New Urbanism: Urban Solutions 03 — EATING FLORIDA

Seaside

Not far east of Grayton Beach and about 28 miles from Destin on Walton County Highway 30-A is Seaside, a truly remarkable beach resort community. Whether you’re vacationing around Destin, Fort Walton Beach, or Panama City or travelling in the Panhandle on Interstate 10, Seaside, a resort unlike any other in Florida, is well worth the time and effort to visit.

In 1979, architectural enthusiast and developer Robert Davis inherited 80 acres of prime beachfront property with 2,800 lineal feet along the Gulf of Mexico from his grandfather, a prosperous department store magnate. Located in southern Walton County near Seagrove Beach, an existing vacation community which, if I were very charitable, could be described as nondescript, Davis's inheritance was a fairly unprepossessing site over which only a visionary might wax poetic. Except for the terrific beach. Despite the lackluster character of his immediate neighbors in Seagrove, Davis and his wife, Daryl, were convinced the beachfront was so enchanting that selling the undeveloped land behind it for two or three thousand dollars an acre would be a major mistake. With its beautiful oceanfront environment Davis knew the site had enormous market potential. He realized that his inheritance was a near-perfect opportunity to create an exclusive beach-oriented resort development unlike any in Florida.

In an interesting twist, Davis had started his professional career in Washington, D.C., working as an architect on subsidized housing developments. After a few frustrating years of laboring on projects that he thought only served to abuse the poor by isolating them in unmanageable housing he fled the District and wound up in Miami, developing town houses and winning several State design awards in the process.

Mulling over a vague idea about resurrecting the old Florida Cracker style house (also known as Frame Vernacular), he approached the husband-wife architectural and planning team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. They had recently parted ways with Arquitectonia, a cutting edge Miami firm they co-founded, and started their own design shop, DPZ. Duany is a self-described Cuban of the “exile” generation and Plater-Zyberk a Polish-American snowbird from the East.

After discussing ways to make his property a demonstration project in how to build a coherent resort community that worked from day one, Davis immediately hired the young team. Believe it or not, his assignment was their very first urban planning project and they had never previously drawn up a Master Plan for a new town. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is hard for this grizzled old planner to swallow, except that, in the end, talent always tells.

The relationship quickly blossomed into a marriage made in Heaven. The design team, Robert and Daryl Davis and Duany and Plater-Zyberk, first toured the region to examine old southern towns to identify workable elements. They then gradually synthesized a design approach based on their observations and DPZ’s research into classic New Towns of the past, especially those created by the famous urban planning pioneers, John Nolan (designer of the Venice, Florida, Master Plan) and Clarence Perry (designer of Radburn, New Jersey).

In a two week long brainstorming session, called a charrette by all of us ever so sophisticated architects and planners, the Davises, DPZ, local officials, and other design consultants sketched out a revolutionary plan. They effectively trashed the conventional wisdom concerning vacation resorts. Their extraordinary plan, when built, became an internationally famous community featured in 1990 by Time as the “Best of the Decade” in design and also was extolled on the pages of U.S. News & World Report, the Atlantic Monthly, People, Travel and Leisure and Smithsonian, among others.

But years before this extraordinary success came the design phase and then the Master Plan. Seaside would be small, totaling 80 acres, about the size of an average regional shopping mall. Its antecedents were unashamedly urban, featuring modest-sized houses on small lots with narrow streets. Wood was the preferred building material for homes and pitched metal roofs became the standard. Small, functional towers were incorporated into many homes so residents could view the ocean and enjoy breezes throughout the day. The development would have no sidewalks, only shoulders of crushed shell so residents could walk barefoot to and from the beach. And, miracle of miracles, the Plan sought to create a sense of community by emphasizing public over private space and by celebrating pedestrians over vehicles, with a compact layout based on a five-minute walking distance from one end of Seaside to the other.

In their design process, Plater-Zyberk and Duany first defined the public spaces, including buildings, town center, parks, and Route 30A, which constitutes the main highway access. Next came a network of 20-foot wide rectilinear interior roads paved with soft pink bricks dissected by grand diagonal boulevards. Then the open-air gift and clothing market along Route 30A and the narrow alleys and sand walkways that cut through the middle of the blocks. Lastly, came the enchanting natural features — the beach and dunes. The planners eliminated the repetitive block and lot pattern found in many 20th Century New Towns by varying the width, depth, and shapes of the building lots and through imaginative use of diagonal boulevards. The resulting distinctly urban landscape and intimate texture permits a variety of lot locations, orientations, size, and price that most beach resorts develop only after many decades, if at all.

The Seaside landscape exhibits not the cold, geometric formalism of a Master Plan but the warm, user-friendly atmosphere associated with older, well-established communities. Several witty design elements also provide Seaside with a relaxed, devil-may-care atmosphere that never takes itself seriously: colorfully designed pergolas and gazebos, boardwalks over the beach dunes, several architecturally distinctive beach pavilions, and even an old, strictly non-functional, tongue in cheek water tower imported from Virginia (now long gone). High order panache, in my book, though certain architectural snobs who are humor-challenged to the nth degree have taken umbrage over it.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk have relied on a very conventional architectural system to accomplish a most unconventional result: design regulations or performance standards that establish eight building types and a common design vocabulary published in a pictorial-graphic document that even the most obtuse architect might comprehend and follow.

Wood siding painted in bright pastels        White or cream colored trim

Vertical windows                                        Metal roofs, either gable or shed

Screened porches and verandas                Picket fences

Seaside has developed such a reputation for excellence in the design community that architects are eager to have their work seen there. Leon Krier, Scott Merrill, Deborah Burke, Stephen Holl, Carey McWhorter, Tony Atkin, Ernesto Buch, Walter Chatham, Stuart Cohen and Anders Nerim, and Robert Davis and Robert Lamar are only a few whose designs have been constructed in Seaside in a variety of styles — Florida Cracker, Neo-Classical, Victorian, Post-Modern, and even Deconstructivist. Although Seaside has the unmistakable look and feel of a beach community right off the streets of both Cape Cod and antebellum Charleston, it is one Florida resort town that can legitimately be called beautiful, charming, and unique.

So, what’s the bottom line? Why is Seaside so meaningful to professional planners and urban designers AND to the affluent, second home buying crowd? The answer is simple. Duany and Plater-Zyberk have captured the twin ideals of community and individual privacy that characterize small towns while simultaneously excising the evils of boredom and economic stagnation. If you don’t think that’s difficult, take a good look around your subdivision. They have taken the image of the small town and metamorphosed it into a model of functional urban development that is neither alienating nor threatening. Their success at Seaside has generated enormous discussion-debate-argument among the people across the country who are involved in designing and developing urban places. What they’re talking about is the on-the-ground, put-words-into-action meaning of neighborhoods that work. Neighborhoods that are interesting, exciting, user friendly and not out-of-sight expensive. Lucky for all of us, that discussion continues unabated today.

Seaside is so effective that lot prices in the mid- to late-1990s climbed to heights even Davis never dreamed possible. The original, more modest native Florida-style houses remain but, as land prices have rapidly escalated, they have been largely supplanted by larger and much more elaborate and expensive structures. But Davis had eager buyers from Florida and all over the South lining up to be part of the fun.

