Tag Archives: Aries Development

Who Is To Blame For The Destruction of the E.W.F. Stirrup House?

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One of the first pictures I ever took of the
E.W.F. Stirrup House – August 26, 2009

This is the inevitable finger-pointing now that the sad, almost decade-long, purposeful campaign of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT on the once-historic E.W.F. Stirrup House has ended.

SPOILER ALERT: In the end rapacious developers got what was wanted and needed. The once-historic house E.W.F. Stirrup House is no more, replaced by a reconstruction — or re-creation — which will be much easier and cheaper to bring up to the current building code.

Mission accomplished!!!

Read Say Goodbye to the E.W.F. Stirrup House While You Still Can, but here’s the capsule version for those who don’t follow links:

The developers were given permission by the Miami Historical Board to destroy the historic structure and replace it with an exact duplicate because the building was too far gone from termite damage and wood rot to restore. Those are the exact same conditions the developer allowed to be exerted on the house during the nearly decade-long campaign of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT.

City of Miami By-Law enforcement
officers discovered the E.W.F. Stirrup
House before I did – August 26, 2006

This reporter has been documenting in pictures and video the E.W.F. Stirrup House for more than 7 years. The thousands of pictures I’ve taken of this building over the years — which was designated a historic structure — proves how the all-wooden house was left open to the elements for most of that time, pointing to an unmistakable campaign of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT.

What’s more, there will be no penalty whatsoever and the developers may have even received grants to do what they did.

[This grant business is still being researched. As usual, a city department pledged to get this information to me weeks ago and has yet to do so. I knew I should have gone with a FOI request, as opposed to a personal promise.]

Who is responsible for this travesty? There’s enough blame to go around. Let’s name names.


Gino Falsetto/Aries Development


Click to enlarge

It all starts here.

However it happened (and I heard a doozy of a story that I was never able to confirm) several lots on Main Highway, at the corner of Franklin Avenue, were purchased and combined for development. So far, so good. Plans were drawn up. So far so good. Before building permits were issued there were objections that had to be satisfied from 3 different community groups, as the story goes:

  1. On the opposite side of Main Highway are several incredibly exclusive gated communities. How exclusive? The houses start at about $2 million and go into the stratosphere from there. The closer you get to Biscayne Bay, which is only 1000 feet away from the formerly-historic E.W.F. Stirrup House, the more you pay exponentially.

    These rich NIMBYs were concerned that their sunsets would be spoiled by a huge building to the west. While it’s unknown what height the developer originally proposed, eventually it was agreed to lower it to 5 stories and step it back from Main Highway, so that it would not create a huge edifice. However, that 5 story wall was instead presented to the rear of the E.W.F. Stirrup House.

  2. The second group accommodated were the Taurus’ customers. They argued that their historic drinking hole should be saved because it was old. The Taurus was a longtime Hippie Hangout, celebrated in story and song. One of the reasons it still was the place to drink in 2006 was because it was the only joint in the area that had a free parking lot. [We’ll ignore the implications of drinking and driving.] The rest of the Grove had parking meters or lots before you could go drinking.

    So, The Taurus was saved. One story says it was moved a few feet.
    Another says it was always right where you see it. But, it was saved.

    TO BE FAIR: The Taurus is an old building and one could argue that it should have been saved after all. I have found references from 1906 in which it was a Tea Room. However, it’s not as old as the E.W.F. Stirrup used to be before it was recreated.

  3. Then comes the once-historic E.W.F. Stirrup House.

    Some of the people of West Grove — the Black neighbourhood fanning out immediately west of the E.W.F. Stirrup House that would not have existed had not Ebenezer Woodbury Franklin Stirrup built it with his own 2 hands — were worried the Stirrup House might not be saved.

    Old Man Stirrup, as some called him, was the patriarch of the neighbourhood, one of Florida’s first Black millionaires, and a man who thought that home ownership was important for the Black families arriving to become the service industry for south Florida’s nascent tourist trade. His 2-story house, in a area of small 1-story Conch and Shotgun houses represented the legacy of the neighbourhood, which is why old-timers were concerned about its potential destruction.

    The developer made a commitment to the citizens of West Grove: The E.W.F. Stirrup House would be saved. However, that’s where the stories diverge. Some people remember that what was promised was a historic museum and resource center. The other story goes that this was the promise made by another group for the Mariah Brown House, a few doors to the west, and that a Bed and Breakfast was always what had been proposed for the once-historic E.W.F. Stirrup House all along.

The recreated Mariah Brown House at 3298 Charles Avenue

IRONY ALERT: The Mariah Brown House was once the oldest house on Charles Avenue. When it was recreated, that honour then went to the E.W.F. Stirrup House.

No matter. What eventually got approved and built at Franklin and Main is officially called the Grove Gardens Residence
Condominiums, at 3540 Main Highway. Unofficially (in the Not Now Silly
Newsroom) this structure is known as The Monstrosity. It’s also a blockbuster, in
an older sense of the word: the building that busts the block; the building
that future developers will point to and say, “But you’ve already allowed
this kind of density, height, and development in this community. Why not me?” [Prediction: eventually the Coconut Grove Playhouse restoration (or will that be another reconstruction?) will point to The Monstrosity to show what’s been allowed. But, as usual, I digress.]

This picture is from February 22, 2013. I had already been
photographing these open windows for 4 years at this point.

It’s crucial to keep this in mind as you continue to read about this travesty:

Once Aries Development got its grimy hands on the E.W.F. Stirrup House, it did nothing. It didn’t even bother to seal the house. It didn’t bother to close the windows. For the better part of a decade the house was open to the elements.
This is not how you treat a structure you are committed to saving. This is a structure undergoing a clear and purposeful campaign of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT. What more proof is needed?

In fact, it was only recently (within the last year) that boards went up on the windows pictured above, but other broken windows and open windows were left alone.

E.W.F. Stirrup’s Descendants

Heretofore I have been careful not to criticize the Stirrup Family, but that ends now.

This picture from July 17, 2012 shows how invasive vines
were allowed to grow up the back of the house, over part
of the roof, and directly into the windows and wood on
the east side of the house. See below for the after pic.

The 5-story Monstrosity looks down upon the jungle.

When E.W.F. Stirrup died in 1957, he left it in his will that the house had to remain in the family in perpetuity. While I had always thought codicils like that could be challenged, to the family’s credit this one never has been.

The house is currently owned by Stirrup No. 1, LLC, a company owned by the grandchildren of E.W.F. Stirrup, which includes E.W.F. Stirrup, III. The Stirrup grandchildren, through this company, entered into a business arrangement to turn the Stirrup House into a Bed & Breakfast.

Here are the broad contours of this business deal:

The Stirrup descendants, who also owned two properties on the north side of Charles Avenue immediately across from the Stirrup House, agreed to a complicated swap. Aries would trade 2 brand new condos in The Monstrosity to the Stirrup grandchildren for
those 2 properties on the north side of Charles, a 50-year lease on the
formerly-Historic Stirrup House built with their grandfather’s own hands, and $10.00 to make it all legal. Which is how Aries got its hands on this cultural treasure, which it proceeded to destroy by a decade-long campaign of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT. 

Once the deal was done, it appears as if the Stirrup grandchildren turned their backs on the Stirrup House, now literally in their own backyard. If the condos they were given are on the north side of The Monstrosity, they were able to look down upon the disaster that their grandfather’s house had become during this purposeful campaign of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT.

IRONY ALERT: Whenever the city cited the property for non-compliance, it didn’t cite Aries Development, which had a 50-year lease on the house and was responsible for its upkeep. The city fined the company owned by the Stirrups for all infractions because it was the owner of record.

It’s impossible to know what was happening behind the scenes, but if this were my grandfather’s legacy, I would have been jumping up and down to get the developer to do the right thing by him — to save the historic E.W.F. Stirrup House, the oldest house on Charles Avenue, from a campaign of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT.

It’s also impossible to know what motivated the Stirrup grandchildren to enter into a business agreement with Aries Development to turn the house into a B&B. Was it money? Were they sold a bill of goods by Aries? Were they blindsided by the horrible treatment the house received at the hands of the developer? However, as [silent?] partners in this business deal, some of the blame has to go to them for being terrible stewards of their grandfather’s house and his legacy.

LaTasha and LaToya Stirrup pointing to
E.W.F. Stirrup – One Grove mural unveiling.

Read more:


Trolleygate Brings A Community Together

Unveiling the One Grove Mural

Recently I discovered The Stirrup Family Legacy website. Part of the About SFL page reads:

This collaborative effort was born in the social media space following an inspired Facebook discussion among a few family members. While aware that our family story is already in the public domain and has been for some time, we acknowledged that the telling of our family story varied greatly and was regrettably unknown to many– particularly to those most needing to hear it. We came to an agreement as a family and decided to act–as a family, for our family.

We agreed that our family story is a classic American immigrant tale; one that is deeply rooted in the American dream.; one that is both exemplary and extraordinary; one that deserves to be told; and one that should rightfully be told by the Stirrup family.

All I’ve ever wanted was to restore the legacy of E.W.F. Stirrup, whose story I accidentally discovered. I became fascinated with the man and what his life meant for Coconut Grove, a place that proves the exception to the rule in Race Relations in this country. As the only person writing about him over the last 7 years, I welcome their inclusion. His is a story that needs to be told widely.

At a Coconut Grove Collaborative meeting (described below) is when I first met SFL’s LaToya Stirrup (and her sister LaTasha). They had read my articles on their great grandfather and thanked me for keeping the legacy alive. We started up an email conversation that ended abruptly. I was told through sources that, although they were not of the side of the family that gave up the 50-year lease on the Stirrup House, they were told by the family to stay away from me because I was criticizing the Bed & Breakfast deal.

