(This article was originally published August 12, 1990 in The Miami Herald Real Estate section)
BLANCA MESA Herald Real Estate Writer
PUBLICATION: Miami Herald, The (FL)
SECTION: HOME & DESIGN
DATE: August 12, 1990
Page: 1J
"It's official. We're leaving," said Luis Alberto Perez, who works at Macho Shoes on the Chaille block in downtown Miami. He laughs when told he's selling shoes in a historic building. "You say historic and I think of El Castillo del Morro, La Habana Vieja. This historic?"
The Chaille block buildings, constructed before 1920, are nationally recognized historic sites. They are the last remaining block left undisturbed from Miami's earliest commercial boom.
The buildings' charm is in their small scale, a covered walkway, the shops that open directly to the street. Upstairs, people escaped the heat and boredom of their rented rooms by congregating on open balconies. In the winter, a fireplace warmed a grand, central gathering room in the 1914 Chaille apartments.
This was a Miami not held captive by the automobile, a city fabric not dependent on air conditioning. Where once there were dozens of similar buildings gracing downtown Miami, the Chaille group is the last block that survives.
This month may be its last.
A 1,000-bed federal jail is planned for this site.
Tenants have been told to leave by the end of the month. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons is negotiating to buy the property.
But preservationists are still hoping the Bureau will design a jail around the Chaille block, converting store fronts and upstairs apartments to offices.
The Chaille site, 401-407 N. Miami Ave., is next to the federal courthouse and west of a planned federal office building in the 400 block of Northeast First Avenue.
The buildings are nestled against the Metromover line -- a hard edge to an even harder landscape beyond: empty parking lots framed in chain-link fences, men who roll their belongings in grocery carts down hot streets toward the hulking Miami Arena.
The Chaille site is one of three parcels eyed by the Bureau of Prisons for its downtown Metropolitan Detention Center. A costly flip-flop already has occurred with one site.
Last fall, the bureau paid $4.75 million for a one-acre site on the south side of Northeast Third Avenue, between North Miami Avenue and Northeast First Avenue. That land is next to Miami-Dade Community College's New World School of the Arts. Although this was the bureau's preferred site in October, the parcel was abandoned after a howl of community protest erupted at a public hearing that same month.
The third site is a vacant lot across from the Chaille block, on the west side of North Miami Avenue between Fourth and Fifth streets.
Lupita, the Mexican mannequin, used to spend her days chained to a post in the Chaille arcade like a sentinel to the abandoned north end of Miami's downtown. Twice her shoes were stolen. Often "crazy people" lifted up her cotton skirt. She was there to welcome people to the Taco Rico restaurant.
Taco Rico marked the beginning of a pedestrian revival in this part of downtown, said Taco Rico's owners, Yuly and Raymond Polanco. And for a while it worked. Office workers trudged north
from Flagler street and the courthouse and city and county offices for lunch. On Arena event nights, the restaurant had Arena parties. "We opened here because of the Arena Towers," said Taco Rico manager Anibal Rivero. "We intended to make long- range investment in this town."
By mid-July, Lupita was gone -- along with the Taco Rico restaurant on the corner of North Miami Avenue and Northeast Fifth Street. The owners expect to get a relocation check for $25,000 from the bureau.
The merchants who sell pink satin bedspreads, velour wall hangings of saints and cotton bandannas are making plans to leave. Their customers, mostly shopkeepers from the Bahamas, Jamaica and Haiti, will have few shops downtown to choose from once the Chaille block is gone, merchants say.
Yet it's hard to love the Chaille buildings. They are falling apart. Upstairs windows have been blocked and boarded shut, overhanging balconies abandoned, pressed tin ceilings corroded from decades of unrepaired roof leaks.
The most distinguishing feature is a pedestrian arcade, marked by columns, that runs along the street. Like many Caribbean buildings, the arcade helps people on the street survive the hot, rainy weather of the tropics.
"I don't think we would have to chain people to the front of the Chaille site" to protect the buildings, said Raul Rodriguez, a Miami architect on the city's Heritage Conservation Board. Even though Miami's history is much shorter than cities like Boston, Philadelphia or Washington, D.C., the city's heritage shouldn't be treated with any less respect, he said. "Without question, it's important to save the Chaille block."
