(This article was originally published in the Miami Herald Real Estate Section, 1990)
MIAMI'S RIVER WAREHOUSES WILDLIFE MINGLE ON THE UNLOVED AND NEGLECTED WORKING WATERWAY
From Biscayne Bay, the city skyline is small and understandable, distant, beautiful, like a postcard. But to be on the river in downtown Miami is to be swallowed up, immediately and without recourse. At the mouth of the river, the city crowds in high-rise clumps: offices and bank towers of striking scale to the narrow, modest river. The Miami River is a poor man's port, where rambling, flaking, messily packed freighters amble away to Third World countries. A sewer. A grave. A place to stash contraband. And, in a few neighborhoods, a place to call home. The river is eclectic, unpredictable and messy like a creature that has evolved, as if in a time warp, beside a sleek, new city. "Sections have evolved as personalities," says Teo Babun, chairman of the Miami River Marine Group, an alliance of shipping and terminal operators and boat yard owners. Yet the Miami River remains largely unknown and unloved by the city that surrounds it. Public parks along its banks have been virtually abandoned by residents who fear crime and isolation. River businesses and city planners now want people to return to the river, the city's birthplace.
Some plans in the works: * Increasing public access and water-related uses in parks and city-owned lots with landscaping, benches, marinas, and possibly restaurants. * Cleaning the river with a multimillion-dollar dredging plan by the Army Corps of Engineers that would remove toxic sediments lining the river bottom. * Preserving a river walk along the north bank, near the mouth of the river, where high-rise offices are proposed for a key parcel bounded by Interstate 95, Southwest Second Avenue and Southwest Second Street. This river-front property is owned by Florida Power and Light.
There's one catch in all these plans: learning to love the river for what it is, grit and greenery included, a working river in a tourist town. In a city that puts a premium on ocean views and bay views, where developers carve lakes out of former tomato fields and wetlands, the Miami River -- once a crystal clear, spring-fed wild river, a place of tourist attractions and fruit orchards, the backyard of Miami millionaires -- remains the city's forgotten waterfront. The river is easy to miss. It is less than five miles long. There is little public access; no wide vistas, and few neighborhoods that can claim it as their own. "We don't have a malecon, a shore drive," says Jack Luft, Miami's development director.
"The city has viewed the waterfront for the first 100 years as an economic resource and used it that way. It's far more necessary to preserve and maintain the active, working areas of the river than to carve in open spaces." While Miami's urban planner Joyce Meyers is working on ways to improve and encourage public access, she said the city's policy is to protect the fishing, boat yards and shipping industry that are already there. "Every single, zoning district in the city is found somewhere along the river," Meyers said. You can't consolidate it. You can't change it. Most businesses have been there for years."
Armando Arrellano, sponge fisherman on the river for the last 29 years, runs his business near Lummus Park downtown in a part of the river scheduled for redevelopment. "Ese perro me ha mordido muchas veces," Arrellano says. "I've heard all that before. It will never happen." More than 800,000 tons of cargo, valued at more than $2 million, leave the Miami River each year, bound mostly to Latin America and the West Indies. A city of Miami economic study reported in 1986 that businesses along the river employ about 7,000. Yet for all that activity, the river's remaining wood frame homes, decaying boat yards, and Caribbean freighters stashed with oddities like mattresses or window frames give it an erratic and worn look. It's a look that surprises in a city that likes to whisk its history away with bulldozers.
For Don Gaby, a retired meteorologist, Miami pioneer and river historian, this rawness is the best-loved, most remembered and surprising thing about the Miami River. "Remember the River Cops case? Right off that boat. That's where they found them," Gaby says, referring to the floating bodies found near the north shore of the river. Most river promoters don't want to remember the River Cops, where three men drowned after jumping off a boat at Jones Boat Yard during a police raid. Eight Miami policemen were involved in the theft of 400 kilograms of cocaine being offloaded. The incident became infamous as the River Cops case. But sordid crime, petty crime, the Gertie Walsh bordello frequented by politicians in the 1940s, rum-running, drugrunning, illegal aliens and illegal cargo are all part of the lore of the Miami River that Gaby and others love.