However,  if we’re going to tell E.W.F. Stirrup’s story, let’s tell it correctly. The Our Patriarch page reads:

Stirrup constructed more than 100 homes in his lifetime, providing an opportunity for newly arrived Bahamians to actually own their first home. Many of the houses built by Stirrup remain, and are concentrated around Charles Avenue (originally Evangelist Street) close to the present-day Coconut Grove Playhouse, and the heart of the Bahamian community. Stirrup’s own home is at the head of Charles Avenue, and has survived as a legacy to its builder. [1] Over the years, many across Miami have continued to honor the legacy of Stirrup by keeping his memory alive in books as well as naming buildings around the city after him, like E.W.F. Stirrup Elementary in West Miami [2], The Stirrup Townhouses [3], and the Stirrup Senior residences in Coconut Grove [4]. His residence, which still stands today, [see 1] as well as the street he cleared to serve as the major thoroughfare for the community, Charles Avenue, were both designated Historic Sites by the City of Miami.

[1] Not any more, as this entire post proves
[2] The E.W.F. Elementary School is named after E.W.F. Stirrup, II, not the patriarch
[3] If this refers to Stirrup Grove, on Franklin Avenue, that is the only thing I’ve ever discovered actually named after the patriarch
[4] Also named after E.W.F. Stirrup, II


J.S. Rashid of Coconut Grove Collaborative Development Corporation

Before I throw shade at Rashid, a man I happen to like, let me praise him. Two years ago I covered the Gibson Plaza Groundbreaking ceremony in A Grand Day For Grand Avenue. Rashid spearheaded this project, which is right across Grand Avenue from the cute little Conch-style house that holds the Coconut Grove Collaborative Development Corporation. Gibson Plaza is now completed and a happening thing.

February 22, 2013 — six more months of growth on those
vines pictured above — when landscapers (and I use the
term loosely) ripped away the vines that had grown into
the siding and windows. This ruined the side of the house.

S’funny story: I was in Coconut Grove that day to attend
a Historic Charles Avenue Committee meeting at the
Collaborative Development Office at which I knew the
E.W.F Stirrup House was on the agenda. This clearing of
the lot was, as predicted, brought up as an example of
all the good things that were were taking place at the
Stirrup House by Aries.

This landscaping is the only thing that ever happened,
not counting the illegal removal of the old trees.

Rashid is also the force behind the Kroma Gallery, the only place along the west end of Grand Avenue that White folks will go to. He has also worked diligently for the infilling of lots in the West Grove with affordable housing, although property values have skyrocketed so much lately that the “affordable” part is now a pipe dream.

If anyone has been waving the flag for West Grove, it’s J.S. Rashid, a community organizer out of Chicago that’s managed to get some things done despite the uphill battle.

But, Rashid is a deal-maker. A community organizer. A go-along-to-get-along guy. However, I think he bends over backwards for developers.  

F’rinstance: when Aries Development needed to get the zoning on the E.W.F. Stirrup House changed from single family dwelling to commercial to accommodate a Bed & Breakfast, Rashid was there to support the project, appearing on the tee vee tubery and everything. While the video has been disabled, CBS Miami produced this report in May 5, 2011, two years after I started my lonely campaign to SAVE THE E.W.F. STIRRUP HOUSE. Quoting from Land Fight Brewing Over Historic Coconut Grove House:

The developer that owns the condo’s behind the Stirrup house has taken out a 50 year lease on the property and is  proposing rezoning the area for adaptive use that mean it can turn it into a business like a bed and breakfast or a cafe.

Community Activist Jihad Rashid was against the idea but he now calls the plan a win-win.

“With the protection that comes with that rezoning, the community can maintain its character and enhance our property and lifestyle and showcase our history,” said Rashid.

The developer has agreed to leave a one foot residential zone around the property to prevent other neighbors from wanting to turn their land into commercial zone. It has also agreed to restore the Stirrup house to its original state and in case of a natural disaster it would build a replica of the building.

It turned out to an unnatural disaster that destroyed the house: a decade-long campaign of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT.

Had Rashid remained opposed to this rezoning, it’s doubtful the house would have been turned into a Bed & Breakfast. However, to be fair, it probably wouldn’t have changed the campaign of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT that had started years earlier.

However, had Rashid been more proactive, some of this might have been prevented. At the meeting I described above, when the representative of Aries Development stood up to give a progress report, and mentioned the recent landscaping I stood up gave him a blast, saying that not only was it the only thing done to the house, but it also managed to destroy part of the house when the vines that had grown into the wooden siding were just ripped away. 

Rashid, who chaired the meeting, shut me down immediately by saying, “We’re all looking forward. We’re not looking back,” which is an insidious way of blame dodging I’ve written about before (under very different circumstances in my rant Treacherous Double-Dealing).

Bottom line: Over the years I tried to warn Rashid several times that things were rotten over at the E.W.F. Stirrup and nothing ever changed. The Community Activist was active elsewhere.


City of Miami Historic and Environmental Protection Board

The HEP Board ultimately approved the plans that allowed this property to be used as a Bed & Breakfast. While there were all kinds of protections in place, the developer was able to get away with nearly a decade of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT because once the HEP Board approved the plan, it never bothered to check on what was happening to this structure — even though it was designated a historic site by the City of Miami.

And, the protections seem inadequate or written with loopholes you can drive a cement truck through. F’rinstance: In the approval documents the developer needs to get a Certificate To Dig before it can dig a hole. This needs to be signed off on by an archeologist. Once I realized I had had lost the fight to turn the E.W.F. Stirrup House into a Bed & Breakfast, I shifted my focus to agitating for an archeological dig of the Stirrup property. 

The property is a huge double lot which has been owned by the same family for more than 120 years. Who knows what artifacts, buried just below the surface, could be discovered in an archeological dig? An archeological dig could reveal how life was lived by Bahamian immigrants in Coconut Grove at the turn of the last century.

Trench and rebar – February 3, 2016

On a recent visit to the Stirrup House, I discovered a backhoe digging a 2 foot deep trench all around the house despite the HEP Board calling for an archeological dig. So, I quickly called Megan Schmidt, Chief Preservation Officer of the City of Miami City of Miami Historic Preservation Office (see below) to see if they had a Certificate To Dig. 

Days later, after the trench had already been dug, rebar inserted into it, and the whole thing filled with cement, I FINALLY got my return call. Apparently the developer did get a Certificate To Dig, but — GET THIS! — the archeologist doesn’t actually sign off on the project until the whole thing is finished.

WAIT!!! WHAT???

Then what’s the purpose of the HEP Board requiring an archeologist to sign off on it after the fact if there is no archeology done? I’ll wait.

TO BE FAIR: The trench was dug to place a concrete footing all around the house so that they could slide massive steel I-beams from one side of the house to the other to support it during the work. However, that was all wasted effort and money, since they could have just razed the house and rebuilt it, as opposed to replacing the house one board at a time until nothing of the old house was left. And, with the scaffolding they put all around the house, most people I spoke to were fooled into thinking it was a renovation. After I told them to take a closer look, they realized exactly what I was talking about.


City of Miami Historic Preservation Office

The foundation trench has been dug, cemented, and
the steel i-beams slung underneath the house, but
before the house got jacked up. February 24, 2016

To her credit Megan Schmidt, of the City of Miami Preservation Office, is one of the few people in Miami government to return my phone calls, even though it takes her days to do so. Also to her credit, she agreed to meet with me once and opened up the entire Stirrup House file to me, which was surprisingly thin. [The reason being, she said, is because each city department keeps its own files.] She also shared the plans on file that merely showed the exterior elevations. I wrote about this in Shocker!!! E.W.F. Stirrup House Plans Are Finally On File.

However, at that same meeting she grossly misinformed me. I specifically asked whether the developer had the required building permits to start work. She told me they didn’t. Months later she said that either I misunderstood her answer, or she misunderstood my question. As it turned out the approval from the HEP Board (above) was all the permitting needed to begin the renovation. That precluded my last opportunity to stop the project.

At the time we met I shared with her my research on the house and my suspicion the rapacious developer was allowing it to undergo a purposeful campaign of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT. She thanked me for my interest and told me her office had to rely on people like me because they were so understaffed. But, was that just lip service? It’s hard to know.

I begged her to keep an eye on the house and she said she would. However, nothing ever changed and the developers were able to pull the wool over her eyes. The Historic E.W.F. Stirrup House is no more.

This is the elaborate web of scaffolding erected all around the Stirrup
House. While it provided stability to the structure, it also disguised what
was going on behind the scenes. In this picture, along the bottom of the
Stirrup House, note the new metal sill plate all around the house.
Also many of the horizontal support beams have already been replaced.

April 27, 2016

When I recently called her to say the entire house was being replaced, she tried to argue the point with me. 

She claimed the scaffolding surrounding the house was only there to protect the house during renovation. I asked if she had been there recently and she said she had in the last few weeks. I said she needed to go back ASAP to see how little of the old house was left. 

I also told her that the contractor informed me that it was all going to be replaced, board by board. I further informed her that the scaffolding actually was disguising that fact, either accidentally or by design.

However, Megyn Schmidt didn’t seem at all surprised or shocked that this project had become a reconstruction, saying casually that sometimes that’s the price of Historic Preservation.

No! The price of Historic Preservation is to preserve the building!!!

The developers AVOIDED the costs of Historic Preservation through its deliberate, almost decade-long campaign of DEMOLITION BY NEGLECT. That’s my whole point. They benefited by destroying this historic house, important to the Black community.

Schmidt was also the one who told me, two months ago, that to the best of her knowledge the City of Miami gave the developer a grant for the Stirrup House, which would have gone through the District 2 Commissioner’s office. When she said she would get the paperwork on this grant for me, I jokingly asked whether I should file an Freedom Of Information request, or should I just trust her to get it to me? I’m still waiting. 

On May 11, 2016 only the roof and a small
section near the front of the house remains.

I knew should have filed under the Florida Sunshine Law, not that it ever gets me anywhere.

TO BE FAIR: She has called me once in the interim to tell me that she may have been mistaken about the grant coming from the District 2 office, but she still remembers a grant and she was still looking for me. Yet, I have called her office and left messages several times since. She has not returned those calls and I know nothing more than I did when she offhandedly mentioned she believed there had been a grant.
I’ll update this grand business when I know more. However, that the developers may have received taxpayer dollars to destroy the E.W.F. Stirrup House really sticks in my craw.