As the last extensive streetscape left intact from Miami's earliest commercial period, the Chaille Block is a survivor in a city with little history. Most of the architecture of the pre- boom '20s has long disappeared.
"We see this as an opportunity," said Sarah Eaton, the city of Miami's historic preservation planner. The city does not oppose the Chaille block location, but favors at least a partial restoration of the buildings.
While the bureau negotiates sales contracts for the buildings, the Miami architectural firm Wolfberg/Alvarez and Associates is preparing site plans for the 1,000-bed jail. Partner David Wolfberg said the design will treat the Chaille buildings "as sensitively as possible." He refused to elaborate. "My contract says I can't discuss it."
The question remaining is whether the federal government will incorporate the historic block into the jail design or demolish it.
"It's unfortunate it's on our site, " said Patricia Sledge, site acquisitions coordinator for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons in Washington, D.C. A consultant's report, issued in June, concluded that demolition is the only acceptable solution.
"We're talking about a facility that will have to withstand missile attacks, bombs," said David Ferro, an architect with the Florida Bureau of Historic Preservation.
In other words, keeping the Chaille block is a security risk.
The historical significance does force the Bureau of Prisons to undergo a national review process. The staff of the Advisory Council for Historic Preservation, an independent federal agency, has asked the bureau to design a jail that
avoids total demolition of the Chaille buildings. The council was established in the mid-1960s to review all federal and federally funded projects that may threaten historic properties.
"El que esta en el camino queda (whoever gets in the way is eliminated)," said Fred Tennen, a Chaille block shopkeeper. He doesn't want to move.
In 1968, Tennen, the son of Cuban exiles, opened the Latinoamericana de Miami wholesale clothing store in a tiny storefront in the Chaille Building. Three bars and a cafeteria marked the four corners of the neighborhood. Across the street were a tailor, furrier and botanica. Above his store, tenants roamed the $35-a-month rooms. "Era un elemento bajo (a low class). But they protected my roof."
Now alarm wires line the roof and walls of his store. Concrete block fills a back window next to a metal door. A white patch in the pressed tin ceiling marks where burglars carved an
entrance in 1980, years after the rooms were shuttered.
"They say they'll give me money. But there's nowhere to go."
Storefronts near Flagler Street, in the heart of downtown, would cost four times as much as space in the Chaille building, where Tennen pays $650 a month.
"They think they can take care of everything with money. That everything has its price. But money can't resolve this."
The willingness to save the Chaille block may hinge on how much money the U.S. Bureau of Prisons is willing to spend. It's cheaper to raze the buildings than it is to incoporate them into the jail design or build around them, said preservation board member Rodriguez.
The bureau has set the construction budget at $70 million. Saving the block would cost an additional $15 million and add $150 million in additional operating costs over the expected life of the building, according to the bureau consultant.
A downtown location would save the federal government time and money by holding prisoners awaiting trial and unsentenced inmates close to the federal courthouse. Currently, prisoners are held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in South Dade, a 30-mile trip each way for court appearances.
Similar downtown detention centers operate in Chicago, Manhattan, Los Angeles and San Diego. The new, more secure, 22- story jail proposed on the Chaille site would be built to look like an office building.
Federal officials say the detention center won't affect property values in downtown Miami or keep people from living nearby.
But some neighbors aren't so sure.
Rick Kahn, one of Arena Towers' developers, said the residents in the Park West neighborhood, just north of the Chaille block, should be consulted.
"If they were fully informed about it they might oppose it vigorously. I don't vote in Miami but they do," he said.
More than 350 people now live at Arena Towers, the first two rental buildings in Miami's ambitious and costly plans to revitalize downtown by attracting residents. This fall, Biscayne View Apartments will offer 463 apartments and townhouses. Condominiums are also available at Ponciana Village.
Joseph Chaille used to live here -- more than 60 years ago.
"My grandfather built the building," said 85-year-old Chaille, descendant of Miami pioneers whose 1904 family home was a few blocks east of the Chaille building. His father, Josiah Chaille, an early Miami commissioner, devised Miami's street numbering system.
His childhood memories: playing in a schoolyard, Sunday services at Central Baptist Church, dawdling in his grandfather William Chaille's real estate office at the Chaille building.
"Families lived along Fifth, Fourth and Third Streets on either side of Second Avenue. I can't remember who they were. But it was very much a neighborhood."
