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Written by Rebecca Wakefield
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On Sunday, a group of park lovers who want to save Bicentennial Park in downtown Miami from over-development were supposed to fly kites as a symbol of the beauty of simplicity.
When they got there, it seemed as if the city park's department had left a visual message of its own -- keep out. It was unintentional, which makes it all the more sad.
Nina West, a parks advocate and member of the City of Miami's Planning Advisory Board, was already miffed that it took her almost an hour to even get to the park from a downtown exit off I-95. Normally, on a Sunday afternoon, she would expect to get there in about ten minutes.
West made a mental note to bring up at her next meeting (again) the fact that apparently there's little or no drainage mitigation to compensate for all the new buildings downtown, thus leading to incredible flooding everywhere.
Then she got to the park and really got mad. Instead of a verdant, if sodden field, she saw a lake where no lake should be, and the remains of a vast party trampled into the mud. "The entire place was a trash heap!" she declared. "There were no receptacles, so where do you put your trash? Our event was a non-event because of the conditions."
I'd heard about this from another activist, so I went out there Sunday afternoon. I didn't see any people with kites, just a collection of homeless men eyeing me curiously as they picked through the grounds for dropped change or some other potential find.
So I called up Tim Schmand, the director in charge of Bicentennial and Bayfront parks. Schmand explained that the night before, Bicentennial hosted some 18,000 people for the 9th annual Haitian Compas Festival, the largest of its kind outside the country of Haiti.
Normally, he says, when a festival ends, the city's hired cleanup team picks up the trash cans (he says there were 100 cans out there that night), and then when everyone is gone, cleans up the entire site. "It rained thoughout the day and at midnight, the skies opened up," he said. "These are low-wage contract workers. I'm not going to say, 'Go out there and kill yourself in the rain.'"
Instead, Schmand told the crew to return in the morning to finish the job. The rain gods had other ideas, gifting us with a downpour, "of Biblical proportions."
"I feel bad," Schmand said. "Unfortunately, there's not this great tradition of using garbage cans in Miami, but we do put them out. That's basically what a facility looks like after a show. But lacking the rain, we would have [cleaned it all up in time for the kite-flying]."
garbageparkbird Now, a bit of history. Bicentennial Park has long been the object of desire for a series of dreamers and schemers who wished to make it -- something.
Originally it was a portion of land owned by the Florida East Coast Railway, Henry Flagler's company, which was lured this far south in the local lore by town matriarch Julia Tuttle, who sent the industrialist an orange blossom. The blossom's promise touched off a never-ending real estate cycle that continues to variously enrich and annoy the locals some 110 years later.
The waterfront area in question roughly extended from what is now the beginning of the MacArthur Causeway south along Biscayne Bay to what is now the Intercontinental Hotel (actually the FEC company owned much of Miami at one point, so please excuse any historical inexactitudes here).
The waterfront shifted through various incarnations, ill-fated schemes, and dredging programs. In the 1920s, a small public space that became Bayfront Park was built. In the 1980s, the city granted life to the tourist trap now known as Bayside, on the park's northern border. In 1972, a county "Parks for People" voter referendum resulted in the purchase of the 30-acre Bicentennial Park site.
In 1987, Miami was granted a national basketball franchise, and the local governments obligingly built the Miami Arena on the edge of Overtown, using public bond money and the usual promises of sports = revitalization. This almost immediately turned out not to be true, plus cruiseship magnate Micky Arison wasn't happy with the amount of money he was losing on a nascent team useful mostly as an excuse to get drunk at the 1800 Club on a week night.
Thus, less than ten years after the Miami Arena was built (and long before it was paid off), it became a white elephant. Arison demanded waterfront land to built the ultimate new sports arena, complete with more ingenious ways to make big bucks off wealthy men trying to impress their friends and mistresses. But I digress.
garbagepark1 Hoopla ensued and it's a hell of a tale, well told by various Miami scribes (most memorably by Jim DeFede, in articles with titles such as "Micky Arison is a Greedy Corporate Pig"). But in the end, the rich guys won. The city and the county concocted a deal to give the land where American Airlines Arena now sits to the Miami Heat in return for, as it turns out, not all that much.
One reason the Heat got what they wanted was that Knight Ridder chairman Tony Ridder and other corporate overlords of the Miami Herald (at the time) saw an arena downtown as part of a master strategy that would eventually include a performing arts center. Knight Ridder (bought out last year by the McClatchy Company) owned a lot of prime land in the exact same area, including the offices and printing presses of the Herald, right on Biscayne Bay.
In fact, after a generous donation of a small piece of land owned by Knight Ridder, the Carnival Performing Arts Center was eventually built right where that newspaper company wanted it, and opened last year, after astounding cost overruns. This deal was cooked up in part by a real estate mover named Philip Blumberg, who used to advise Knight Ridder on its properties. Years later, he went on to become chairman of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, and a drinking buddy of erstwhile commissioner-pugilist Johnny Winton, before getting busted in Broward County, "pale, sweating profusely and naked from the waist down" in his car. He got popped (for the second time) for possession of cocaine and marijuana.
That last bit is maybe not absolutely necessary to include, but in my twisted little mind, it speaks to the double life and hidden agendas of some private interests who seek to manipulate public assets.
Now, back to Bicentennial Park. Basically, the City of Miami has ignored and neglected this park for decades, waiting for one of these private interests to win out and take it over. At various times, the Florida Marlins have attempted to follow Arison's lead and build a new baseball stadium in the park. This failed. Carmen Lunetta, then Port of Miami director, proposed taking part of the park for a Maritime Park, but that idea died out when Lunetta was indicted for various forms of political corruption.
garbageparklake Another interest group, supporters of the Miami Art Museum, currently located across from the main branch of the county library on Flagler Street, then pushed the idea of building a beautiful new art museum in Bicentennial. The concept eventually became two museums, one for art, and one for the science museum currently located in Vizcaya digs.
This idea gained traction with the passage of two voter-approved bond issues -- one in the City of Miami, and the other in Miami-Dade County. The city bond promised $17 million in aid to the museums, while the county bond offered a whopping $275 million, assuming the patrons of the museums could raise enough money to finish the job.
A group of parks advocates are pushing the city commission to not release about $2 million of the bond money to the art museum until the museum opens its books and answers more questions about its operations and plans for the park. Most of the activists I've spoken to say that they have no problem with the child-oriented science museum because they think it's a good fit for the park and the goal of bringing families there. They say the science folk have been transparent about their plans, whereas they feel the art people are playing games to disguise the fact that they aren't holding enough cards.
bicentenial_aerial Or, as maverick developer/art collector Marty Margulies put it in a recent letter to the city commission, "The truth of the matter is that the proponents of this ill conceived art museum project do not need more time. They have had three years to raise the promised $100 Million in pledges that might have demonstrated the kind of private philanthropy required for a world class art museum."
"They need to bring to the table not only the $100 Million in pledges to kick the project off, but pledges to cover the construction cost overruns, operations and parking ? not to mention the ?world class art collection? for the world class museum they are touting. Failing to do so, their petitions and support letters are nothing but smoke and mirrors that will not pay the bills any more than the illusory pledges for the new performing art center are funding its operating deficits. Let the elite that feels we need a brand new art museum put their money where their mouths are, instead of expecting the taxpayers to shoulder the expense when it is clear that the existing museum has little or no art collection and enjoys only marginal public support."
For my money, whatever gets put in the park, it's clear that the city has not been a good caretaker in general. Other than special events, few people ever go there and it's a shame because it's quite beautiful on our waterfront.
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