Peter Gardner/Sabal Hill

Peter Gardner is the least culpable person on this list. He’s the newest developer to sign onto the E.W.F. Stirrup clusterfuck, only within the last year.

When I recently heard that he was now involved in the Stirrup House Bed & Breakfast my interest was piqued. I had heard his name, and that of his company Pointe Group (now Sabal Hill) as being one of the developers who wanted to gentrify Grand Avenue. This is a 6 block project that’s been bandied about for years and years and years.

Here’s the scaffolding coming down on June 20, 2016

There are two ends to Grand Avenue, the east end and the west end. The east side has CocoWalk and all the new development. From the east end you have access to Biscayne Bay and, more importantly South Bayshore Drive and Main Highway, both with their multi-million dollar estates.

Looking west down Grand Avenue from Margaret. This
model shown to me at the Sabal Hill offices makes it
appear as if Grand Avenue will become a gentrified
concrete canyon, despite Peter Gardner’s protestations.

The west end of Grand Avenue, from Margaret Street on, is the West Grove ghetto with the fabled US-1/Dixie Highway at the far west end. However, this entire end of Grand Avenue has gone from being the thriving Black Business District — when segregation gave this stretch of stores a virtual monopoly with the Black community — to the depressed area it is in now. The very same systemic racism as existed in every city in this country also exerted itself on this stretch of Grand Avenue. There was virtually no urban improvement in West Grove for more than 50 years, until Rashid built Gibson Plaza.

The biggest problem with this stretch of Grand Avenue is that these properties — which could once be had for a song because the neighbourhood was blighted — have been flipped too many times by speculators and developers. It’s still blighted, but now the land is too expensive to build anything that won’t create a concrete canyon along that stretch of Grand. Land is a machine that has to pay for itself. Only massive development will allow this land to pay its own way in the future.

CREDIT WHERE CREDIT’S DUE: I met with Peter Gardner a few weeks back, surprised that he’d even talk to me after all I’ve written about the Stirrup House and the rapacious developers who got their grimy hands on it. None of the other developers involved ever replied to me.

I told Peter Gardner I was heartbroken over what happened to the Stirrup House at the hands of his current partners, Aries Development. Now that I no longer have to watch the Stirrup House I was going to start investigating Grand Avenue.

For his part Gardner kept talking about the fact that he’s a born & bred Coconut Grove boy who only wants what’s best for Coconut Grove. However his definition of what’s best for Coconut Grove is diametrically opposed to what I think is best for Coconut Grove. I don’t think wholesale gentrification will be good for the people in West Grove. Gardner tells me it could still be 2 years before the first shovel goes into the ground for these Grand Avenue developments. Let’s hope cooler heads prevail before then or, at the very least, plans are made for all of the current residents living in relative poverty to be relocated to affordable housing.

Something that greatly troubles me is how Sabal Hill has also acquired those two empty lots across the street from the Stirrup House (see above). He’s betting those 2 properties will become more valuable once the Stirrup House Bed & Breakfast and the Coconut Grove Playhouse are finally re-opened. Gardner paid $1,000,000 for those lots that are zoned for Single Family Dwellings. He will never be able to make his money back by building single family dwellings. He will need a zoning variance to build duplexes, apartment buildings, or a business.

There had been houses on those properties before Aries Development got its grimy hands on them. However, they were torn down so those lots could be used as a marshaling yard for the construction of The Monstrosity. In fact, those 2 lots are just some of the affordable housing knocked down to build that ugly thing.

The community needs to appose any change of zoning for those two properties, otherwise — ONCE AGAIN — the developers will get what they want by pulling the wool over the eyes of the City of Miami Planning and Zoning Department.


The Black Residents of West Grove/Apathy

It has to be said: The residents of West Grove are an apathetic lot. Whenever I talk to folks in West Grove about the E.W.F. Stirrup House, I get a big shrug. The Old Timers, who are old enough to remember Mr. Stirrup in his lifetime, have expressed little concern for the building. Younger people don’t even know who the hell E.W.F. Stirrup was and why his legacy is so important.

Looking south across the two lots acquired by Sabal Hill, to the
E.W.F. Stirrup House, dwarfed by The Monstrosity behind it.

One of my [Black] sources has a theory about this apathy. It starts with many decades of systemic racism. Black folks were used to being ignored at City Hall. It was all they could do to get low-paying jobs, put food on the table, and see their children get an education and stay out of trouble. 

Who had time to concern themselves with the house of a rich man? E.W.F. Stirrup may have been one of Florida’s first Black millionaires, but he was also called a slum landlord because some of his rental properties were in pitiful condition. So few people in West Grove know of E.W.F. Stirrup that his reputation hardly matters. However, make no mistake, there is a Black neighbourhood in Coconut Grove due to his efforts. 


The White Residents of Coconut Grove/Systemic Racism

This is what 13 decades of Institutional Racism looks like. And, it was no different in Coconut Grove than anywhere else in this country, except for one thing: E.W.F. Stirrup built more than 100 homes and then bartered, rented, or sold them to the growing Black families that were arriving to become the service industry for the nascent tourist trade.

Note the difference between how Commodore Ralph Monroe has been honoured and how E.W.F. Stirrup has not. They were contemporaries and both are considered Founding Fathers of Coconut Grove. Their houses were only 625 feet apart. Yet Commodore Monroe’s house was restored and turned into a Florida State Park called The Barnacle. 

The plywood sheeting is going up on June 7, 2016. The last part of
the formerly-historic E.W.F. Stirrup House left was the roof. And, as
you can see, that’s also been destroyed. It will probably be coming off.

Conversely, the E.W.F. Stirrup House was torn down to build an exact re-creation to be turned into a commercial Bed & Breakfast for Rich White Fucks, as I call them. I wonder what Mr. Stirrup would think about that?

Meanwhile, you can barely find information about E.W.F. Stirrup, his life and legacy online. I have only ever been able to find one photograph of Mr. Stirrup, even though Ralph Monroe was a photographer.

None of this would have happened had E.W.F. Stirrup had been White. West Grove wouldn’t look the way it does now if it were White. The same systemic racism that plagued other cities also worked its devolution on West Grove.

I calls ’em as I sees ’em.

Playhouse Parking Problems Proliferate

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Coconut Grove Playhouse panorama

As I told my newest BFF, Art Noriega, CEO of the Miami Parking Authority, I don’t go to Miami to find problems with his parking lots. That just seems to happen whenever I go to Coconut Grove.

As you may remember from our last exciting epsiode, EXCLUSIVE: Are Valet Companies Stealing From Miami Taxpayers?, I reported how Paradise Parking was illegally parking cars on the Playhouse Parking Lot, contrary to its agreement with the City of Miami. Paradise Parking rents 45 spaces from the Miami Parking Authority at $6.00 per space per day, but those spaces are immediately behind the Playhouse, not the main MPA parking lot to the north of the building.

Copy of Art Noriega’s letter

When I reported this skulduggery to the Miami Parking Authority, Art Noriega jumped into action and sent out this letter, which reads in part:

May 7, 2015

Dear Mr. Radrizzani:

This letter is to follow up on our conversation with Mr. Victor Rosario (Senior Manager of Operations) on Monday May 4, 2015 in regards to Paradise Parking valet staff parking vehicles outside of the designated area at the Playhouse Lot. As explained in the conversation, this conduct or practice will not be tolerated and Paradise Parking staff needs to adhere to the current policies effective immediately.

If for any reason this or any other issue occurs, the current agreement will be terminated immediately.

[…]
 
Art Noriega,
Chief Executive Officer

Some of the 25 spaces reserved for valet parking on June 6

Just a month later, on June 6, I parked in the Playhouse Parking lot again. Ostensibly, I was attending another Coconut Grove Drum Circle, but I couldn’t help notice that the entire middle section of the Playhouse parking lot was cordoned off with caution tape and reserved for valet parking.

Because this seemed contrary to my understanding of the parking lot rules and the letter of understanding, I spoke to the security guard on duty, who knew he was talking to a reporter. Lionel Pichel, of Security Alliance, told me that the spaces had been rented for use by valets for MAC Parking, a Florida company with headquarters in North Miami. It was his understanding the spaces were reserved for a private party at a private residence on the east side of Main Highway. However, that’s as far as his information went.

An interesting thing happened while I was standing there talking to him. Twice valets from Paradise Parking, who confirmed to me later they were working an event at the Cruz Building on Commodore Plaza, pulled in wanting to use the spaces reserved for MAC Parking. Pichel told them the spaces were reserved for someone else and they drove off, to park behind the Playhouse. I’m not sure if an attempt to park where they’re not allowed would vitiate the contract with the Miami Parking Authority, but “If for any reason this or any other issue occurs, the current agreement will be terminated immediately” seems pretty all-encompassing. Pichel told me that the valets always try to park in the
main lot and they always have to be chased away. He said he was glad I had already confirmed the rules to him.

These spaces were empty all night long.

Shrugging my shoulders, I went off on my merry way, first to dinner and then to the drum circle, which is right across the street from the Playhouse parking lot. Before hitting the drum circle, I returned to the parking lot to get my stuff out of my trunk. I couldn’t help but notice that every space reserved for valet parking was still empty.

I talked to Mr. Pichel again. He was surprised the valets hadn’t arrived yet and told me that I should be seeing guys with white shirts running around soon. However, all night long I kept popping back over to see whether anyone had parked in these spaces reserved for MAC Parking. Eventually all the other spaces in the lot were occupied and, just like in May, customers would pull into the lot, find no available spaces, and leave again. Yet, the center core of the parking lot, 25 spaces in all, remained empty.

I didn’t stay overnight, but when I left at 11 PM these spaces were still unoccupied. Subsequent research informs me they were empty all night.