In the past several years, tourists from Destin and other nearby commercial resorts have discovered Seaside and are visiting in ever increasing numbers, allowing the town’s modest, centrally located retail center to survive. Seaside may not yet be a “real city” by the standards of some critics and hidden agendas, but it certainly is well worth a visit for part of a day, a week, or longer in one of the numerous rental units.

And that point brings us to a number of critical comments. A fair number of professional urban planners, including me, have decidedly mixed thoughts about what Seaside really is and what it actually does. If you take a hard look at Seaside you realize that some things are not as they at first seem. Or, at the very least, are not as they are represented by the resort’s promoters, including Robert Davis and DPZ.

Seaside has evolved into what is basically a vacation destination, in effect a large, low-rise hotel sprawling across 80 acres. Very few families (around 40 when I last checked) live there year-round. Which means almost everyone you see walking around the streets in the spring, summer, and early fall are short-term visitors. So forget about opportunities to build a genuine community of inter-connected neighbors chatting across their porches and borrowing sugar or flour to make apple pies or chocolate chip cookies. And, despite all the DPZ hype about reducing the reliance on cars, if you are a year-round resident try finding everything you need at those trendy and upscale little markets in the commercial center. Like groceries. Fat chance, unless you don’t mind paying through the nose or having precious few choices. Yes, a new Publix is only a half-mile or so away on County Highway 395 but try walking that distance while carrying $100 worth of groceries, especially along streets with few sidewalks.

Another problem is despite the attempt to position Seaside and similar New Urbanist communities as alternatives to subdivisions, Seaside is exactly that. A residential subdivision built in what planners call a greenfield — previously undeveloped land. Yes, Seaside is more dense and has more mixed uses than the typical subdivision but it really does not look, act, or feel like the older, traditional city neighborhoods that blossomed in many U.S. cities before WW II or the neighborhoods in Charleston, Savannah, etc., that supposedly inspired DPZ. And that is a critical point since achieving similarity to those older, established neighborhoods is one of the highly touted goals of New Urbanism. Not to mention that today, even after the housing bubble popped, most lots start in the vicinity of a half million dollars, and the asking prices for the larger houses exceed $5 million ($5.2 million as of 5-25-11). And here’s the kicker: a one-bedroom, one-bathroom, 375-square foot house is selling for $925,000. No joke. Sounds exactly like a place where you’ll find lots of middle- and lower-middle income folks.

However, those older, established neighborhoods in Charleston, Savannah, etc. typically grew organically over many decades as a result of intersecting peaks and valleys in demand for many types of uses by various ethnic and social groups. Which is precisely why New York, Boston, Chicago, and New Orleans are characterized by their exciting mix of building types, architectural styles, land uses, etc. that make those cities special places that stimulate both hearts and minds, delighting residents and visitors alike. And that leads me to point out the lack of social diversity in Seaside, a problem for most urban planners and many potential residents, unless, of course, you’re white and affluent and want to keep your community that way. Then, Seaside, which consists overwhelmingly of detached, single-family residences, is your kind of place.

A second interesting question is where are all the institutions in Seaside? Have you ever seen an older, inner-city neighborhood without four or five churches within a few blocks of each other? Or Fire and Police Departments? Or a library? Of which Seaside has none. Where are the very community-building foci that New Urbanism claims to value so highly? Churches, public schools, public service facilities, and even cemeteries. You won’t find them in Seaside. To be honest there is one fairly small inter-faith chapel and one private school. My guess is the land is just too damned expensive for those frivolous uses since they put minimal money into the developer’s pockets.

But, all nay-saying and nit-picking aside, Seaside is enjoyable for what it is. Not for what people claim it should be. After all, it was started in 1980-1981 and has little time to grow into what it could be.

Windsor

If you’re at all like me, you love to fantasize about the perfect Florida resort community. Perfect in the following sense. No traffic congestion. No loud, pushy, obnoxious tourists and their inevitably ill-mannered and bratty kids. Meticulously landscaped polo fields right outside your door. An adjacent, members-only (to exclude riff-raff like you and me) par-72 championship 18-hole golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones Jr., and eight north-south, Har-Tru tennis courts designed by Wimbledon champion Stan Smith, each of which are protected by jasmine-covered privacy walls, of course. Not to mention a private equestrian center with riding trails sculpted into the landscape. Or a fully equipped fitness center. And what about the first-class gun club emphasizing new clay shooting games from Europe with computer-controlled equipment that simulates the excitement of driven game situations on flat terrain and other target-presentations (hey, that last sentence was lifted without much re-write from the below-referenced web site and is almost enough to make discriminating Readers gag). And you couldn’t forget the unspoiled, picturesque beach with its own private club and ever so elegant restaurant and lovely homes that take your breath away. Etc., etc. Who was it that said money can’t buy happiness? Well, maybe it can’t, but it sure can buy one shit-load of creature comforts.

If the perfect Florida resort community is your dream, you’ll find all that and more in an exclusive community of Windsor on Hutchinson Island about eight miles north of Vero Beach situated between the Atlantic Ocean and Indian River. It is an upper-, upper-crust, gated enclave for those who take for granted personal bankers handling their substantial trust funds, bookkeeping services that pay their monthly bills, and lackeys devoted to anticipating their every whim, no matter how ridiculous by the standards of the common folk.

Make no mistake, these are people who never even consider the possibility of bouncing checks two days before payday. Okay, it’s no secret that neither I nor 99.99999 percent of the people who would ever read this page can afford to breathe the rarefied air found in Windsor. But it’s nice to take a peek at how the other ½ percent of the U.S. population lives. And what the heck, if you win one of those mega-million dollar lotteries, who knows what you might be able to afford in terms of a second home by the sea.

Windsor is another marvelous design by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the architectural-planning Super Stars responsible for Seaside, the beach resort in the Panhandle that so many people find compelling. Sited on about 420 acres and designed for 350 homes, Windsor was conceived as a European-style settlement with its roots firmly planted in early colonial Caribbean times, with narrow streets alternating with wide, heavily planted boulevards. Actually, the concept was somewhat broader-based than that. The three chief architectural elements used by DPZ in their design were 16th Century Spanish designs from the city of St. Augustine, numerous small English Caribbean towns of the 17th Century, and early 18th Century Charleston, South Carolina.

As an aside, landowners in colonial Charleston were taxed on their property’s street frontage. Consequently, people hating to pay taxes then as well as now, the narrow end of the houses and lots almost always fronted on the street while the main rooms, aligned on the building’s long axis, had intimate views of interior courts and gardens, which were surrounded by high masonry walls to keep peasants like us from getting too familiar with the gentry, superior lot they were then and now. That design focus became an essential part of the DPZ block and lot orientation in Windsor. And who said research into old, dusty planning records is a waste of time and effort?

The centerpiece of DPZ’s plan and Windsor’s very heart and soul is the village commons that serves as the gateway into the community and the focus of social and commercial activities. Entry to this commons is via an elegant allee of oaks, perhaps a conscious effort to recall the glory days of the old plantation South (as is so perfectly illustrated by the magnificent Oak Alley plantation in southern Louisiana). To top it off, noted architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen designed four small but very attractive kiosks to help define the entrance. That internally focused commons area, with a village center and a town hall designed by Leon Krier, which is used as a meeting hall and doubles as a non-denominational church, is a typical urban cluster with a tightly gridded street pattern. The cluster is bordered on two sides by the golf course and the polo fields. And yes, that’s fields with an s. As in two polo fields stacked end-to-end. How about that for a most unusual greenbelt? Where else in the world but coastal Florida?

