Miami Beach has reached a better and higher purpose thanks to the more ambitious vision of Thomas Krammer which changed the course of the initial planning of the Lummus Brothers.
Dating to 1912, South of Fifth Street was the
first subdivision of Miami Beach to be developed. The brothers James and John
Lummus set out to create an affordable seaside community for the “proletariat,”
Mr. Cary said. They plotted lots 50 feet wide, small enough that even people
with modest incomes could afford to buy land and build homes, Mr. Cary said.
The area served as the industrial and
transportation hub of the city back then, with railyards and oil tanks.
Buildings of three stories or less continued to
be built in an Art Deco style until 1954 when the Fontainebleau Hotel opened
farther north. With 1,504 rooms and multiple restaurants, theaters, arcades and
coffee shops, it began to “suck all the energy out of South Beach,” Mr. Cary
said.
South of Fifth became desolate. Conditions
worsened after 1980, when the Mariel boatlift dropped 125,000 Cubans in
Florida. South of Fifth was disproportionately affected, city officials said.
The area became known for drug dealing, and the streets were considered unsafe
at night. It decayed into a zone of abandoned warehouses, seedy efficiency
hotels and boarded-up properties. Mr. Cary recalled seeing vagrants living in
the then-vacant Brown’s Hotel on Ocean Drive, lighting the rooms with candles.
Then, while on vacation in early 1992, Thomas
Kramer, a German businessman, took a helicopter ride over South Beach and had a
vision: to create a version of New York’s Battery Park City on the southern tip
of Miami Beach.
Before German reunification, Mr. Kramer had
started a fund to invest in East German real estate. The fund soon went
bankrupt. But he had also married into a wealthy German family.
With a reputation for knowing how to get things
done quickly, Mr. Kramer spent more than $100 million to buy real estate in Miami
Beach, including 45 acres south of Fifth Street. The area was then called South
Pointe; the dilapidated buildings served as chic locations for fashion model
shoots.
“Everyone thought he was crazy,” said Saul Gross,
the president of Streamline Properties and then a city commissioner. “He wanted
to buy whatever he could, and he was willing to pay whatever people were
asking; he wasn’t even negotiating.”
Mr. Kramer invited 11 architectural firms to
develop plans for the area. After six days of discussions, “Miami Beach’s
original city center was ready for its most spectacular facelift,” he said. * Source The New York Times.
No comments:
Post a Comment