The MPA confirmed that MAC Parking rented 25 parking spaces, at $10 per. However, that was THE PREVIOUS WEEKEND, not on June 6th. That means there was an internal communications SNAFU that cost the city of Miami an untold number of dollars on Saturday night. Because it was FAM Night in the Grove, every one of those 25 spaces would have been filled. Furthermore, who knows how many times each would have been turned over during the course of the night?

I’m told that the MPA people who messed up will be dealt with. However, as a result of my initial inquiries, the MPA said it will no longer rent spaces for valet parking in the main Playhouse parking lot after the end of June.

However, that’s only one problem solved. I filed a Freedom of Information request to learn the name of MAC Parking’s client, the person (or company) who had the juice to reserve public facilities for a private function. However, I have been told that the MPA has no way to compel MAC Parking to reveal the name of its client as it is a private company not subject to Florida’s Sunshine Laws.

I have suggested that this is a serious gap in the information the MPA collects on behalf of the public it serves. It’s more important to know who is using taxpayer facilities than who contracted for said facilities. The argument I made was, “What if my name is Al Capone and I hired a valet company to park the cars of all my mobster friends? Should I be able to hide behind a 3rd party private contractor?” In essence, I was told, yes. As long as the parking spaces are being used for lawful purposes, the city has no interest in who contracted MAC Parking to use public facilities. I told the MPA that we’ll have to agree to disagree, while I investigate that aspect of the FOIA act a bit further, because that just don’t sound right to me.

Meanwhile, there is still the issue of valet parking traffic on Charles Avenue, which was one of those 11 questions I asked of [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff, on December 19th of last year. Sarnoff refused to answer my two attempts to get a reply, punting to the Miami Parking Authority instead, even though some of those questions were outside of the MPA’s bailiwick. Here’s a question [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff never answered:

2). When neighbours complained previously that the 45 valet parking spots rented from the MPA would bring additional traffic, they were assured there would be no additional traffic on Charles Avenue as a result. This is clearly false. Why has this been allowed to continue for the past year despite occasional complaints by the neighbours?

Read: The Coconut Grove Playhouse Trojan Horse; Part II for the full list of questions that [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff refused to answer on behalf of his constituents. Then join ABT – Anybody But Teresa, the facebook page that openly scoffs at the notion that [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff is trying to get his wife annoited in his seat after he’s been term-limited out on his ass.

On Saturday night I happened to run into a resident from Charles Avenue, someone with whom I’ve spoken to previously about the parking fiasco. When I explained that the Paradise Parking valets are now forced to go in and out using Charles Avenue, they reminded me the City of Miami promised that that wouldn’t happen. I reminded them that I was told by the city that the residents should be happy that it’s less traffic than when the Playhouse was open, which is hardly the point.

I have a fix for this problem if the MPA is willing to listen, and from what I know of Art Noriega, he will. Whether he acts upon it is another story, but it would solve several problems. If I were the Parking Czar, here’s what I’d do:

1). Allow the parking valets in and out privileges on Lot 6, the main Playhouse Parking Lot, as long as they don’t park there;
2). Where I’ve drawn a yellow line is a white arrow painted on the ground. Paint over it;
3). At the yellow line place a sign that says Valet Parking Only, just like the sign currently on Charles Avenue, and allow the valets to use this for parking cars;
4). Where I’ve drawn a red line is a gate to Charles Avenue where the Valet Parking Only sign is. It used to be closed and locked before the MPA rented the space to Paradise Parking. It should be closed and locked again.

VOILA!!! 

 The valet traffic on Charles Avenue is reduced drastically. Both the valets at the Cruz Building and the restaurants on the ground floor of the Grove Gardens Residence Condominiums can use the Main Highway entrance and exit..

Then, if not for the valets racing in and out of the Regions Bank parking lot, there would be no valet traffic on Charles Avenue at all. However, Aries Development has contracted with Regions Bank to use this parking lot when the bank is closed, regardless of how dangerous it is to have valets zipping in and out where families walk.

Bang The News Slowly ► Unpacking The Writer

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Here we go again, readers! Unpacking The Writer is a monthly pulling-back-of-the-curtain to reveal the inner-workings of a one-man news operation. Let’s get right to it.

The most exciting news of the last month is the campaign to put Harry Nilsson in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Every year when the RnRHoF nominees are announced I scream, “What about Harry?” Then when I see who is finally inducted, I just shake my head in despair. This year I decided to do something about it.

Just a few days before last month’s Unpacking The Writer, I fired up a facebookery called Harry Nilsson for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was only a few days later that I discovered there was a similar page started much earlier than mine. Had I known, I would have signed onto Harry Nilsson belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, started by Todd Lawrence, instead. Todd and I connected soon afterwards in IM. I assured him that I didn’t consider my page competition to his and that we should cooperate for the greater good. It can’t hurt that there are two such pages because we travel in different circles.

It wasn’t long before Todd asked we could add Gabriel Szoke, moderator of the Harry Nilsson facebook fan page, to our IMs. Then the 3 of us started kicking around various ideas to put #HarryintheHall. None of our plans are ripe enough to be revealed, but I can assure you that they are grandiose.

There are 3 ways you can help, dear readers: 1). Stay tuned; 2). Join our facebook pages; 3). And, watch this. A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night is a sublime BBC production of the LP of the same name. It is one of the few times in his entire career that Harry Nilsson sang live, even though there was no audience and it’s certainly not Rock and Roll:


This is definitely not Rock and Roll

Meanwhile, the Not Now Silly Newsroom has been busy breaking actual news during the past month. 

Since our last exciting episode I’ve written [in chronological order] about Richard Nixon (once again); attended and reported on the campaign kick-off of District Two Candidate Javier Gonzalez; finally told my Sally Kellerman story, which I had been threatening to do for years; wrote about the Bicycle Shop (again), which resulted in a $1,000 fine against Aries Development; and, if that isn’t enough, wrote about a rip off of Miami taxpayers by the valet parking companies — connected to Aries Development through family — and alerted the Miami Parking Authority to this scam. [What’s more is that I’ve been constructing longer and longer sentences.] I’ve been busy little writer.

I make no bones about it: I’m always delighted when I can score points against Gino Falsetto, the rapacious owner/developer of Aries Development. Rather than go through all the reasons why, just read Happy Birthday Coconut Grove!!! Now Honour Your Past. Then join Save the E.W.F. Stirrup House on the facebookery and help me make this campaign go viral.

A PERSONAL MESSAGE TO GINO FALSETTO: When I began writing about the E.W.F. Stirrup House more than 5 years ago, I phoned and emailed several times to get your side of the story. You never gave me the decency of a response, even if it were to tell me it was none of my business and to get lost. However, that did not deter me from trying to save the 120-year old house and the amazing legacy of Ebenezer Woodbury Franklin Stirrup. However, I’d still love to hear your side of the story. Contact me. I promise to be as fair to you as you have been to Coconut Grove history.

This month’s Top Ten Posts

Tangent over, dear readers.

Those are the writings that appear above the surface. What’s below the surface? Well, to start with, there’s always the ongoing research on other stories still to be written. Then there are those stories only partially written. On those I’m either stalled because I’m looking for additional information or have hit the wall on that topic, hoping I’ll eventually return to it. Writer’s Block is a cruel mistress.

But, that’s only what’s just immediately beneath the surface. That’s what will, in all probability (but only if things go well), rise to the surface and eventually appear on these pages. Not everything does. There are currently 23 posts in draft form and I know that not all will make it to the front page of the Not Now Silly Newsroom. To compare: there are 747 posts here, not including this one.

Of course, there are deeper layers. F’rinstance, my continued exploration of Drum Circles. I am trying to solve — in an intellectual way — why I feel such an unworldly attraction to them. The fact of the matter is I’ve never been a joiner. Most of my adult life I’ve eschewed groups the same way Groucho said he wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have him as a member. However, since my first encounter with a drum circle (a story I tell in The 32nd Annual King Mango Strut), I try to join them whenever I get the chance. I’ll even drive an hour to go to a drum circle.

I play the claves, mostly, but occasionally will play the wood block and, even more occasionally, the cowbell. When I’m playing cowbell nobody shouts, “More cowbell!” because I’m terrible at the cowbell, which takes far more rhythm and wrist than I’ve got. When I play cowbell, I play real quietly, hoping I’ll eventually find the groove. I never seem to.

I was recently discussing my attraction to the claves with one of my drumming buddies. It actually started with mutual book recommendations. I suggested she read Dr. Oliver Sacks‘ Musicophilia; Tales of Music and the Brain. I’ve read Sacks books for years, loving his case histories. Reading Musicophilia explained part of my attraction to drum circles and my relationship to music. From the book blurb:

Our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong: Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right: Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson’s disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer’s or amnesia.

Music is irresistible, haunting, and unforgettable, and in Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks tells us why.

Here’s a true confession: When I was growing up I was constantly told, “Stop fidgeting.”

However, I wasn’t fidgeting. I was keeping an internal rhythm with my feet or hands. I would be tapping my fingers and toes to the music I heard playing in my head all the time.

However, it took me a very long time to realize that not everybody hears music in their head all the time. I’m always hearing music in my head, but only when there is no music; especially if there is no music. Sometimes the machinery I hear on the streets is converted to song as it passes through my ears to other receptors in my brain. Leaf blowers cease droning to become a background pipe organ to a brand new song my grey matter invented on the spot.

When
there’s no music playing, I can have entire swing bands playing my own
arrangements in my own head. Or a Blues band rocking out to a tune
that’s being made up on the spot. I used to do this more often when I
was in my late teens. In fact I remember several hitchhiking trips
when I composed entire tunes in my head. I would write down the lyrics as soon
as I got the chance. I can still remember some of them, which have become far more elaborate in my head over the years.

When there’s actual music playing, my head, hands, and feet keep a counter-rhythm to it, or add trumpet parts, or other vocals. But, only in my head, translating those complexities into seemingly spasmodic jerking of my fingers and toes.