The majority of houses in that urban cluster are quite unlike those found in other American luxury resort communities. DPZ’s plan has pushed these attached, small lot townhouses and detached courtyard or sideyard entrance homes forward until they’re very close to the streets. Entrance into most of Windsor’s very private courtyard and sideyard houses brings the visitor first to a walled, shaded garden courtyard and from there into the main house itself. That pattern creates atmospheres of enormous intimacy and charm. Which is the principal reason the commons are described as “urban” in character, despite the relatively few houses and low density.

Historical house types in the early settlement of St. Augustine served as the basic model for DPZ’s cluster plan. Most of the first homes in Spanish St. Augustine were single-story masonry structures. But in the 17th Century, when the English took over, they built second-story wood additions with tall, narrow windows and wide roofs overhanging the lower story, creating cooler, shaded arcades below. The Windsor residences follow that general pattern, with tall windows deeply recessed into masonry walls, wood balconies cantilevered from above, and lush tropical foliage flowing over garden walls. It’s a lovely touch, indeed. Especially for those privileged few with very deep pockets.

Each of those townhouses has a detached garage with living quarters above that are typically accessed from a mid-block alley or from a pedestrian walkway. The relatively unornamented exterior architectural treatment (featuring plain, solid white walls) of the “urban” Windsor homes gives little indication of the rich character of their well-hidden interior spaces featuring lush sub-tropical gardens with courtyards, pools, fountains, etc. Is it any surprise that most of the people building homes in Windsor have chosen this distinctive and intimate “urban” cluster for the location of their residences?

Every building in Windsor — residential, commercial, and public — is controlled by a strict architectural code, specifying all design elements and materials for each of seven basic building types. Those detailed standards include height, placement on lots, building articulation, lot line relationships, and interior orientation for all structures, including outbuildings, porches, elevations, and topographic changes. The code requires all building plans to be submitted to the Windsor Architectural Review Committee for approval prior to issuance of permits and start of construction. Those guys have to be as tough as nails because individuals with serious money at their disposal are well accustomed to bashing low-level building inspector types around until they get their own way. Or else paying them off with under the table envelopes. And that’s no exaggeration. Can you imagine a building inspector telling someone like Donald Trump or what’s-his-face Rockefeller that he can’t do whatever it is he wants to with his new house? Get real. That poor bastard wouldn’t last a New York minute.

Would it possibly surprise anyone to learn that the developers named the community after their favorite polo park in England? Oh, Winifred, my dear, how utterly charming. Or that the polo fields are modeled after those at the ever so posh Oak Brook Country Club near Chicago? Which was built in the 1930s during the Great Depression, remember those hard economic times?

Now for reality’s wake up call, which is a hard slap in the face for us middle-class dreamers. As of mid-May 2011, lots in Windsor start at $300,000 and rocket upwards to the $3.3 million neighborhood. Whoa. And that’s just for the property. The houses aren’t any more reasonable, starting at a comfortable $1.1 million and shooting straight into the stratosphere at $11.2 million. And that’s in tough economic times.

Implications

Okay, so why am I seeming to waste a lot of time and ink running on about some ethereal urban planning nonsense few real people care about and far fewer can afford? Simple, because thousands and thousands of potential homeowners are lining up to buy homes in New Urbanist developments throughout Florida. Seaside, the first New Urbanist community, was so successful it has become the land development model of choice in coastal Florida and much of the rest of the country. If you don’t believe me take a look at what’s happening throughout the Panhandle and much of the rest of Florida.

Remember those good old boys, Ed Ball and Alfred I. Du Pont? They started the St. Joe Paper Company that became the largest land owner in northern Florida. Well, it’s still around, now known as the St. Joe Company and today it owns nearly 900,000 acres in Florida, keeping its title as the State’s largest private landowner. The majority of St. Joe’s land is concentrated in northwest Florida, between Tallahassee and Walton County. The company owns approximately 40 miles of Gulf of Mexico coastline, another 250 miles of what it calls recreational waterfront, and hundreds of thousands of acres of rural recreational land and timberland. It’s a ten thousand pound gorilla that gets what it wants, when it wants.

Arvida, its homebuilding division, which touts itself as the nation’s premier developer of master planned residential and resort communities, is currently building quite a few communities supposedly based on New Urbanist principles. Arvida’s Water Color community is immediately next door to Seaside. You can’t forget Water Sound in Camp Creek, Palmetto Trace in Panama City Beach, WindMark Beach near Port St. Joe, and River Camp in Mexico Beach. And that’s just part of what Arvida has going. Not to mention what all the other developers in northern Florida hot to jump on the money-making machine called New Urbanism have on the drawing boards. The New Urbanist communities of Rosemary Beach and Alys Beach are also near Seaside. Both are upscale DPZ developments of expensive single-family homes with a modicum of mixed use thrown in to make them look like they are in the New Urbanist camp. Not to mention numerous other communities similar to Seaside are springing up from Seagrove Beach all the way west to Destin.

What happened is that the design of Seaside by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberg literally exploded in the urban planning and design communities and quickly became a well-articulated movement. Today, the ideas developed by Duany and Plater-Zyberg and others go by various names: New Urbanism, Traditional Neighborhood Development, and Neo-Traditional Communities. The main idea behind what we’ll simply call New Urbanism is to try and recapture some of the character and community that existed in the older, traditional city neighborhoods that developed prior to WW II. New Urbanist communities are generally pedestrian-oriented, high-density, mixed-use neighborhoods with narrow streets and a wide variety of housing types and socioeconomic classes. Those types of developments also feature a variety of land uses and mix residential, retail, and often office uses in the same areas rather than segregating them.

Many positive urban characteristics result from that type of land development. The higher densities, mixed-uses, and pedestrian orientation help to reduce automobile reliance. That’s an essential point we can’t gloss over. As a result of their designs, New Urbanist developments consume considerably less land than traditional developments because they accommodate the same population in a smaller area. Which is already a critical variable in a State where developable land is becoming a relatively scarce commodity, most critically in south and central Florida. If innovative urban planning and design can improve the quality of life, increase housing densities, and also decrease demand for land and water resources, surely those techniques must be part of the new development tool kit.

The inclusion of Seaside and Windsor in this blog was neither a frivolous gesture nor one that was made without considerable reflection. I believe most Americans do not know what professionally innovative urban planning and architecture can accomplish in terms of creating enjoyable and livable places that also conserve land. Most of us, and that includes me as well, live in some tired variation of the standard, cookie-cutter suburb of curvilinear streets, fairly large lots on which squat architecturally undistinguished houses — and that’s being charitable — set back from the property lines, bordered by highways without sidewalks or lights connecting one subdivision and strip mall to the next. We have come to regard that pattern as normal and as the only one available. Seaside and Windsor are two real world examples of exciting alternatives to that suburban sprawl model.

