Deco, MiMo, and Up We Go
Can Miami's past survive the overheated present?
BY WAYNE CURTIS
Sallye Jude sits in the fussy Victorian
lobby of the Miami River Inn, just west of downtown
Miami. A curious dalliance between past and future
exists on this stretch of the river; the new NeoLofts
condominium complex next door, which rises 21 stories
over the inn, got its first residents just the night
before. The tower is white and lean and aggressively
geometric. It emits a pale glow at twilight, a ghostly
presence hovering over the densely landscaped grounds
and historic buildings that make up the inn.
Jude has been involved in Florida preservation efforts
since 1972, and her achievements include saving the
grandly neoclassical Warner Place, a home completed
in 1912 that she and her partners converted to offices
in the neighborhood between downtown and East Little
Havana. While engaged in that project, Jude noticed
a derelict assortment of turn-of-the-century frame
boarding houses nearby, the last of a once-common
local breed. In 1989, Jude and six partners started
to buy the buildings. Over the next three years they
acquired 11 adjacent properties—including a former
guest house called the Rose Arms, where a week's
stay once cost $16—and invested $5 million in
restoration and landscaping.
Jude faced setbacks in bringing this inn back to life—among
them, a crime wave that targeted tourists, and the
fallout from a failed bank that had financed the project.
But she confronted an even more formidable hurdle
in integrating her vision into that of the city. "It
was a hard job to convince people that there's
history here and it needs to be preserved," she
says.
Preservation had traditionally lacked a voice in Miami,
in part, Jude says, because powerful landowners exerted
an outsized influence on decisions at city hall. But
it's also because, in Miami, the past isn't
all that past, and history hasn't defined city
character as it has in so many other eastern seaboard
locales. It started as a mid-19th-century frontier
outpost but didn't get on the map until after
its incorporation in 1896, the same year Henry Flagler
brought his railroad south to take advantage of frost-free
winters. When nearly the whole of the city's
history can be recalled by living residents, the case
to preserve the remnants tends to be hard to make.
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