Maybe I should have been a composer/arranger, but I play no instruments and can’t read or write music. However, when I am at drum circles, that part of my psyche seems to get a workout. When I’m in a drum circle I play what I think of as the accents with my claves. Sometimes (in my head) it’s what Ella would sing when she was scatting. Other times I hear my little rat-tat-tat bursts as the parts for a brass section.

I know I have entered my personal groove at a drum circle when what I hear is melody and not strictly rhythm. While I’m not sure I described it so that it makes sense to my readers, it makes perfect sense to me, which is what counts.

If you’ve been following along at home, you’ll recognize Pops, to the left. After my mother died a decade ago, I came down to help Pops. It’s not that Pops really needed my help. He played golf 4-5 days a week. However, he’s of a generation that knows where the kitchen is, but never mastered the magic required to get a meal on the table, unless it came out of a microwave. That’s has always been my main role here.

Pops turned turned 89 on Valentine’s Day and, for the most part, he’s been healthy. But, he’s slowing down. There are fewer chores around the house I’ll let him do. However, it’s hard. I remember how sad he was when I told him that I was taking the laundry away from him. It was one of the household jobs he had to learn when my mother went into the hospital, and he was so proud of himself. He argued for a while, but finally gave in.

Two weeks ago, during a routine pacemaker check-up, it was discovered that it was not getting any signals to his heart. One of the wire leads became corroded some time since his last check-up 3 months ago.

That was the bad news. The good news was that his heart was beating well enough on its own that he didn’t require an immediate operation. We scheduled a pacemaker procedure for the following week, after adjusting some of his meds. This past Thursday he went in for the operation to replace his pacemaker.

Normally, this is an outpatient procedure; a quick in and out. However, because of Pops’ age, they thought it was a good idea that he be kept overnight. I spent about 15 hours at the hospital last week, split over 2 days. I brought Pops home on Friday and he’s been taking it easy ever since.

Now you’re all caught up until next month.

EXCLUSIVE: Are Valet Companies Stealing From Miami Taxpayers?

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The area surrounding the
Coconut Grove Playhouse
[Click map to enlarge]
LEGEND:


A). Grove Gardens Condominiums;
aka The Monstrosity;
B). Regions Bank;
C). The E.W.F. Stirrup House;
D). Zoned residential lots, used
for illegal parking;
E). Part of the 45 parking spaces
leased for Valet Parking;
F). Blue Star Drive In & remaining 45
spaces leased to Valet parking;
G). Playhouse Parking Lot
operated by the MPA;
H). Unlocked gate directing traffic
onto William and Thomas Streets
and location of arrow directing cars
to exit onto Charles Avenue;
I). Main entrance/exit for main
Playhouse parking lot;
J). The Bicycle Shop;
K). The Barnacle, now a State Park,
once belonged to Commodore Ralph
Monroe, a contemporary of E.W.F.
Stirrup;
L). Rich people in gated enclaves;
M). Far less well off people in West
Grove, which has remained
predominately Black and depressed
during the last 125 years;
N). Commodore Plaza, named after
Ralph Monroe, is lined with pricy
eateries and more expensive art
galleries, meant for people with
more disposable income than
those on the surrounding blocks.

A year-long investigation by the Not Now Silly Newsroom has uncovered a situation in which valet parking companies continue to rip off City of Miami taxpayers for an untold numbers of dollars.

Last year, when Miami-Dade Cultural Czar Michael Spring untangled the Gordian knot of the Coconut Grove Playhouse, several pieces of that complex puzzle were the various parking lots surrounding the Playhouse. Paradise Parking was kicked off the main parking lot [G on map to the left] — after having squatted on it for several years — in exchange for an arrangement where it rents 45 parking spaces from the MPA, at $6 a day per, immediately behind the Playhouse in lots [E] and [F].

It never occurred to me when I went into journalism that I’d be sitting in parking lots noting the movements of cars and valets, but that’s part of what I’ve been doing for the last year. That surveillance led to several articles. After my last series of parking lot stories, a gate at the west end of the Coconut Grove Playhouse parking lot was ordered locked. It turned out the valets on Commodore Plaza had demanded it be left open on busy Friday and Saturday nights in order to make their job easier.

However — and this is crucial — the valet companies don’t run the parking lots, nor the city for that matter. They just think they do. That’s why they run roughshod over West Grove, caring little about the agreements they’ve already made. They are playing the city for chumps and stealing money from taxpayers.

[For more on these Coconut Grove parking problems, and so I don’t have to repeat myself, please read: The Coconut Grove Playhouse Trojan Horse; Part I • Part II • A Playhouse Trojan Horse Update.]

Which brings us to the evening of Saturday, May 2nd. There was a big event at the Cruz Building on Commodore Plaza [N], one street over from the Playhouse parking lot. (The Cruz Building, rumoured to have been built with cocaine money in Miami’s Go-Go 80s, is rented out for weddings or bar mitzvahs and the like.) Saturday’s event must have been bigger-than-average because the single block of Commodore Plaza was bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go traffic in both directions, with an officer directing traffic directly in front of the Cruz building. Many parking valets were taking cars from the swells and zipping off somewhere, as the security officer held up traffic for them.

That got my journalistic senses tingling. Where were the cars going?

The last time I heard of a big affair at the Cruz building, the valets were illegally parking cars on the 2 residential lots [D] on Charles Avenue, immediately across the street from the E.W.F. Stirrup House [C]. The neighbours called the Not Now Silly Newsroom, which led to this reporter asking 11 questions of [allegedly] corrupt Miami District 2 Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff. He refused to answer any of them and punted them to the Miami Parking Authority. After waiting 2 months, I finally got answers to those questions that fell within the MPA’s bailiwick; not all did, so there are several questions outstanding.

On May 2nd, after some surveillance at 6:30 PM, I discovered the valets were taking cars from the Cruz Building and parking them in the MPA lot, which is not a part of the 45 spaces rented from the MPA. Eventually, by 9PM, the MPA lot was filled with cars, many of which were parked by valets. Private citizens would pull into the parking lot, drive around the small circle and, finding no parking spaces, would leave. Every car that left without finding a parking space was money taken out of the Miami taxpayer’s pocket by the valet parking companies.

This is more egregious than it sounds for 2 reasons:

  • The citizens were behaving better than the valets, who stuck their Cruz Building cars anywhere they’d fit, whether there were lines on the ground, or not;
  • At 9PM, parking lot [F], which is rented from the MPA was 100% empty, while parking lot [E], also rented, had only 8 cars in it.

[As a side issue: The Regions Bank parking lot, [B] had 18 cars in it, more than I’ve ever counted before. I have communicated with Regions Bank only to learn it has sanctioned this valet parking arrangement. The bank cited — GET THIS!!! — how it’s a convenient arrangements for their own customers because it allows them to drive right up to the night deposit. However, Regions better hope their customers are driving skateboards, because that’s all that will really fit.]

In short: The valets fill up every surrounding parking lot first, before they start filling up their own.  They’re playing the city and Regions Bank for chumps and stealing money from the taxpayer.

When I told this story to Art Noriega, head of the Miami Parking Authority, he hit the roof on Monday morning. Can’t wait for my follow-up interview with him.

Let’s tie all this up with a pretty little bow for people who need to have their noses rubbed in the corruption before they actually see it.

Because:

  • The valet companies are connected to Gino Falsetto through Andrew Falsetto at Paradise Parking;
  • Gino Falsetto owns Aries Management & Development LLC;
  • Aries has a 50-year lease on the E.W.F. Stirrup House, the 2nd oldest house in Coconut Grove, designated historic, but currently undergoing nearly a decade of Demolition by Neglect;
  • Aries owns the Bicycle Shop (through another company), which was the subject of Is Aries Development Coconut Grove’s Biggest Scofflaw? and Follow Up to ” Is Aries Development Coconut Grove’s Biggest Scofflaw?”, earlier this week;
  • Aries, through other companies, owns the 2 vacant residential lots across the street from the Stirrup House, which had a cute little West Grove shotgun-and conch-style house on each before they were razed;
  • Aries torpedoed several plans over the years to reopen the Coconut Grove Playhouse, allowing further Demolition by Neglect of that venerated structure that the community is still trying to save;
  • Finally, Aries built the Grove Gardens Resident Condominiums, aka The Monstrosity, which set a new precedent for higher density structures in West Grove;

Is it not obvious to the Powers That Be that a single entity is responsible for most of the deterioration of the area immediately surrounding the Main Highway and Charles Avenue, which has been designated a Historic Roadway?

How does Gino Falsetto get away with all of this right under everybody’s collective noses? More to the point: Am I the only one watching?

Follow Up to ” Is Aries Development Coconut Grove’s Biggest Scofflaw?”

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On Monday this reporter posted “Is Aries Development Coconut Grove’s Biggest Scofflaw?” 

However, before I even started writing that story I called the Coconut Grove NET office, right at the stroke of 9AM, to make a formal complaint.

I  spoke with a woman named Faye and made it very clear that I was not only calling to register a complaint, but I was also calling as a journalist. I gave her a rundown of the history of the Bicycle Shop being an unsecured construction site last year. I also told her that, although the gate was finally locked, no one ever responded to my phone calls; I left several messages pleading for a callback because the gate was still unlocked a week later. That’s why I made it clear to Faye that I would really like a response this year. I know she took down everything I told her because several times she asked me to slow down so she could catch up.

After hanging up I started writing “Is Aries Development Coconut Grove’s Biggest Scofflaw?” I was hoping to include a response from either the NET office or Code Compliance in my story. However, many hours later, after I had finished the post and still not heard back, I hit the PUBLISH button.

TO BE HONEST: I really had no expectation someone would phone me. I’m still waiting for that call like I’m still waiting for those phone calls from last year.

Later in the day one of my inside governmental sources suggested I email Eli Gutierrez, the City of Miami Code Compliance Director. I sent a Mr. Gutierrez an email with the link to my story and got an IMMEDIATE reply. More accurately, I got a CC:, as Gutierrez emailed one of his code compliance underlings:

Please an [sic] officer to this site first thing in the morning. Let us
know inspection results. Make this a priority. Include the Building
department if you need to.