That said, we have to take a critical look at what limiting characteristics those and most other Florida New Urbanist communities have in common. First, they are almost all built on greenfields, which, if you drink the New Urbanist Kool-Aid, is a Corky No-No. Building on greenfields isolated from a functioning urban center is how you build those nasty suburbs the New Urbanists are always bitching and pissing and moaning about, with their noses held collectively in the air while sniffing disdainfully as if trying to identify who tracked the dog shit all over the new white carpet. Second, real mixed use, socioeconomically diverse, and dense New Urbanist communities are scarce, at least in Florida. We’re talking up-market, whitebread, single-family vacation burbs, brother, where commercial-retail, office-warehouse, light industrial employment centers or social diversity are seldom found. Drive through Seaside, Rosemary Beach, or Alys Beach and compare them to genuine cities like Pensacola, Apalachicola, Savannah, or Charleston. Save yourself the trouble; they don’t compare. They are pretty, second-home, relatively low-density, vacation “hotels” spread out over many acres. Third, practically all of Florida’s New Urbanist communities are vehicle-oriented in the sense that no mass transit of any type is available to residents or visitors and none will be in the foreseeable future.

Actually, the problem is not so much with well intentioned and skilled New Urbanist planners or architects but with developers, government, and the public. I’m certain New Urbanist designers would rather work on something more socially redeeming than another upscale vacation community like Alys Beach. But where are the developers for those projects? Designing traditional neighborhoods in an existing city is difficult for many reasons. For one, in most cities what we’re talking about is flat out against existing regulations. Meaning it’s currently illegal. Plus, who owns/controls large swaths of deteriorated urban neighborhoods and is willing to risk a true fortune in an untested experiment? No one I know. Here’s a better question:  where exactly is the demand for that type of dense, mixed use, diverse, in-fill development?

Developers are entrepreneurs who respond to or in rare cases anticipate market demand. They are in that business to make a profit on their investment. Which is the way it must be. They are not the problem. Nor is local government, though they frequently share the blame by being so reluctant to change or to envision a new future beyond what is on the ground today.

It’s time to finger the culprits, the people directly responsible for destroying Florida’s urban and natural environments. That’s easy. Just read the classic comics. As Pogo said with amazing perspicacity as he regarded our polluted environment:

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Walt Kelly, original Earth Day poster, 1971.

The problem is us, meaning the larger American society because we still collectively insist on things that are harmful to our own best interests and that of the environment. We are comfortable in sprawling suburbs that eat sensitive environments like the Green Swamp or the Everglades or simply name whatever ecosystem you like that’s fallen under the urban development hammer.

The real bottom line is to convince developers, local (and state) governments, and the public that the combination of creative planning and architecture with developers who have verve and courage can result in denser, mixed use, diverse places that are attractive, livable, distinctive and sustainable. And not just for the moneyed few in vacation communities situated adjacent to beaches.

The message is simple. Sound urban design can work to the advantage of the environment by creating higher density, mixed use, diverse, increased connectivity, pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented communities that minimize land and water consumption. That’s critical because that message transcends the affluent specifics of Seaside, Windsor, and places like Rosemary Beach and Alys Beach and opens the opportunity of building livable neighborhoods in existing Florida cities and throughout the United States to a much boarder audience.

The last thing I want to leave you Gentle Readers with is a not so simple observation. Like Coral Gables, the communities of Seaside and Windsor have all come from ideas generated by a few enlightened private land owners, not from frequently apathetic public sector planners who work for local political jurisdictions. And certainly not from Florida regulatory agencies that have for many decades covered themselves in ignominy.

Although the contributions of enlightened developers have had major significance in Florida’s past and present urban development they can not and will not be the principal factor in determining land use densities across the State. Enlightened land owners are uncommon anywhere in the United States and in Florida constitute an endangered species. Therefore, history and common sense demonstrate that any movement advocating a sustainable environment that depends on the benevolence of developers, no matter how enlightened some seem, is doomed. Far more effective means are needed if our goal is to have environmentally sustainable urban development.

The big unknown is if the State (followed by local political jurisdictions) will stand up against the enormous sums thrown about by fat-cat powerbrokers to grease the political process and keep their subservient politicians in office. Will the State finally take a stand and be counted in the struggle to protect the environment for future generations by instituting truly effective State-wide growth controls and sustainability requirements (rather than the joke that is the current “growth control” legislation)? If the past is prologue to the future, then the answer to that enormous unknown is never.

But we have the records of New Urbanism and the Cross Florida Barge Canal to use as sticks with which to beat the politicians. Higher residential densities in smart growth communities have generated high consumer demand and can make serious money for owners of those developments. Seaside and Windsor and many others have proven the validity of that equation. All we need to do is to adapt those concepts to more reasonably priced communities and to build in multiple stories and introduce more mixed uses to further increase densities, diversity, connectivity, and create additional opportunities for urban places that are filled with excitement and vitality.

New urbanism, smart growth, and sustainability can make important differences for Florida’s future especially if those ideas are combined with the activism of environmentalists like Marjorie Carr. But they have to be tied into a State-wide, effective system of growth controls for them to work. Problem is, given the status quo that will be a terribly difficult, uphill struggle, just like fighting the Cross Florida Barge Canal was in the 1960s and 1970s.

Finding State or Federal representatives who would dare to oppose the economic interests of the powerbrokers or their bastardized conceptions of what constitutes a sustainable environment will be a struggle worthy of Diogenes the Cynic, whose daylight quest with a lantern “for an honest man” was probably the most powerful statement in history of a person’s contempt for his culture. The only sustainability concern that is real for Florida powerbrokers is to keep money flowing into their pockets. They will do almost anything to keep that specific “sustainability” pipeline open. That’s no exaggeration. The power elite want everyone to remember the famous equation:

Money talks and bullshit walks.

The fat-cat powerbrokers have the money and they’re talking — meaning, defining what it means to be sustainable and controlling the State land regulatory process. The environmentalists, New Urbanists, and smart growth planners have relatively little money and thus, according to the equation, are full of bullshit. So they’re walking — meaning, playing the outside game.

The only way to wipe out that disturbing analogy is by creating a new reality, a powerful paradigm that combines New Urbanism with genuine environmental values and whole-system sustainability; a paradigm not dictated by the “Money Talks” crowd and their bend-over, easy-virtue politicians now in office.

The big question remains: Can that vision become reality? My best answer is a tentative MAYBE. Stay tuned.

Seeds Planted and Grown

Andrea Wulf’s new book, Founding Gardeners, recently reached No. 32 on the New York Times bestseller list. You might think that an unlikely accomplishment for a gardening history of the United States written in English by a German national, but Wulf has taken a number of heroic figures of the American Revolution and wrapped them in the cloak of the postmodern victory garden. Her book argues that George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison among others were all dirt-under-the-fingernails gardeners whose love of the soil shaped the way they forged a newly born nation. Wulf goes to some lengths to explain how the Founders brought a new country and their own gardens simultaneously to fruition.

According to one review, “Wulf’s scholarship, passion and pleasing prose make for a happy combination: a history book for gardeners, a gardening book for historians.” My take on her subject is quite different.

Let’s ignore the gardens of the “Founding Fathers” — don’t you just love the patriarchal onomatopoeia — and look elsewhere for the seeds they planted and the fruits of their labor that are with us to this day. This past month provided a critical clue and a wonderful launch point for that search.

