At long last, Part 4!
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Miami Beach, Florida... It's a city that ought to be a pilgrimage site for anyone with any interest whatsoever in Art Deco. It's also a city that has interesting ties to the city where I live, and where I was born. You see, the developers who erected the fairy castle that is Miami Beach had made their intentions to turn Asheville into a "summer Miami" explicitly clear... until a hurricane in 1926, followed by the stock market crash in 1929 ended
that little scheme by wiping out the investors' and developers' fortunes. Nevertheless, Miami Beach ended up with the biggest collection of Art Deco architecture in the Southeast, and one of the finest collections in the world, and Asheville ended up with the second-largest collection of such in the Southeast.
But oh, just think... were it not for that hurricane, the streets of my city could have looked like this but, you know, with the streets lined with pines or something instead of palms.
This is the hotel where we stayed, on Ocean Drive, and where we quickly learned that in order to actually go anywhere on foot you have to cross the street to the Lummus Park side. If you don't, you're set upon by predatory restaurant hosts and hostesses who cannot be dissuaded by anything short of small-caliber arms fire.
To the chest.
Although we ate on Ocean Drive twice, once at an Italian restaurant and once at noted celebrity chef Gloria Estefan's restaurant (I thought it was incredibly stupid to go to a restaurant just because it's owned by someone famous who has probably never cooked anything since she helped the servants make cookies when she was six), we did so knowing that we were doing so only because we were tourists and tourists are simply expected to do certain things. All the restaurants on Ocean Drive have basically the same menu, and are all probably owned and managed by the same corporation. Later we ate at the 11th Street Diner, which was awesome, but both there and at the eateries on Ocean Drive I was astonished at the large portions.
I'd figured that it being Miami Beach, where everyone is thin and gorgeous, "food" would actually amount to haute cuisine elsewhere: a charred sliver of meat the size and thickness of a fingernail clipping and an artful smear of sauce arranged to spell the Japanese kanji for "tax attorney." But no. In Miami, all the restaurants we visited served horse-sized portions of delicious food. Maybe they serve so much food because everyone walks everywhere and works it all off.
As we are wont to do when we travel, boyfriend and I played the "could you live here?" game. I rather liked Miami Beach, and boyfriend rather liked it as well although his opinion is tempered by Miami itself, which he loathes. On the other hand, I'm not sure that Miami Beach would like me much, as I retain a measurable percentage of body fat and I have no tolerance whatsoever for The Beautiful People.
On the other other hand, though, you can buy a condo on Collins Avenue for about $89,000. You can't buy a bathroom in Asheville for $89,000. Perhaps living in Miami Beach might be tolerable after all. It would require some adjustment though... I would need to walk everywhere to reach an acceptable percentage of body fat (around -15% ought to do it), and I would need to carry a slingshot everywhere I went in the event of chance encounters with Beautiful People.
As glamorous as Miami's image is, one thing they never tell you about is that due to its location at sea level and its therefore poor drainage, Miami Beach often smells like shit. You'll be walking along the sidewalk and then all of a sudden --
boom! -- you're enveloped in a mephitic fog that smells like a boiling sewer.
South Florida has an enormous Jewish population. We saw men with forelocks and yarmulkes walking along in plaid shorts and sandals (which is almost as delightful to see as when turbaned Sikhs are walking along in plaid shorts and sandals), and every night a car with a huge menorah attached to the top drove down Ocean Drive.
We visited the Holocaust Memorial. It sums up my view of human nature pretty succinctly.
The quote on the wall behind the statues says:
"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." -- Anne Frank
I am currently in school to become a forensic social worker. I have no faith in humanity because what little I did have was drilled out of me during my junior internship. Having to read the manual on what to do when a parent on a supervised visit tries copping a feel on their toddler will do that to you. As a species we are capable of horrendous things. This is a monument to that capacity.
The quote on the wall now says:
"Ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered." -- Anne Frank
This church is part of the denomination I attend. United Church of Christ represent!
I'm not surprised at the homeless population. It's warm year-round. Why wouldn't they be here? I wonder though, if Miami has to deal with many places engaging in what's known as "Greyhound Therapy" in social-work speak. It's when a city loads its homeless or mentally ill onto a bus with a one-way ticket somewhere else. Asheville gets them from California, Georgia, and Florida. We ship ours to Wisconsin. Who ships theirs to Miami?
It was weird to go sailing by the city in what amounted to a skyscraper turned on its side. It's equally weird to stand in the city and watch what amounts to a skyscraper turned on its side go sailing by.
As a reward for looking at all four parts of this series, here are several blurry photographs of Ocean Drive and environs at night.
And as an extra-super-special treat, we end with a photograph of the decorative fireplace in the lobby of the Colony Hotel. Thanks for viewing!
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