Damn! I should have gone straight to Gutierrez last year. However, if I recall correctly, his was one of the phone numbers at which I left messages.

No matter, because by Tuesday afternoon the site had been inspected and cited for 3 deficiencies, including my original complaint of an unsecured work site. The other 2 fall into the vacant, abandoned, and blighted rubrics. The pictures that accompany this post were taken by the City of Miami Code Compliance and were sent to me as a result of the inspection.

According to Gutierrez the owner was cited for these infractions and fined $1,000. There is a 10-day window in which the owner, Aries Development [which owns the company that owns the Bicycle Shop], can file an appeal. However, they still need to fix the deficiencies ASAP. The only deficiency that the owner has a chance of correcting within that 10-day window is locking the gate.

However, remember the Aftermath of the Great Miami Tree Massacre? In short: The same developer, as the controller of a 50-year lease on the E.W.F. Stirrup House, was cited for cutting down 4 old trees on that property, contrary to Miami By-Laws. Before any trees can be cut in this city, a landscaping plan must be submitted to the city and a permit obtained before any chopping. The owners were fined $4,000, or $1,000 per tree.

IRONY ALERT: The owner of record was not the party that cut down the trees. Aries Development, which has a 50-year lease on the Stirrup House, were the real culprits.

And here’s where it gets really sticky: A landscaping plan was filed after the fact and approved. Consequently all the fines were expunged. It’s as if the deveoper did nothing wrong whatsoever.

This developer just does what it wants and always seems to escape any real consequences. As the recently retired Miami muckraker Al Crespo might say, “It’s Miami, bitches.”

Is Aries Development Coconut Grove’s Biggest Scofflaw?

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Aries Development is [allegedly] breaking the law again and, if something isn’t done, somebody’s going to get hurt, probably children. 

Not Now Silly has written about The Bicycle Shop many times in the past year. The condemned structure was deeded to Aries Development, which I have also written about extensively, calling its owner Gino Falsetto the worst neighbour in Coconut Grove.

The Bicycle Shop — and $15,000 — was given to Aries by Miami-Dade County in order to get it to relinquish all claims on The Coconut Grove Playhouse. Until then Aries [under the companies Paradise Parking, Double Park, and Carbbean Parking] had been squatting on the Coconut Grove Parking lot and pocketing the parking revenue. Aries had also scuttled several previous deals to reopen the Playhouse because it claimed the previous deals did not adequately compensate it for its loan to the Playhouse board before it went bankrupt. As long as they were collecting the parking fees, there was little incentive to get off that gravy train. However, Miami-Dade finally shook Aries loose last year.

The first thing Aries did when finally getting its grubby corporate mitts on The Bicycle Shop was rip off the roof. This was done without benefit of a building permit, which is how Aries seems to do everything: without any of the necessary permits, and without city or county oversight. Because ripping off the roof created such an unstable structure, metal bracing had to be installed inside to keep the walls from blowing out. Now those steel trusses are the only thing holding the building together.

During the destruction period, and for a while afterwards, this construction/destruction zone was totally open to the public. The gate on the fence was not locked. Children were playing inside. I contacted the city of Miami several times to complain of an unsafe work site. Eventually, the gate was locked.

Now that gate is unlocked again. 

Saturday Night was FAM Night in Coconut Grove. Because I’m a proud participant of the Coconut Grove Drum Circle, I parked in the Playhouse Parking lot, which is right across the street from where we bang a gong.

When I arrived at the Playhouse parking lot I was shocked — SHOCKED, I TELLS YA! — that the gate to The Bicycle Shop was open again and two young women were inside taking pictures. So I went inside and took pictures of them.

Later, when I went back to my car to get something, there were children (aged 10-12, I’d estimate) running around inside the Bicycle Shop in the dark. There is nothing more attractive to a kid than an unsecured construction site. There is nothing more dangerous than a child running around a construction site in the dark.

I have already called the Coconut Grove NET office to report this unsafe construction zone. I made it clear that I was calling as a reporter and they assured me that a By-Law Inspector would be calling me back. However, I’m still waiting for those callbacks from when I reported this very same unsafe work site more than a year ago. That’s why I hold out no hope I will be called back.

Please keep in mind that Aries Development has not only further blighted the already condemned Bicycle Shop, but controls the 120-year old E.W.F. Stirrup House, which has been designated historic by the city. It has been undergoing Demolition by Neglect ever since Aries acquired a 50-year lease on this important cultural treasure of Black Grove, where the City of Miami actually began. To learn why this is far more egregious than destroying the Bicycle Shop, please read Happy Birthday Coconut Grove!!! Now Honour Your Past.

Meanwhile, this is just more proof, if any were needed, that Aries Development doesn’t care about the residents of Coconut Grove unless they are living in The Monstrosity, aka Grove Gardens Residence Condominiums, which it built behind the Stirrup House. I wonder if it had all the proper permits for that.

Is Kevin Spacey The Coconut Grove Playhouse Angel Or Devil?

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Playhouse panorama – All pics by author on March 10, 2015

There is disturbing news coming out of Miami concerning the renovations of the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

Everyone thought the Playhouse Plan was well on the way when last year all the financial encumbrances that delayed restoring and reopening the Playhouse had been settled. Then recently, Arquitectonica was chosen as the lead design company to oversee the project. However, quietly in the background lawyer Mike Eidson (Lewis S. “Mike” Eidson) started agitating for a new plan. In a nutshell, it’s far more ambitious than the 300 seat theater proposed as a Trojan Horse for a huge parking garage at Main Highway and Charles Avenue.

Eidson’s plan includes 2 theaters as a Trojan Horse for a huge parking garage at Main Highway and Charles Avenue, one about 350 seats and the other approximately 750 seats. [See: The Latest Play on the Coconut Grove Playhouse for Memorandum of Understanding penned by Miami-Dade Commissioner Xavier Suarez and an overview of the Eidson Plan.] Because this plan is far more ambitious than the previous plan, it will require an additional $40 million to the $20 million already earmarked for the Playhouse restoration. That money has to come from somewhere and Eidson, not unlike Zero Mostel, has been out fund-raising.

Once again weeds are growing out of the house, not the ground.

This is a philanthropist?

In the Business called Show, someone who comes in with enough cash to rescue a play is called an angel. The names being bandied about as so-called “philanthropists” who want to swoop in and save the Coconut Grove Playhouse sound more like devils.

As of this writing, Mike Eidson has yet to return my call. I was hoping for an ON THE RECORD confirmation or denial before taking this to print. However, time is of the essence considering the Miami-Dade Commission will be voting on the Suarez Memorandum of Understanding tomorrow at 2PM. [If I turn out to be wrong, I’ll apologize profusely all around.]

It will take more than 3 “philanthropists” to cough up $40 million, so there will, no doubt, be more names added (or subtracted) from this list. However, 3 names have filtered down to me: Pointe Group, Grass River Properties and Aries Development. Long-time readers of the NNS Newsroom will recognize Aries Development as the company that I have been writing about for the last 6 years. It is owned by rapacious developer Gino Falsetto, who has allowed the E.W.F. Stirrup House to undergo nearly a decade of Demolition by Neglect.

SLIGHT TANGENT: It’s worth writing about The Pointe Group and Grass River Properties, but those are stories for another day. I had never heard of Grass River Properties until it came up in connection with the Eidson Plan. Through sheer coincidence, this reporter attended the Golden Pines Neighborhood Association meeting last night at which [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff and the local police Commander were forced to answer for Grass River’s highrise at 27th Avenue and 27th Street. To his credit Grass River rep Christian Cobb was there to answer questions and he was excoriated by several of the residents for parking and traffic difficulties around the project. From what Cobb said many of these problems will be solved soon, but could have been solved a lot sooner had Grass River been proactive, meeting with residents before the project started, or responding to complaints that have been made for the last 18 months. TANGENT OVER.

However, it was the words “Aries Development” and “philanthropist” in the same sentence that made me throw up in my mouth a little. This reporter has written story after story about what a BAD NEIGHBOUR Gino Falsetto has been to the West Grove neighbourhood that he carpetbagged his way into in order to build The Monstrosity. The Monstrosity is immediately behind — and dwarfs — the E.W.F. Stirrup House, which he controls through a 50-year lease, and has allowed to undergo nearly a decade of Demolition by Neglect.

Why is the E.W.F. Stirrup House
culturally important to Miami?
Read: Happy Birthday Coconut
Grove!!! Now Honour Your Past

This is a philanthropist?

When asked, Aries Development puts forward two different lies for allowing this situation to continue. Pick one: Either they ran out of money before they got to the Stirrup House restoration or the city keeps delaying them. Dismissing the latter lie is easy: Aries only filed plans last year with the city, plans that are totally inadequate for historic preservation, under which all renovations must take place.

The “ran out of money” lie is even more laughable considering that Aries: 1). Built two hugely expensive basement levels below The Monstrosity for parking and a private Members Only Wine Cave called La Cava; 2). Is operating 3 restaurants on the ground floor of The Monstrosity; 3). Loaned the now-bankrupt Playhouse Board an undetermined amount of money, which is how it ended up with the Bicycle Shop in compensation; 4). “Squatted” on the Playhouse Parking Lot, collecting the fees from people silly enough to park there; 5). Is about to pony up a portion of $40 million dollars — out of the goodness of its corporate heart — to save the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

This is a philanthropist?

I say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!

It’s time for people to treat Gino Falsetto as the slum landlord he is and reject his money-grubbing social climbing until he fulfills the promises he’s already made concerning the E.W.F. Stirrup House. 

More than any single individual Gino Falsetto stands to profit the most from a successful and lively Coconut Grove Playhouse. Gino Falsetto isn’t a philanthropist; he’s out to line his own pockets at the expense of everybody else.

A philanthropist would not allow this cultural TREASURE of Black Grove to waste away. A philanthropist would have already done the right thing. A philanthropist would not have created the current blight that is the E.W.F. Stirrup House and the Bicycle Shop. 