The month of May 2011 marked the 50^th anniversary of the travails of the largely forgotten Freedom Riders, those courageous blacks and whites who rode interstate buses in an attempt to integrate bus terminals in Alabama and Mississippi. The Freedom Riders were threatened with violence unimaginable today and were beaten savagely, fire-bombed, tear gassed, attacked by police dogs and mobs of brutal white thugs, and arrested, tried, and convicted for trying to get the police in those States to enforce earlier U.S. Supreme Court civil rights decisions. And today, you don’t have to listen very closely to right-wingers or conservatives to hear talk of states rights and angry complaints that the federal government has no right to force business owners to serve or employ anyone they don’t want to.

The seeds of racial hatred, prejudice, and discrimination were planted by eleven of the first 13 Presidents of the United States who were slave owners and by all the signers of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It’s a dirty little fact few want to talk about today. Every one of our “Founding Fathers” were either slave owners or were directly complicit by allowing slave owners and slave states to prosper politically and financially. In essence, for at least the first 50 years of its existence this country was built on the backs and the sweat of black slaves. Those were the seeds planted by our “Founding Fathers.”

If Readers do not find much to agree with in my point of view, consider the reasons the "three-fifths" clause was inserted in the Constitution (Article I, section 2) to determine a state's representation in Congress and the number of Electors in the Electoral College. That insertion wasn’t an accident; it was an intentional act with intentional consequences. Through exercise of the "three-fifths" clause, slave states always had one-third more seats in Congress and in the Electoral College than their free population justified even though, naturally, slaves were unable to vote. Thus, slave states had greater voice in Congress and in presidential elections than a straight popular vote would have earned them. That meant southern states collectively gained an advantage that often provided the margin of victory in close elections, for example in 1800 when Thomas Jefferson won over northern rivals John Adams and Aaron Burr.

We know the results of those seeds: the Civil War, Reconstruction, the economic slavery imposed by tenant farming and share cropping, Jim Crow laws, KKK, White Citizens’ Councils, lynching and other mindless violence, voter “registration” laws in the South, de facto and de jure segregation, separate and unequal.

As a direct result of the seeds planted by our “Founding Fathers” we live in an America where racism is omnipresent. Don’t bother claiming that we are enjoying a justified moment of national pride over our racial progress, with a black man elected as President. Just listen to the context and subtext of what conservatives are saying about Obama not being born in America, not being one of us, not being qualified to go to Harvard, etc, etc.

In 21^st Century America, racism is definitely not extinguished or even totally sub-rosa, though many optimists believe it can be beaten. But not in the short life left to me. Those seeds were planted too well and have established deep roots. That’s what I see, an old white guy who’s been leaning left for a long time.

But, what do black people see? And I don’t mean about whether prejudice still flourishes in America because they all see that even if too many whites refuse to.

They saw Ronald Reagan launch his 1980 election campaign by invoking states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, that bastion of White Citizens’ Councils and unrepentant racial hatred. They’ve seen a war on drugs that, if you judge by the convictions, looks like a war on black people. They saw George Bush gleefully drag the specter of Willie Horton from stump to stump. They saw the George W. Bush campaign’s scurrilous attack in South Carolina on John McCain’s mythological black love-child. They’ve seen the pathetic failures of half-hearted school busing and housing desegregation. They’ve seen Senator Trent Lott praise Strom Thurmond for his unadulterated racism, claiming this would be a better country if Thurmond had been elected President. They’ve seen the horrors brought by Hurricane Katrina as black citizens pleaded on national television for their government to help them. They see America for what it really is while whites see only what they want.

As Ta-Nehisi Coates argued in April 2008 in the Atlantic Monthly, a considerable portion of the black electorate consists of an “organic” tradition of conservatives "who favor hard work and moral reform over protests and government intervention." But the black American who feels that way inevitably "votes Democratic, not out of any love for abortion rights or progressive taxation, but because he feels — in fact, he knows — that the modern-day GOP draws on the support of people who hate him."

Seeds planted and grown.

St. Louis University 01

My connection with Academe, that sweet-and-sour bitch, started in fall 1962 when I enrolled as a freshman at Saint Louis University. Taking the entrance exam is only a faint blur; my only clear memory of that dreaded event is nervousness suffered in a dark hallway of a no-name lecture building (a good guess is that it was pre-renovation DeSmet Hall), whose very walls dripped unvoiced tales of failed exams, dashed hopes, and ruined lives. Whatever my score, I was admitted unconditionally.

I shall not bore you, Gentle Reader, with a course-by-course recitation of Pilgrim’s Progress through the Wilderness of Learning. Suffice to say, even after a full year’s sabbatical from intellectual pursuits at R.L. Polk, I was not emotionally prepared or sufficiently mature to be a serious college student.

During that first week, my disorientation was total. Not knowing the names of the buildings, where to study between classes, I felt lost and completely alone. Then, almost in desperation, I started hanging out with my brother, Jack, and his friends at the Arts Lounge on the first floor of DuBourg Hall. That quickly and permanently became my home away from home. Someone from that group was in the Arts Lounge at all times through the day, from 7:00 AM through 5:00 PM. You could leave your books, coat, whatever, go to class, come back and the same guys would still be there talking about classes, whose professors were the bigger assholes, studying, or, and this was far more likely, playing cards at the same tables, morning, noon, and into the evening during exam weeks. We actually called ourselves the Arts Lounge Good Times Society (ALGTS) and had sweatshirts made up that featured a totally bogus heraldic shield with the ALGTS initials floating over it and wore those sweatshirts to class every Thursday and refused to tell anyone what it meant because it was a secret society and if we told them we’d have to kill them. It was our less than potent dig at the asshole fraternities and sororities that ruled social life on the University campus. We, of course, were streetcar students lived somewhere in the surrounding city and reveled in our status as GDIs (God Damned Independents).

It probably won’t surprise you, Gentle Reader, if I note that our time was only occasionally occupied with studying. What we really did was play cards all day long. Mostly bridge but sometimes hearts. Bridge was the ruling passion. Well, it never was my particular passion because I didn’t get ego-involved like most of the others. Hearts was my game and I was a tiger, constantly going after the big, spectacular win and getting it more often than not. I was a savage hearts player but barely tolerated bridge, largely because everyone else seemed to live and breathe it and I found their absorption off-putting.

But it was bridge that occupied most of our time and energies, not studying, discussion of young women, or other card games. As my distinctly mediocre grades attested. That first year I nearly flunked out of Spanish through a near total lack of studying and barely managed to earn a ‘D’. Somehow, in sophomore year, my irresponsible party attitude, much in evidence during school days as well as on week-ends, worsened a good deal as I fell into the rhythm of college. The inevitable result was I flunked my first and only course, Introduction to Philosophy. In truth, all I had to do to pass was take the final exam and the Philosophy professor, a nice guy but a terribly ineffective teacher, assured me I would receive a ‘D’. No way, hose-head. Even in the mental stupor that then characterized my classroom performance it had dawned on me that by accepting the ‘D’ I would set the tone for all future Philosophy courses, of which I had to have at least three, for a minimum of 15 hours. So, intentionally, and with a heavy heart, I declined to take the exam and received the only ‘F’ of my college career. I did it because I knew a failing grade would force me to take a “make-up” course during the summer session; I was determined to do well in that course.

