Florida wrap blog.

Time to finish up writing about Florida, with some leftovers taken from the notes I made about the trip.

The flight down, which was during a clear day, took us from Chicago southeast toward Florida. Among other places, the pilot mentioned that we'd be flying over Nashville, an old home town of mine. I didn't give that much though until I happened to look out the window and see a city below. There was a river snaking through it, and the downtown buildings looked as big as those in a tabletop model you might see on exhibit. But the pattern of Interstates seemed familiar, and all at once the pattern made sense -- that was Nashville more than 30,000 feet below. All the years I lived there, I'd never seen it from on high.

Sign near one of the gates at the Ft. Lauderdale International Airport: "NO BACKYARD CITRUS BEYOND THIS POINT. Deposit fruit here." The sign was attached to a large box with a door in it, presumably to leave the orange you'd picked in your yard back in... New York or North Dakota, lest you transmit orange diseases to the Florida crop. At least that's what I think it was for. As agricultural control policies go, this was pretty weak.

On a number of major roads, but especially I-95, I saw other signs that said EVACUATION ROUTE. Along with those words was a schematic of a hurricane, though it looked more like a sketch of a whirlpool. They need to take hurricanes seriously on that coast, no doubt. I learned in Miami Beach that one of the factors that helped bust the Florida land boom was a large hurricane that struck in 1926.

After the main dinner of the National Multi Housing Council, there were some short speeches by officials of that organization, but everyone was waiting for the unspecified "entertainment" mentioned in the program. Rumor was that Jerry Seinfield was going to show up -- plausible, since the apartment landlords of the nation could come up with whatever his astronomical fee would be. He was mentioned because people had sighted Larry David, Seinfield’s long-time writer, at the Boca Raton Resort & Club. In fact, my associate Anthony saw David as we walked through the lobby earlier that day. I wouldn't have recognized him, but Anthony was sure it was him.

The entertainment turned out to be presidential impersonator Steve Bridges, and it was a spot-on impersonation of Bush the Younger, one of the best I've ever seen of any politician, and outrageously funny. He was a good deal funnier than Larry David, at least to judge by the episode of his TV show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I managed to see the last night I was in Florida. It was a show I'd never seen before. A few funny moments, but not all that many.

St. Augustine grass blog.

My brother Jay writes: "I can't be sure, but I think that the broad-bladed grass you mentioned [January 20] is probably St. Augustine grass. It wouldn't surprise me if were named for the town in Florida, but I don't know that. It grows well in Houston and San Antonio and it will grow in Dallas, too, but is subject to damage if it stays too cold for too long.

"I have some in my yard, mixed with other varieties of grass and assorted other plants (as far as I'm concerned if it's green and cut to a uniform length, it's a lawn). Ten or twelve years ago we had a protracted cold spell -- ten or twelve days when it didn't get above freezing, with a record-tying low one night, I recall, of 1 or 2 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. It killed most of the St. Augustine. That spring it was as thin as a eunuch's beard, but some strands survived, and over the course of two or three years, it came back.

"Thinking of the Intracoastal Waterway, our grandfather was involved in the construction of the first Mansfield Cut through Padre Island. The Cut connects the Laguna Madre (and the Intracoastal Waterway) to the Gulf of Mexico, and allows access to Port Mansfield. I can recall visiting when he and grandmother were staying in Port Mansfield so he could be closer to the job site.

"He had a share, at least, in a patent for some sort of concrete device that was used in the construction of protective breakwaters for the Cut. I can recall seeing two or three small-scale models for them in his house, at least one in use as a doorstop. You may remember seeing them too. [I don't.] The device was, in effect, four thick, blunt arms joined together in the center, and projecting at angles so that one arm would always be pointing up while the other three acted as a base. The models were about six or eight inches high. I gather that the ones for use were several feet high and proportionately heavy. The exact reason behind the design I never learned; my guess -- and that's all it is -- is that they were supposed to lock together and form a strong bond without the expense and weight of a solid wall.

"Of course, the first cut through Padre Island -- the one he worked on -- was destroyed by storms shortly after it was finished in 1957. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt it shortly thereafter. Whether this has anything to do with the construction of the breakwaters I don't know.”

South Beach blog.