Gino Falsetto should should be made to clean up the messes he’s already created before anyone considers his money clean enough to touch.

This is a philanthropist?

TO BE FAIR: There are some real angels in this story: Mike Eidson and Kevin Spacey.

Eidson has come up with a game-changing Playhouse Plan that will be more than just a rinky-dink 300 seat theater with a parking garage wrapped around it.

Furthermore, having interviewed a half dozen people OFF THE RECORD about Mike Eidson, everyone tells me he’s on the side of the angels. Seriously. One person used that expression. His only interest seems to be to bring live theater back to the corner of Main Highway and Charles Avenue.

Those in the know have been exercising caution about embracing Eidson’s Plan, though. The big fear is that it will take him so long to raise the $40 million, and solve all the design problems, that Florida just yanks the lease and sells the property to the highest bidder for a huge development. My fear is that Eidson is in such a hurry to show that he’s got this under control that he’s not too choosy about who he climbs into bed with.

Kevin Spacey, who has signed onto the Eidson Plan as Artistic Consultant, should also be considered an angel. There’s no denying Spacey’s acting chops. Were those films not career enough he’s also credited with restoring the reputation of London’s venerated Old Vic Theater as Artistic Director.

I am sure Spacey is getting involved with the Coconut Grove Playhouse for all the right reasons. While not as old as the Old Vic, it also has a venerated history, which I’m sure has not escaped his notice. Were I an an actor of his stature, that would be the kind of challenge I would take on next.

This is a philanthropist?

However, based on the little I know of him, I don’t think he would approve of the treatment of E.W.F. Stirrup’s legacy. It’s less than 200 feet from the Stirrup House to Coconut Grove Playhouse. Kevin Spacey needs to be made aware of how this carpetbagging rapscallion treats the people of West Grove, in which the Coconut Grove Playhouse resides.

To be clear: It’s only because E.W.F. Stirrup was Black has his house been allowed to undergo almost a decade of Demolition by Neglect. More than anyone else, except for perhaps his contemporary Ralph Monroe, Stirrup put his stamp on Coconut Grove and, therefore, Miami. Yet Monroe’s house, The Barnacle, just a few thousand feet away, is now memorialized as a State Park. The E.W.F Stirrup House is memorialized as more Gino Falsetto blight, just like the Bicycle Shop.

A panorama showing the parking lot between the Bicycle Shop and the north wall of the Coconut
Grove Playhouse. When Aries acquired the Bicycle Shop one of the first things it did was rip the roof off.
This led to an unsafe construction site, which I reported to By Law Compliance until they finally sealed the
building. However, then the structure became unsafe because it no longer had a roof to hold the walls in. Now
the interior is criss-crossed with massive steel beams bolted to the walls and floors to stabilize the structure.

This is a philanthropist?

A Playhouse Trojan Horse Update

, , , , , , , ,
These are the arrows in Question 3. I’m not sure
why they were blocked off this way yesterday.

Last week I received a call from the executive assistant of Art Noriega, CEO of the Miami Parking Authority. Because it began with a fulsome apology for not answering my email [See: The Coconut Grove Playhouse Trojan Horse; Part II], I was willing to listen. 

Mr. Noriega wanted to have a meeting at my convenience to discuss my email. I suggested Wednesday [yesterday] and, instead of meeting at his office, we meet at the Playhouse Parking lot. He was more than willing. In the exchange of emails confirming our meeting, I made one last demand: that he still answer my email. That way we could have a conversation, as opposed to a grilling, and get to better understand each other and the issues. He was more than willing to do that, as well.

Here is Mr. Noriega’s replies to the questions that applied to the Miami Parking Authority, followed by those [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff has refused to answer:

Feb 17
Headly,

In anticipation of our meeting tomorrow, here is our response to your original e-mail. Really looking forward to a lively discussion.

[…] 2). When neighbours complained previously that the 45 valet parking spots rented from the MPA would bring additional traffic, they were assured there would be no additional traffic on Charles Avenue as a result. This is clearly false. Why has this been allowed to continue for the past year despite occasional complaints by the neighbours?

The MPA was not made aware of any complaints. The valet has been operating for quite some time. If there were complaints, they haven’t come to us.

3). If there was to be no additional traffic on Charles Avenue then why did the MPA, when it resurfaced the Main Street parking lot, paint a giant arrow on the ground immediately BEHIND the Playhouse directing cars to exit onto Charles Avenue?

The arrows were placed to add clarity to the ingress and egress of traffic through that area.  The traffic, to our understanding, always flowed that way even before MPA took over the management.

4). Some of these 45 spots rented from the MPA are now being used several days a week as a drive-in movie theater. How is this being done?

MPA entered into an agreement with Miami Dade County to allow this drive-in theater to operate in that section of the lot, Mon-Thurs Nights. Is there a sub-lease? Yes A contract? Yes A gentleman’s agreement? Is the MPA involved? Yes

5). What permits were needed to run a drive-in theater in that parking lot?

Blue Star Lite is the company running the drive-in theater and they pulled all the necessary permits from the city of Miami.  What are the insurance requirements and who is paying for it? The insurance requirements are detailed in the contract and is paid for by Blue Star Lite and are approved by the city of Miami risk management department.

6). When these 45 spaces are full of cars and/or drive-in movie patrons, where does the overflow parking go now that the gate on the residential lot has been locked again? [It’s been locked and unlocked as needed for overflow parking until now.]

Overflow is directed to the front portion of the lot located adjacent to Main Highway.

7). At the far west end of the MPA parking lot on Main Highway there is a chain-link fence with a double-gate that feeds onto William Avenue. Why is this gate locked most daylight hours, but quietly unlocked and left wide open on busy nights in Coconut Grove, when the Playhouse parking lot is full?

The gate should be closed at all times.  We have addressed with our security to ensure this is indeed the case.  It should not be open at any time.

8). What will the City of Miami do about monitoring these valet parking infractions going forward?

MPA monitors all valet companies working on the public right of way. Any  Valet companies working in or on private property are monitored by the city of Miami code enforcement division.

9). What will the City of Miami do to reduce all the added traffic these parking lots have caused on Charles and William Avenues?

This question needs to be addressed by City of Miami transportation division. The traffic flow there now is much lower than it was when the Playhouse was operational.

[…]

Regards,
Art

Art Noriega
Chief Executive Officer
Miami Parking Authority

Just to remind readers, here are the questions [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff has refused to answer, merely replying that the resident who complained had her complaint satistfied in 2 business days. 

 1). Why did Charles Avenue resident Cynthia Hernandez have to insist that the police do something after they first tried to tell her that there was nothing they could do since the property owner hadn’t made a complaint?

[To their credit, but only after additional phone calls, the police finally ordered the residential lot to be emptied of cars; a process, I am told, that took 45 minutes and created the 2nd traffic jam of the night on Charles Avenue. The first was filling the empty lot with some 40-50 cars in the first place.]

[…] 10). Considering Gino Falsetto is one of the owners of Aries; and considering he also has financial interests in the empty residential lot being used for the last year as overflow parking to the 45 spaces rented from the MPA; and considering he is also part owner of Paradise Parking; and considering it’s his 3 restaurants that use the valet parking; and considering that his brother Andrew Falsetto is a part of South Park, the company that took the fall for Friday night’s parking fiasco; isn’t all this circular finger-pointing just a little too convenient for everyone to duck responsibility by blaming this ongoing situation as a one-time event?

The E.W.F. Stirrup House on February 18, 2015
after nearly a decade of Demolition by Neglect.

11). And, most important of all: Considering all I have uncovered and written about Gino Falsetto’s shenanigans — his Demolition by Neglect of the 120-year old E.W.F. Stirrup House; the destruction of the old trees on that property without the proper plans and permits; the interior demolition of the E.W.F. Stirrup House without permit or historic plan on file; the destruction of the wall that separated La Bottega from the current construction zone of the E.W.F. Stirrup lot without the proper permits; the removing the roof of the Bicycle Shop without a demolition permit; his alleged squatting on the Playhouse parking lot for several years; etc., so forth, and so on — isn’t it time that Falsetto, and the series of companies he hides behind, are held responsible for the downgrading of the quality of life of your West Grove constituents who live around his fiefdom?

The residents on Charles Avenue may be gratified to learn that Art Noriega suggests they call Miami Code Enforcement for any further valet parking shenanigans and they’ll take care of it, especially now that he’s on the case.

The Charles Avenue Historic Marker is right across
the street from the E.W.F. Stirrup House and immediate
behind the Coconut Grove Playhouse. Any restoration that
doesn’t pay attention to this rich history is an insult to the
Black folk that have lived in the West Grove for generations.

I didn’t bother to ask Noriega any questions about the Blue Star-Lite Drive-In because it will be kicked to the curb, literally, when — and if —  the Coconut Grove Playhouse becomes a construction zone. However, Norienga did mention, in an off-hand way, that all the valet parking companies sharing these lots will be in trouble when — and if — the Coconut Grove Playhouse becomes a construction zone.

My sense of Art Noriega is that he’s a nice guy with a difficult job. He has to balance Miami’s need for more and more parking spaces with a sensitivity to neighbourhoods, traffic patterns, and culture. I did my usual sales job on him about the rich cultural history of West Grove. I think I impressed him with my sincerity. More to the point: I hope I made him understand that what was being ignored in all this talk of a revival for the Coconut Grove Playhouse is the neighbourhood immediately behind it.

Noriega seemed genuinely pained when he spoke of the Coconut Grove Playhouse being dark for all these years. The way he described it, back in the day, made it sound as if The Playhouse was the stable cultural center of a swirling art scene that encompassed the entire Grove. He contends its shuttering created a black hole for businesses throughout that entire south end of downtown Coconut Grove, from which Commodore Plaza is only just recovering.

Noriega also said that any talk of how many parking spaces will be needed [200-300 is what I’ve heard] on the Playhouse footprint is premature. They still don’t know how much of the building can be saved, if any, how big the theater will be, and whether there will be one theater or two, as a recently floated plan suggests.