That summer of 1963 was the season of my intellectual awakening. In the first Summer Session I first re-took the two parts of First Year Spanish and in the second Summer Session I re-enrolled in the Introduction to Philosophy course. The Spanish was a whirl-wind 11 hours of course work, actually divided into two separate sub-sessions. The first Spanish class met from 8:00 AM to 10:00 and the second from 10:00 to noon. The teacher was a fairly young guy in his late twenties named Bill Walker, a grad student working on a PhD in Spanish. He may have been a good teacher in many ways but he also was an arrogant dickhead who obviously enjoyed terrorizing and bullying his students.

To everyone’s surprise, including my own, I earned a ‘B’ and then an ‘A’ in Spanish 101 and Spanish 102. In the next summer session I received a very solid ‘B’ in the Philosophy course, discovering in the process that I actually enjoyed the subject, probably because the young Jesuit instructor introduced us to Existentialism and ignored the intensely boring Scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas to which I had reacted so negatively the previous semester.

That summer was a true watershed in my life. It marked a distinct change in direction for me and constituted the beginning of the end of the intellectual immaturity that had so dominated my previous moments. For the first time I worked on becoming a relatively serious student. Naturally, that transformation did not occur overnight. But at least by junior year I was on the way.

It was during that summer that four of the ALGTS crowd traveled to Seattle for the World’s Fair. My brother, Jack, Bob J., Paul H. and Jerry O. decided to go for two weeks, driving Bob J’s 1957 Chevy. I remember being upset that I wasn’t asked to accompany them. When I confronted Jack about it, he angrily told me that there wasn’t enough room for five guys with all the luggage. And anyway, they were his friends, not mine. So there. I remember sulking about it for a week then let it go.

One night after work, Bob J. dropped a bombshell. His father had turned him down on a $1,200 loan to cover the costs of the trip and he didn’t know if he could go, which meant the trip was off. When I questioned him about why he needed so much money it turned out that only $500 was for the trip; the rest was for tuition for the coming year. I did a quick mental calculation. The more than $2,300 in my savings account, savings from my job at R.L. Polk and the Dairy, was easily enough to cover my tuition for the coming year and Bob J’s expenses as well. So I agreed to be his banker. I simply told him that I would lend him the money and not charge interest.

For a few minutes he didn’t believe I had that much cash in the bank. Not until Jack confirmed my assessment of my financial reserves. From the frown on Jack’s face I knew he wholeheartedly disapproved. Always the wiser, older brother, even though my loan to Bob meant the trip was back on. When Dad found out what I had proposed he hit the roof. From birth a cautious accountant, he wanted to know what I planned to do if Bob J. couldn’t or wouldn’t pay me back. How could I go to college without that money? He ranted and raved for quite a while but to no avail. I lent Bob the money anyway. I really didn’t give a rat’s ass what my father thought.

As ridiculous as this may sound, I might have listened to Dad except the year previous I had read in the financial pages and various magazines how well AT&T was doing and wanted to invest about $1,500 in their stock. Dad had talked me out of it, using the same reasoning expressed above concerning the possible loss of the money and the resulting inability to pay my tuition. Not three months later the stock went through the roof, split, rose, and split again. Had I followed my instincts, I would have almost tripled my investment within a year. So much for Dad’s acumen as an investment counselor. That incident had really pissed me off and colored me feelings about my father’s supposedly superior financial acumen.

That situation certainly colored my decision to lend Bob J. the money. After all, he was a good friend; if friends wouldn’t help each other what kind of world would we live in? Okay, that’s a horribly naive reason for lending your hard-earned money but that’s exactly how I felt. Hey, you have to remember I was twenty years old. And very impulsive. Meaning immature as hell. But I knew full well where my priorities lay.

Once the deed was done I worried about it for a couple days but when they hit the road I simply forgot it. Until Jack called home collect from a Los Angeles hospital. They had been in a bad accident. It was a miracle but no one was killed. On the other hand Bob J’s car was dead. TOTALED! Not only that but he had taken out more than a hundred yards of chain-link fencing while crashing off the San Bernardino Freeway, rolling down a steep embankment and landing on railroad tracks. And the State of California was making ugly, threatening noises about billing him for replacing the fence. Holy shit!

It turned out the four adventurers had spent the previous night in Las Vegas playing the macho stud role in the casinos instead of sleeping. Bob J, the head macho and owner of the car, had insisted on driving straight to Los Angeles instead of pulling off the road and catching a few ZZs. Just to stay on schedule. Needless to say, he fell asleep at the wheel in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Why they all weren’t killed was a mystery to the California Highway Patrol officer who was behind them and witnessed the whole thing. He had seen their car weaving and attempted to catch up with lights flashing and siren wailing but the car went off the highway before he pulled close to it. When he ran down the slope to the wreck at the bottom of a steep arroyo there was the car, lying across two sets of train tracks. He was astounded to see four guys crawl out, virtually unscratched. Well, either Bob J. or Jerry O. had a broken finger but that was it. In the confusion, no one realized the implications of a car sitting on the railroad tracks until a train whistle blasted away the atmosphere of serendipity. Even if the car had not been destroyed in the initial accident, not much was left after a monster Union Pacific engine precipitously removed the intruding vehicle from its right-of-way.

All four weary but unhurt (emotions do not count in that assessment) travelers stayed in Los Angeles another day or two, then boarded a Greyhound bus and headed forlornly home. Four whipped puppies with their tails between their legs. As an aside, they hated the cross-country Greyhound experience so much not one of those guys would never again get on a long-distance bus.

Bob J. wound up having to pay the State for the fence. But he also paid me back in full by the next summer. It was later than he had originally promised, but pay he did. He offered to give me a couple hundred dollars to cover the interest but I declined, figuring he had been hurt enough. Dad was the first person I gleefully told. What a malicious bastard I could be. Yeah, I had learned at the knee of the master.

Coprolite

Coprolite              Fossilized excrement, fecal matter, or dung that, depending on the animal that left it behind, may contain whole organisms, appendages, bone fragments, plant remains, seeds, or even pollen. Coprolites record the diets (types of food), feeding behaviors (did the animal eat juveniles or adults or grasses or woody plants), digestive system function, and habitats of prehistoric animals (wetland, woodland, upland, desert, pelagic ocean, etc.). Analysis of coprolite composition can tell paleontologists not only what the animal ate but also its feeding behavior. For example, if a coprolite is rich in calcium and phosphorus that are found in bones, sinew, and claws, the depositing animal was likely a carnivore, either a predator or scavenger. But if the fossilized feces consist of partially digested plant material, the animal was most likely an herbivore. The term was coined from two Greek words: kopros, meaning dung, and lithikos, meaning stone, in 1829 by William Buckland (1784-1856), a noted British fossil hunter, clergyman, and Oxford professor of geology and mineralogy. Combined, we get fossilized feces.