Upon arrival in Miami Beach, I ditched my rented SUV in a parking garage and embraced more basic transport, my feet. I put several miles on them that afternoon. After I had lunch, that is. Come to Miami Beach and the cuisine of choice is -- Cuban? Seafood? Novelle Fusion Haitian Sushi? No, I stopped at Kim's Chinese, near the end of the Lincoln Street open-air pedestrian shopping mall, and had the "jerk chicken," a term I’d never encountered at a Chinese joint. Delicious, but not especially Jamaican that I could tell.

Walked south, toward the art deco district. By that time I knew that a festival was going on there, Art Deco Weekend. A long stretch of Ocean Drive had been blocked off to cars, and given over to pedestrians and booths offering food and crafts. I wandered down the street, eyed all the things worth seeing: dressed up buildings, dressed down women, oddly dressed buskers. In front of a Mediterranean-style mansion, it seemed that an unusual number of people were stopping to take pictures. I later learned that this had been Gianni Versace's mansion, and place of sudden death.

Spent some time on a bench in the park between Ocean Drive and the beach. The street on one side and the beach on the other were both fairly busy, but there weren't too many other people near where I was sitting. One person who was nearby, maybe 50 feet away, had the look of a homeless man -- a black man with long graying hair and beard, a tattered suitcase and some other articles stacked near him. He was standing right at the edge of the park, next to the beach, and without warning he produced a recorder and started to play. He was quite good. Perhaps he had a lot of time to practice.

I was floating along with that, but all at once another man approached my bench and started a conversation. I wasn't altogether receptive, especially since my enjoyment of the impromptu recorder concert had been interrupted, but I was civil. He was middle-aged and dressed for touring, and said he was in town from Connecticut, glad to be out of that weather, etc. He might have been trying to pick me up; this seems to happen to me every five years or so; but I can't be sure. After a few minutes, he wandered away, but by that time the black man had quit playing.

Not long after that, I joined a tour given by the Miami Design Preservation League, the art deco walking tour. The guide, a fellow named Jim, was knowledgeable as a good guide or docent needs to be, and took a cluster of about a dozen of us to see an assortment of art deco and Mediterranean Revival hotels, some in startlingly good repair, some a little seedy, some under repair. We even took a look the Miami Beach Main Post Office. Not art deco, but interesting -- a WPA building with a mural illustrating various Seminole wars, and a place where there had been a decorative water fountain. Inside the post office.

Red machine blog.

When my business was done -- interviews conducted, sessions attended, and business-flavored small talk made -- it was time to make use of my free time. I had an afternoon and the next morning before returning to the frozen North.

In a situation like that the thing to do is focus. I'd never been to greater Miami, or any closer to it than Orlando, but I'd studied the area fairly closely back in 1995 as an employee of the Map Group, which makes fold-out tourist maps. It was during my short stint with that company, in fact, that I acquired an interest in some domestic destinations that had never resonated with me before. Among these was Miami.

(The Map Group is still in business, operating as Compass Maps in Bath, England. If you ever see a Map Group PopOut map of Chicago, that's essentially my work, with various updates since 1995 to reflect changes in the city. I drew the map by hand, and one of the artists in England copied it into publishable format using a PowerMac. I also made contributions to the New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas maps.)

So I had to pick one place among the many intriguing places in Miami and environs. I chose Miami Beach.

The more interesting way to get there probably would have been a road called Florida A1A, a two-lane that runs right down the coast. I decided that could wait for the next morning, and I headed down from Boca on the fast road -- the relatively fast road, considering heavy traffic -- I-95. I can't pretend it's an especially interesting road, but it got me to Miami Beach, with a turnoff on the Julia Tuttle Causeway, in time for lunch.

My vehicle for the trip was a novelty for me, too. At the Enterprise rental car outpost near the Ft. Lauderdale airport, the cheap car that I had reserved, a Neon I think, wasn't ready for me when I showed up. So the solicitous staff offered me an '03 Mitsubishi Endeavor, no extra charge. I couldn't pass that up: my chance to drive something I would never buy, an evil SUV. Better yet, it was metallic red, though I knew that meant I would have to be more careful than usual to obey speed limits.

The Endeavor isn't the largest of SUVs, however, and seemed to handle reasonably well. I didn't do any kind of driving that would test an SUV's propensity to roll over, and since I drive a Sienna at home, this red machine I'd rented didn’t seem all that expansive.

It had a fine sound system. I headed down I-95 and sampled South Florida radio. Not as distinctive as I'd like, radio never is, since it's been famously standardized by unimaginative media companies. Picked up the usual English-language genre radio, plus Spanish stations that I'll bet are every bit as standardized as the English. But not far out of Boca I picked up a station that I couldn't quite place.

