious talking bird. It is perhaps an ambivalent […]
Coral Gables
Book a window seat on the starboard side for your next flight to Miami. As you land, you’ll see a tower, rising like Proteus from the sea, that looks like it took a wrong turn on the way to Cadiz. A preacher’s son built her, chose her as the centerpiece of the city he intended […]
New World Symphony
We do, thanks be to God, have the New World Symphony, an island of sanity in a sea of aesthetic carnage.
Captain’s Tavern
A couple weeks back, I sat across the Tavern from a father and his boy. The boy was still in soccer clothes, a rash of dirt, and blood, and grass began halfway down his shin where his socks loosely lay and ran up to the break of his shorts. That was me once, sitting with […]
Art Basel
A cloud was on the mind of men and wailing went the weather Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together. Science announced non-entity, and art admired decay The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay. What passes for art in what passes for our culture […]