Fun Stuff: Here’s an amazing story about a dinosaur dump. An exceptionally large coprolite discovered in Saskatchewan, Canada, at the Eastend Fossil Research Station provided paleontologists with direct evidence of dinosaurian food consumption activity. The specimen was found in the 65-million year old Frenchman Formation. The Saskatchewan coprolite was an elongated, fractured mass of rock that measured about 17 x 6 x 5 inches. About 200 associated fragments weathered downslope from the larger mass and would have contributed to the original volume of the feces, estimated to have been about 2½ quarts. The specimen contained fragments of shattered bone; its great size distinguished it as the largest individual carnivore/scavenger (depending or which paleontologist you are inclined to believe) coprolite yet described. Although determining the identity of the species of animal that produced a coprolite is usually problematic, several clues indicate a tyrannosaur origin, especially the large size of the deposit and the geologic and temporal contexts in which the coprolite was found, near an almost complete tyrannosaur fossil. Of the crocodilian species and carnivorous dinosaurs documented in the Frenchman Formation, Tyrannosaurus rex was the most likely suspect capable of producing such an incredible fecal log. Microscopic analysis of the distribution of bone fibers and blood vessels in the shattered bone fragments in the coprolite indicated that the digested animal was a young herbivorous dinosaur that was likely about the size of a cow. The remarkable state of preservation of the fossil probably was facilitated by flooding on the ancient coastal lowland plain on which the fecal mass was deposited and rapid burial of the largely intact feces. A fascinating photo of that coprolite can be found at: http://gsc.nrcan.gc.ca/paleochron/29_e.php

More Fun Stuff: Numerous coprolites from Shasta ground sloth, a long extinct North American herbivore that was as large as an Alaskan brown bear, have been found in Rampart Cave in the lower Grand Canyon, which is now part of the arid Mojave Desert. Analysis of the ground sloth  coprolites revealed that 10,000 to 15,000 years ago the environment supported single-leaf ash and juniper trees, ephedra (or Mormon tea), shad scale shrubs, cactus, globe mallow, and even aquatic plants. Environments supporting that vegetation today can only be found at elevations 3,000 or more feet higher than the cave where the fossilized dung was discovered, indicating climate change had occurred in the interim. Interestingly, even though sloths were slow moving and lived in Southwestern areas inhabited by the ancient ones, no evidence has been found that they were hunted by humans. Perhaps something in their diet made their flesh unpalatable. And you thought paleontologists played no role in the analysis of climatic change, human-animal interactions, or genetic changes over the life of a population. Who says geoscience doesn’t deal with fascinating shit?

Miami Beach: Urban Solutions 02: — EATING FLORIDA

 In many ways, Miami Beach is the creation of one man, Carl G. Fisher, a partially blind, high school drop-out. Fisher became a successful manufacturer of compressed acetylene headlights used by the first cars, which then evolved into the first automotive headlights. After selling that firm to Union Carbide for nine million dollars, Fisher morphed into a land developer in Indianapolis who built the Indianapolis Speedway. Before he arrived in southern Florida, Miami Beach consisted of a 200-foot wide continuous strip of barrier island-sand bar that paralleled the coast. It was occupied largely by tidal mangroves, plagues of mosquitoes and those always nasty sandflies. Only a few feet above sea level, the island sloped gently east and west away from a line of fragile sand dunes. Not many years before Fisher showed up, an 81-year-old Quaker farmer, John S. Collins, had established an avocado plantation on the slightly higher northern end of the island and was chiefly interested in furthering his silvacultural pursuits. But Collins family members had other ideas about developing the island, primarily as prime oceanfront property but ran short of the needed capital. And thus Carl Fisher became involved.

Recognizing that opportunity as the gold mine it was, Fisher immediately bought more land from two local bankers, the Lummus brothers, and began dredging what ended up as three million cubic yards of sand and mud from the bottom of Biscayne Bay. It should come as no surprise that that action totally destroyed that part of the Bay as a natural biological community, perhaps for the remaining period of human occupance on Earth. The spoil was piled on the sand bar to create a “real” island. As an aside, Fisher paid absolutely nothing for the fill materials dredged from Biscayne Bay. Not one thin dime. His only costs were for labor and machinery, not materials. After the pumping was completed, Fisher got down to the real work. In 1921 alone, Carl and his associates sold over $23 million in lots lining the recently poured streets and sidewalks of the newly named “Miami Beach.”

Say what you want about his appalling lack of environmental concern, Fisher was a modern Spanish conquistador, driven by his own vision of gold, Florida land speculation gold he hoped would start filling his pockets and never stop. The Miami Beach we see today, with all its marvels and foibles, is a testament to his single-minded determination to succeed no matter what havoc he wreaked on the environment. But we’ve come to praise Carl, not to bury him with hindsight. Or at least to praise what he wrought, if only indirectly.

Carl Fisher wanted Lincoln Road to be the Miami Beach counterpart to Fifth Avenue in New York, serving as the link connecting development on Biscayne Bay with that fronting the Atlantic Ocean. Although in the South Florida boom times it came close to matching any number of upscale shopping districts in major U.S. cities, that bubble eventually popped and the area fell into a slow decline.

Today, Lincoln Road is a pedestrian mall between Alton Road and Washington Avenue. It is thriving as a shopping and dining destination for locals and tourists alike. Restaurants offer indoor or outdoor seating or both. If you pay attention you’ll hear a cornucopia of languages, including the ubiquitous Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, French, German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Arabic and many that you may have trouble identifying. Street people of all varieties wander up and down the Mall: tourists from Iowa gawking, well dressed straights, strikingly attired gays and trans-gendereds, mothers with children, bicyclers, roller bladers, skateboarders, muscle-heads in wifebeaters, even jugglers and magicians to spice things up. It’s diversity up the ying-yang.

If you Road Trip to Miami Beach the first thing that should catch your eye is the marvelous Art Deco design. Art Deco as a style of painting, architecture, industrial and interior design was widely influenced by a combination of modern and ancient art. It started with Art Nouveau and the Art and Crafts movement and rapidly evolved with inputs from Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Constructivism. However, it also freely borrowed themes first expressed in the highly standardized design styles of several ancient cultures, particularly Assyrian, Egyptian and Persian. Art Deco designers used stepped forms, rounded corners, multiple-striped decorative elements and black decoration characteristic of those cultures. The critical elements were frequently aligned in geometrical order and expressed in a simple format stripped of excess ornamentation and typically relied on modern age, machine-like materials.

The style we define today as Art Deco had two principal sources. The first was a synthesis of numerous exotic and dynamic cultural influences that became popular in the first two decades of the 20th Century, culminating in Paris, that eternal hotbed of artistic accomplishment. Some art historians believe the nick-name, Art Deco, arose as a semi-official abbreviation of the 1925 Paris Design Fair, the “Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes.” Others correctly point out that the Societe des Artistes Decorateurs was formed back in 1901 in Paris with the goals of merging industrial mass production with the decorative arts. And still others claim the name was first used in 1966 during a retrospective of the 1925 Paris show. Whatever the origin of the name, in the early 1920s the movement was essentially taken over and championed by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe. His stunning set designs, borrowing heavily from African and Oriental art and characterized by visually sensuous patterns and materials, became the rage of avant-garde theater-goers throughout Europe and popularized the movement among upper-crust trend setters.

That exotic development in Paris merged with the more technical influences of the Italian Futurists and such leading Cubist artists as Dali and Cocteau. It also borrowed extensively from Egyptian funerary artifacts (especially inspired by the discovery of munificent riches in Tut-ankh-amun’s tomb by Howard Carter in 1922 that so excited international society) as well as the art of the Mayans, Aztecs, Moors, and Assyrians. Early Art Deco also luxuriated in the application of rare and expensive materials and capitalized on the fluidity of nature by using fountains, curves, seashells, and rare and mythic animals as central motifs and themes.