It sounded like a talk show. A couple of men were talking, anyway, but it wasn't English and it wasn't Spanish. But what was it? It sounded like... French. But not entirely. French, in South Florida? Then it hit me. It had to be Haitian Creole. But I can't be completely sure, since the only Haitian Creole I know is tonton macoute.

Mizner blog.

For those of us with a certain cast of mind, wandering around the Boca Raton Resort & Club is a time machine. A little bit of historic imagination removes you from our casual age and lands you in the Florida land boom, ca. 1926. Carefully appointed men in white suits and Panama hats, and short-haired women in bright mid-length dresses, arrive from the Boca Raton train station in leased touring cars to stay to Addison Mizner's newest creation, the Cloister. Bellhops carry their loads, gardeners attend to the lush vegetation, chambermaids do their work unobtrusively. The air is warm and sweet, and new hotel is gloriously Mediterranean.

I don't know if men really wore Panama hats in Florida nearly 80 years ago, but they should have. That's how I see it, anyway.

From the BRRC web site, a basic description: "The original structure of the resort estate -- the 'Cloister' -- was built in 1926 by Addison Mizner and reflects Spanish-Mediterranean, Moorish and Gothic influences. It is characterized by hidden gardens, barrel tile roofs, archways, ornate columns, finials, intricate mosaics, fountains and beamed ceilings of ornate pecky cypress."

Addison Mizner was one of those characters that make the times of a few generations ago seem much more interesting than our own, though I believe that's an illusion. In any case, The Rough Guide to Florida has this to say about Mizner:

"A former miner and prizefighter, Addison Mizner (1872-1933) was an unemployed architect when he arrived in Palm Beach... in 1918. Inspired by the medieval buildings he'd seen around the Mediterranean, Mizner, financed by the heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune, built the Everglades Club [in Palm Beach]. Described by Mizner as 'a little bit of Seville and the Alhambra, a dash of Madeira and Algiers,' the Everglades Club was the first public building in Florida in Mediterranean Revival style...
The success of the club won Mizner commissions all over Palm Beach as the wintering wealthy decided the swap suites at one of Henry Flagler's hotels for a 'million-dollar cottage' of their own. Brilliant and unorthodox, Mizner's loggias and U-shaped interiors made the most of Florida's pleasant winters, while his twisting staircases to nowhere became legendary. Pursuing a lived-in-since-medieval-times look, [he had] workmen lay roof tiles crookedly, sprayed condensed milk onto walls to create an impression of centuries-old grime, and fired shotgun pellets into wood to imitate wormholes. By the mid-20s, Mizner had created the Palm Beach Style. [He] later fashioned much of Boca Raton."

Especially the Cloister. It evolved into the BRRC, and now features several connected hotel buildings, a marina, and the Mizner Center, a large collection of meeting facilities where most of the convention I attended was held. None of the newer parts of the complex has quite the charm of the original Cloister. One detail: Near a small bar off the main lobby in that structure, I noticed a plaque describing Mizner's pet spider monkeys.

When he was a young man, apparently, his father had been part of the U.S. mission to Costa Rica (I think), and younger Mizner acquired a fondness for spider monkeys while there. After his successes in Florida, he kept them as pets, and was always seen with one during the construction of the Cloister. The bar next to the lobby is called the Monkey Bar, and if you look carefully at the front desk of the BRRC, you'll see several small brass lamps with monkey figures for bases.

Camino Real blog.

I didn't stay at the convention hotel during this trip, the Boca Raton Resort & Club, but at the Radisson Bridge Hotel, about a quarter mile away. On the whole, the Radisson was an ordinary hotel -- except that it was painted pink -- but I did have an excellent view from my balcony, which overlooked Lake Boca. All around the lake, which is really just an enlargement of the Intracoastal Waterway at that point, are clutches of high-priced properties, including condos, marinas and other hotels, including the BRRC complex, which is also pink.

I got to know that the route to the convention pretty well, walking back and forth on a sidewalk next to a narrow street called Camino Real, past the same condos I saw from my balcony. These properties were on the waterfront side of the street. On the other side, connecting streets sported cheaper rental properties. But probably not that cheap.

Walking along in the warm air was almost the only pleasure I needed on this trip, but it was pleasing to see the greenery, too, because South Florida is green even in January. I suppose it never really turns brown, short of a drought, and for that matter I'm sure the owners of the properties I passed would never let that happen. They'd drain the Everglades dry first, and probably are anyway. Just along the quarter-mile path between my room and the convention, I saw palms, banyan, cypress, funky southern pines, and a wide-bladed grass I never see up north, but which I remember from South Texas. Elsewhere I saw orange trees and bamboo.

