Long before Coconut Grove’s first high-rise was built at 2951 S. Bayshore Dr., that address was known as The Compound and described by Miami Herald reporter Stephen Trumbull “…a pastoral setting of cottages…occupied by newspaper and news wire service men and women…” and UM professors. The verdant property would become Sailboat Bay Apartments, later The […]

On January 1, 2020 I officially became a minimalist. I’m collecting experiences now, not stuff. I also figured, the less I own the more I can travel, only there’s no traveling this year. I still need my dose of traveling though. Travel is ESSENTIAL.  While international traveling is suspended, people came up with these virtual traveling ideas. The Vatican Museum, The […]

As a Cuban-American New Yorker, I have strong family and cultural ties to South Florida. Since childhood I spent summer vacations in the Magic City, soaking up Cuban culture as well as the glorious sunshine. Once I started working as a teacher for the New York public schools, I continued the tradition of enjoying July […]

We moved to Miami by accident in 1953. We drove down from Chicago for a vacation and stayed in Miami Beach at the Tradewinds Hotel. One day my parents told my two older sisters and me they would be gone for a few hours, and we were to stay at the pool and not go […]

Much has been made of 16-year-old Bill Clinton meeting John F. Kennedy when Clinton was Arkansas’s delegate to Boys Nation in 1963. There’s even a famous photo. Though I was a bit younger and lacked official recognition, I, too, met JFK. It was a combination of luck and living in Miami Beach. Perhaps a bit of chutzpah, […]

“Look, Mom! I’m a princess!” I used to yell from the inside of a tree that stood the height of a two-story house in the heart of Coral Gables, close to my childhood home, the one my parents still live in today. The tree stood on a triangular patch of grass bordered by Banos Court, […]

There was a lot happening in Miami in the middle and late1920s when my father, Tom, and my mother, Ruth, as newlyweds, came across the Tamiami Trail from Fort Myers. My father, nicknamed “Doc,” had been in the lumber business in Fort Myers as a young man and left for Miami to take a management […]

Buenos días, Miami Everything here is from somewhere else: the coffee, the milk, the woman bending over her lunch; the fresh-cut gold of mango running between her fingers; even the ocean gathering itself and its children from the streets paved with palm fronds and heat. The turtles are not from here; the manatees, the alligators, […]

Pizza I sit in East Hialeah, a white, leather-top stool at Mr. Bee’s Pizza, a leftover outdoor ‘50s soda shop just off Palm Avenue. These are out days with Father, and this is his favorite spot. Mabel and Mitzy shift their weight to their feet, push into a spin. Father lets them, so does Mr. […]