The second great source of Art Deco inspiration was its assimilation into modern American culture of the late 1920s and 1930s. Among the major artistic and architectural influences were the Chicago Century of Progress (1933) and the New York World’s Fair (1939). Of special significance was the movement’s adoption into the American mass production mainstream of industrial design. Household appliances, cars, women’s fashion accessories, fine jewelry, furniture, hotels, apartments, even factories were designed in the Art Deco style, which incidentally is also known to building-type specialists as Art or Style Moderne. By the mid-thirties, Art Deco had literally exploded on the international artistic scene as a major force. In New York City alone the famous Radio City Music Hall, the Chrysler Building, and the Waldorf Astoria are striking examples of Art Deco design.

The tropical Art Deco architecture of Miami Beach proudly shouted its rejection of all that was staid and conventional with its racing stripes, rounded corners, raised eyebrows (otherwise known to us cultural low-lifes as canopies) over porthole windows and glass block walls. Constructed largely during the mid- to late-1930s, the colorful Art Deco structures brought to full flower a design style that was visually stimulating, exuberant, daringly seductive, sensual, theatrical, original and alive with an irrepressibly vibrant dynamism. The rich combinations of curved surfaces juxtaposed with flat walls, luxurious ornamentation, steel railings, curvilinear windows, flat roofs, and pastel colors dazzle the eye and excite the imagination. Although each Art Deco building exhibits considerable individuality, the power of the striking architectural theme results in a remarkable visual unity throughout the South Beach area and much of the rest of Miami Beach.

But architectural styles inevitably fall out of fashion and are no longer at the cutting edge of style. Or even interesting. Shortly after World War II the South Beach area settled into twenty years of genteel neglect. Salvation arrived in the mid-1970s when Barbara Capitman and Leonard Horowitz visited and discovered a forgotten treasure trove, hundreds of visually exciting but aging Art Deco buildings. Capitman and Horowitz were so enthused by the idea of saving the wonderful architecture they helped found the Miami Design Preservation League in 1976 with the express purpose of reversing the downward trend and immediately halting the demolition of buildings in varying stages of deterioration.

In 1979, after well more than a decade of neglect followed by a decade of rampant decline, one square mile of Miami Beach was listed an “Historic District” in the National Register of Historic Places. Suddenly, restoration was in the air as developers realized they could earn substantial tax credits for bringing buildings designated as historic back to life. The District is officially located between 5th Street on the south, 23rd Street on the north, Ocean Drive on the east and Lenox Court on the south. It contains more than 650 buildings in the distinctive Mediterranean Revival and Art Deco styles. Although many additional examples of these designs types can be found in other sections of Miami Beach and in the Greater Miami Metropolitan Area, the District contains more buildings in the Art Deco style, nearly 500, than any other single area in the country. And many of those structures are truly outstanding and are among the finest examples of that design type existing today.

But all is not perfect in that sub-tropical paradise. Crime and poverty are not unknown. And a substantial number of the lovely old structures face a harsh reality, one that may have no viable upside. City of Miami Beach building officials say the reality is that many of the old Art Deco buildings, as historically significant as they are, may not survive the ravages of time and shoddy construction. No matter how much money and effort are expended, whether by private owners or developers. The heart of the problem for some of the structures is neither age nor a lack of maintenance that inevitably leads to deterioration but with the original building materials. Which all too often included beach sand and sea water. The simple fact is that not long after the internal reinforcement rods come in contact with salt they begin to erode. It’s only a matter of time until the surrounding concrete starts deteriorating and eventually crumbles.

Little can be done about saving original structures that are infected with those problems. The truth that many preservationists don’t want to acknowledge is renovation and restoration can be a bitch because you never know what’s behind a wall or the ceiling until you rip it out. And either find rot and decay or an usable whatever it is you’re looking at. My heart is squarely on the side of preservation but when it’s your money at risk renovation decisions become far more complex.

Exacerbating that already difficult situation is old-fashioned human greed. Many developers would rather see their Art Deco buildings crumble and then rebuild with modern structures containing three or four times more floors. Thus, making considerably more money. Although some developers have offered to rebuild replicas of the hotels that are facing the wrecking ball it’s not certain whether that alternative would be acceptable to historic preservation board members.

One reason historic preservationists are upset is because they believe that the City’s Building Department itself is adding to the problem by being too quick to condemn deteriorated structures. And they have accused developers of adopting a policy of deliberate neglect. Because it’s so much less expensive to knock the buildings down and replace them with larger structures than it is to restore them. Again, it’s a complex situation with no easy answers.

Now for a change of pace. After a long day trudging around South Beach’s Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue you might get tired of the preening, beautiful people. And the milling hordes of middle-class strainers and strivers desperate to spot those preening, beautiful people. And making themselves as obnoxious as humanly possible by intruding in ways that would embarrass a stone. The solution is to take a Road Trip to North Beach, SoBe’s prole relative. It doesn’t have a single high-fashion model draped around a light pole. Or photographers dashing up and down the streets eager to snap a photo to sell to the grocery store rags. And yes, North Beach is decidedly unhip and even on the wrong side of grungy. Ain’t no doubt about it. Commercial uses that have seen better days are everywhere. North Beach is the type of urban place where the Walgreens is an anchor store. Only it’s anchoring a gaggle of inexpensive ethnic restaurants — Italian, Argentinean, Cuban, Peruvian. And a kosher deli or three, of course.

However gritty North Beach’s urban ambiance, it’s refreshingly real when compared to the more touristy part of South Beach on Ocean Drive. It’s a lot like the old urban neighborhoods I was familiar with as a kid. So, I find that it fits like a comfortable old shoe. Not especially attractive but somehow reassuring and appealing on a gut level. It delivers more substance than the other-worldly South Beach, with its nose stuck high in the air, so desperate it is to attract beautiful people, the moneyed crowd, and assorted phonies. You’ve got to remember, as an urban planner I get paid to turn places like North Beach around. So I find communities like that, with workable urban fabric and with a lot more opportunities than constraints, to be absolutely irresistible, at least on a professional basis. But certain parts of North Beach are definitely on the edge. So, don’t walk around with your head up your ass, to coin a phrase. Vigilance should be a way of life, especially for women. No matter where you are or what time of day it is.

Implications

The thing is, despite beginning as an unmitigated environmental disaster, Miami Beach succeeds in doubled spades as an urban place where its neighbor Coral Gables makes an only slightly better than passing grade. Despite the oh-so-tony Miracle Mile and nearby and adjacent blocks of higher density development, Coral Gables is mostly a low-density suburb. Yes, a teeth-rattlingly attractive suburb but a suburb nonetheless.

Miami Beach, especially South Beach, features much higher densities, many more mixed uses, and far greater socioeconomic diversity, making it an urban place of great excitement and vibrancy. And I’m not talking about a block or two but mile after mile. Make no mistake, Miami Beach is about celebrating life for a wide range of social and income groups largely because of its higher densities and greater variety of mixed uses. The State needs more Miami Beach-type solutions — meaning higher densities, mixed uses, increased connectivity, and diversity — to slow developers from eating land and water resources at prodigious rates. Period. Well, not necessarily Miami Beach with all its warts and baggage but you should get the message.

Incidentally, warts and baggage are what you get with real cities rather than faux creations like Disney’s Celebration. But more on that topic later.