The route to the BRRC crossed a small drawbridge over the Intracostal Waterway. A sign announced the Waterway as the work of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as I knew it was, and I had to wonder if those long-dead engineers had any inkling of the real estate value they were creating at that spot, most of it now probably in the hands of people busy being born in the decades in which the canal was dug. As far as the eye can see southward from the little Camino Real drawbridge are houses lining either side of the Waterway; big structures, and every jack one of them had a boat dock, and many had boats.

Often the bridge was up, or going up, when I wanted to cross. Boats of various sizes crossed under the open wings of the bridge. I did note, however, a sign that said -- I'm paraphrasing -- that if you were too lazy to lower a mast or antenna or something else on your boat that could be lowered, and still made the bridge go up for you, you'd be fined at least $1100.

On the west side of the drawbridge, the road opened up into a traffic circle, the only one I encountered during this trip. No sign of any kind indicated that the street heading north from the circle would take you to the BRRC. If you didn't know where it was, I suppose, you didn't have any business being there. The sidewalk leading to the Resort was also lined with greenery, passed a guardhouse -- the guard paid no attention to pedestrians -- and took you on to the full spectacle of the Cloister, or the original part of the BRRC. More about which tomorrow.

South Florida blog.

Just flew in from South Florida, and boy are my arms... well, they're not all that tired, but I did do the long haul down various airport corridors recently, lugging an assortment of electronic equipment -- two cameras and two tape recorders, to be exact -- along with the other things I took on a 72-hour trip to that subtropical destination.

It was a bid'ness trip, and I did my business. I attended the annual convention of the National Multihousing Council, the trade group of apartment owners large and small, but mostly large. From interviewing a number of people in the apartment business, I'll now be able to produce a whole feature article for my magazine.

The setting. The Boca Raton Resort & Club, a generic name for one of the more remarkable hotels I've ever seen, a warren of pink Mediterranean revival edifices and courtyards and gardens, originating in the Florida land boom 80-odd years ago and still sustained by vast cash inflows from wealthy patrons. As is Boca Raton itself, if posh appearances are any indication.

The weather. Growing up in South Texas, I didn't give much thought to a place like Florida, or anywhere known for its warm climate. It's mild in the winter and hot in the summer, big deal. That's the way it was in San Antonio, more or less. But now that I've lived through a decade and more of Northern winters, I understand the appeal of South Florida better. Not that I would consider living there, but I wouldn't mind returning for a longer visit in some future winter.

Certainly I was glad to leave the climate-controlled Ft. Lauderdale International Airport, through the sliding automatic doors, to a gush of 70-degree, mildly humid air. Earlier that day, it was about 30 F in Chicago. Not bad for Chicago in January, actually, and balmy compared with the temps in the Northeast in the middle of last week. But not very warm either. Once in Florida, it took me a little while to get used to going outside without a coat.

The flight. Booked an amazingly inexpensive flight on ATA's web site about a month ago, about $160 roundtrip for a Wednesday departure and a Saturday return, Midway to Ft. Lauderdale. In high season, no less. ATA, in my experience, is either grossly late or precisely on time. Fortunately, going to Ft. Lauderdale proved to be one of the latter, on-time variety.

I had the pleasure of keeping company on the flight down with a garrulous elderly couple -- in their early 80s -- named Harvey and Mitzi. They were talkative all right, but not bores. Harvey had been an apartment and retail developer, so we talked about real estate; they had had a good many friends with private airplanes, so we talked about aviation; and they had been interesting places in interesting times, so we talked about that. I especially wanted to hear about that.

For instance, they'd driven from Chicago to Mexico City and back in 1947. I wanted a time machine, so I could do that too. They had also visited Cuba in early 1959, immediately after Castro came to power. Apparently, the fighting that had ousted Batista had scared off most tourists, and the new government broadcasted encouragement for them to come back -- the Bay of Pigs, the Missile Crisis, and the Embargo were all still in the future. Their tale of this trip also included bribing an official at an airstrip to get permission to fly back to the United States.

"I don't think he was looking for a bribe," said Mitzi. "He just didn't have the right paperwork, and didn't know what would happen if he let us go."

"I gave him $20, and that eased his mind," said Harvey. "That was a lot of money in those days."