Gaby also knows the lure of palms that grow thickly like a forest at Sewell Park, that sea gulls fly over the river each morning and evening, where manatees like to swim, and how barnacles disappear upriver where the water is sweeter and mollusks live. The retired meteorologist has written a guide to the river available from The Historical Museum of Southern Florida. Spring Garden is a neighborhood for people who love the river. It is almost an island, bordered on the south side by the Miami River, on the east by the Seybold Canal, connected to the city by Northwest 11th Street and a small yellow bridge on Northwest Seventh Street. There are about 200 homes spanning the decades of Miami's architectural styles. Its isolation is why the trees are taller here, wider and wild. And why the people who live here in houses as old as the city say they would never want to leave.
"You have to understand, I feel like it's out in the country," says Carol May, who lives in Spring Garden with her husband Jack in a 1926 home shaded by live oak trees. Like Spring Garden, the residential neighborhoods that line the river are, for the most part, modest. The luxury developments that rise on grander vistas of the bay and ocean have bypassed the modest, working Miami River. And yet, to live on the river's edge, or on a boat, is to live in another Miami. The air seems to flow softer, cooler. Here, the palms that never got in the way of newer developments have been allowed to grow older, with some grace. Celeste Goerlach lives in one of the oldest homes on the Miami River, the Burdines mansion, built in 1923 on the south shore in what was known then as Grove Park. The home was built for Roddy Burdine, son of the founder of Burdine's Department Store in downtown Miami. The home was built with the river in mind, on a ridge overlooking the water. Palladian-style windows line the back porch for a sweeping look at the river and today, the pilings of the Interstate 836 expressway. No matter. "I just pretend those are ancient Greek columns," Goerlach said.
But Goerlach is one of the few city residents who enjoys the river. "The only time people are aware of the river is when they're going over a bridge," says T.O. Sykes, owner of the Big Fish restaurant on the south bank of the Miami river. Though the high-rises of Brickell Avenue tower over the Big Fish, Sykes' open-air restaurant remains distinctly anti-Brickell: hand-made, rough, gritty like the river. "Our waterfront developments haven't done well," Sykes said. "They try to make it look too apple pie. Everything looks the same." There are few restaurants on the Miami River. This is not by accident. Until 1955, the Miami River was this town's sewer.
"There were no restaurants because the river stank so much," Gaby said. Though today the river doesn't stink, its waters are dark. A shiny, oily film seems to float on it, reflecting the sun, the buildings, ships, trees, all with amazing clarity and vivid coloring, like black glass. The river is very polluted. "It's nasty," said Sarah Bellmund, project manager for Biscayne Bay Surface Water Improvement and Management plan for the South Florida Water Management District office in West Palm Beach. Bellmund monitors the river water quality because, as the river goes, so goes Biscayne Bay. Everything in the river eventually flows out to the bay, affecting reefs and people who use the bay's waters, Bellmund said.
As for the river: "I don't even like to touch the water." Despite the fish and birds and manatees that live here, years of oil spills, industrial and upstream farm uses, storm water run-off and sewage overflows have combined to make the river an environmentally dangerous waterway, scientists say. Mercury, arsenic, cadmium, nickel, zinc and hydrocarbons pollute sediment on the river bottom. Sewage spills result in high levels of coliform bacteria, from human waste. Levels measured in the river are two to five times higher than health standards permit, according to the Dade Environmental Resources Management department.
"I find it appalling that people eat fish from there," Bellmund said. Still, she says the river could come back, with better monitoring of toxic spills and improvements in the sewage system. "It doesn't take a whole lot of time to destroy something," Bellmund said. "But one of the neat things is that a lot of biological systems have the ability to come back." Which may not necessarily be said of residents. Eventually, development is "going to go based on what's needed," said Jack Pyms, a real estate broker who has a listing for 2.86 acres of land on the river front. Pyms is also the mayor of Islandia, a string of partially submerged islands within Biscayne National Park, for which development proposals are pending.
For-sale signs on the riverbank site tells a tale of two rivers: "Zoned for waterfront industrial or high-rise apartments." "The main problem is there's such a mixed use," Pyms said. "Nobody is going to put a beautiful high-rise residential building if it's next to a freight yard." For some, that checkerboard pattern of development is what makes the river. "We're very fortunate that it is still a river with character, not overdeveloped," said Babun of the Miami River Marine Group. "It's a river that still has manatees, fish and birds and beauty in spite of the fact we have ignored it."