He seems genuinely concerned to see that forward progress continues on the Playhouse Renovation/Revival. His biggest fear seems to be that the State of Florida (which owns the land) gets tired of waiting for something to happen and sells the land, as it has always had the power to do once the Playhouse board went bankrupt.

It’s been a year since Miami-Dade Cultural Czar Michael Spring cut all the deals that allowed the Playhouse Renovation to go ahead. Since then, and only recently, Arquitectonica was chosen to oversee the project. How long will Florida wait for plans to arrive on a builder’s drawing board is anybody’s guess, but it certainly won’t be forever.

The Coconut Grove Playhouse Trojan Horse; Part II

, , , , , , ,
Gate [H] left open for the valet parking allowing traffic to
go out onto William and Thomas Avenues. Note the arrow
on the ground directing traffic out onto Charles Avenue.

Part I of The Coconut Grove Trojan Horse presented a capsule history of the Coconut Grove Playhouse, the surrounding area, and how a good neighbour’s complaint to City Hall led to this long investigative article. 

After researching the parking issues around the Playhouse for the last year and seeing how the residents were being abused by these valet companies, especially following a night of havoc they created on Charles Avenue in December, this reporter emailed [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff a series of questions which have yet to be answered:

FROM: Headly Westerfield
TO: msarnoff@salawmiami.com, rnelson@miamigov.com
Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 3:36 PM
SUBJECT: ON THE RECORD – PLEASE RESPOND

For
the past year I have been quietly researching the parking lots
surrounding the Coconut Grove Playhouse. This week I was forwarded an
email chain in which your name appears. This seems like a good time to
write up the result of some of that research. My forthcoming article
concerns more than the illegal parking last Friday night on the empty
residential lot on the north side of the Historic Roadway of Charles
Avenue.

Since this is not the first time this lot has been used
for overflow valet parking — just the latest and most egregious — the
denials by Daniel Radrizzani ring hollow. I have witnessed this
residential lot being used on many Friday and Saturday nights and have
taken pictures of it. The neighbours will confirm that this has been an
ongoing problem. And, Coconut Grove Village Council Chair Javier
Gonzales will no doubt remember the several nights I interrupted his
evenings to tell him he should rush on over there to see it for himself.

Consequently,
I have a series of questions about *ALL* the parking surrounding the
Coconut Grove Playhouse, of which this residential lot is only one piece
of the entire puzzle.

1). Why did Charles Avenue resident
Cynthia Hernandez have to insist that the police do something after they
first tried to tell her that there was nothing they could do since the
property owner hadn’t made a complaint?

[To their credit, but
only after additional phone calls, the police finally ordered the
residential lot to be emptied of cars; a process, I am told, that took
45 minutes and created the 2nd traffic jam of the night on Charles
Avenue. The first was filling the empty lot with some 40-50 cars in the
first place.]

2). When neighbours complained previously that the
45 valet parking spots rented from the MPA would bring additional
traffic, they were assured there would be no additional traffic on
Charles Avenue as a result. This is clearly false. Why has this been
allowed to continue for the past year despite occasional complaints by
the neighbours?

3). If there was to be no additional traffic on
Charles Avenue then why did the MPA, when it resurfaced the Main Street
parking lot, paint a giant arrow on the ground immediately BEHIND the
Playhouse directing cars to exit onto Charles Avenue?

4). Some of
these 45 spots rented from the MPA are now being used several days a
week as a drive-in movie theater. How is this being done? Is there a
sub-lease? A contract? A gentleman’s agreement? Is the MPA involved?

5).
What permits were needed to run a drive-in theater in that parking lot?
What are the insurance requirements and who is paying for it?

6).
When these 45 spaces are full of cars and/or drive-in movie patrons,
where does the overflow parking go now that the gate on the residential
lot has been locked again? [It’s been locked and unlocked as needed for
overflow parking until now.]

7). At the far west end of the MPA
parking lot on Main Highway there is a chain-link fence with a
double-gate that feeds onto William Avenue. Why is this gate locked most
daylight hours, but quietly unlocked and left wide open on busy nights
in Coconut Grove, when the Playhouse parking lot is full?

8). What will the City of Miami do about monitoring these valet parking infractions going forward?

9).
What will the City of Miami do to reduce all the added traffic these
parking lots have caused on Charles and William Avenues?

10).
Considering Gino Falsetto is one of the owners of Aries; and considering
he also has financial interests in the empty residential lot being used
for the last year as overflow parking to the 45 spaces rented from the
MPA; and considering he is also part owner of Paradise Parking; and
considering it’s his 3 restaurants that use the valet parking; and
considering that his brother Andrew Falsetto is a part of South Park,
the company that took the fall for Friday night’s parking fiasco; isn’t
all this circular finger-pointing just a little too convenient for
everyone to duck responsibility by blaming this ongoing situation as a
one-time event?

11). And, most important of all: Considering all I
have uncovered and written about Gino Falsetto’s shenanigans — his
Demolition by Neglect of the 120-year old E.W.F. Stirrup House; the
destruction of the old trees on that property without the proper plans
and permits; the interior demolition of the E.W.F. Stirrup House without
permit or historic plan on file; the destruction of the wall that
separated La Bottega from the current construction zone of the E.W.F.
Stirrup lot without the proper permits; the removing the roof of the
Bicycle Shop without a demolition permit; his alleged squatting on the
Playhouse parking lot for several years; etc., so forth, and so on —
isn’t it time that Falsetto, and the series of companies he hides
behind, are held responsible for the downgrading of the quality of life
of your West Grove constituents who live around his fiefdom?

I will publish when I think my story is ready and would like to include your response. A prompt response ensures that.

My questions to [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff
were punted to the Miami Parking Authority, which has still yet to answer.

The area surrounding the
Coconut Grove Playhouse
[Click map to enlarge]
LEGEND:


A). Grove Gardens Condominiums;
aka The Monstrosity;
B). Regions Bank;
C). The E.W.F. Stirrup House;
D). Zoned residential lots, used
for illegal parking;
E). Part of the 45 parking spaces
leased for Valet Parking;
F). Blue Star Drive In & remaining 45
spaces leased to Valet parking;
G). Playhouse Parking Lot
operated by the MPA;
H). Unlocked gate directing traffic
onto William and Thomas Streets
and location of arrow directing cars
to exit onto Charles Avenue;
I). Main entrance/exit for main
Playhouse parking lot;
J). The Bicycle Shop;
K). The Barnacle, now a State Park,
once belonged to Commodore Ralph
Monroe, a contemporary of E.W.F.
Stirrup;
L). Rich people in gated enclaves;
M). Far less well off people in West
Grove, which has remained
predominately Black and depressed
during the last 125 years;
N). Commodore Plaza, named after
Ralph Monroe, is lined with pricy
eateries and more expensive art
galleries, meant for people with
more disposable incomes than
those on the surrounding blocks.

In the meantime, I emailed back [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff to
re-ask questions 1, 2, 8, 9, 10, and 11, since those questions could ONLY
be addressed by an elected representative on behalf of his
constituents. The response from Sarnoff’s office, paraphrasing, “As we
told you before, the neighbour is satisfied her complaint was resolved
within 2 business days. We’re done here.”

While I didn’t get a response from people paid by the City of Miami to answer questions, I did get a response from Regions Bank [B],
which is treating this issue seriously.

The Regions Bank parking lot is
another small piece to the parking puzzle. On many occasions I watched the valets zip cars in and out of the bank parking lot after hours. After asking a few discrete questions I was told the local Regions manager had an informal
agreement with the valet parking company to use the bank’s parking lot
at night. Consequently, I contacted Regions’ HQ and asked several questions about its
Coconut Grove branch:

1).
Is Regions Bank aware of any arrangement between the manager of your
Coconut Grove branch and the manager of the 3 restaurants next door
(Calamari, La Bottega, The Taurus) to use the bank parking lot for the
restaurant’s valet parking during the bank’s off hours?

2). Is there an [sic] written agreement on this arrangement or is it just an understanding?

3).
The valets get $6 per car. I have counted more than a dozen cars at any
given time in this parking lot, with cars constantly being brought in
and out as I watched. These valet fees represent several hundred dollars
on the busy Friday and Saturday nights that I have witessed [sic]
myself. Is any of this money shared with Regions Bank? With the Coconut
Grove Regions Bank manager?

4). Has liability insurance has been
arranged for the shunting of cars in and out of this parking lot? If so,
who is the provider and who pays for the insurance? If not, who would
be responsible were there to be a fatality as cars zip in and out on
this residential street?

5). Why is your parking lot being used
to secure profits for a valet company, and customers for 3 restaurants,
who would otherwise eat elsewhere were it not for the valet parking?

Please
respond as soon as is convenient because I plan to post my story when
it’s finished and would like to give Regions Bank the opportunity to
respond.

Once I started asking questions about this arrangement, it was formalized: 

Headly,

You can attribute the following to me:

We do have a license agreement between Regions and the valet parking company.

We do not receive any financial compensation.

What
Regions and our customers do receive is that the parking company helps
manage the lot after hours.  Before this agreement, there was an issue
with cars parking in the lot after hours and blocking access to the
night drop and ATM.  This kept customers from being able to access their
funds – or make deposits in their accounts – in an efficient manner. 
The agreement was developed to help remedy that issue and to help people
in the community access the ATM and night drop as needed.

You would need to consult with the valet company regarding insurance arrangements covering their activities on the lot.

Thank you.

Jeremy D. King
Corporate Communications
Regions Financial Corporation
205-XXX-XXXX
jeremyd.king@regions.com

So
… While Regions Bank has seen fit to reply to me, neither [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc. D. Sarnoff, nor the Miami Parking
Authority have answered any of my questions. Which brings us to this:

The Parking Problem at Charles Avenue and Main Highway
~~or~~
Why Is The Playhouse a Trojan Horse for a Huge Parking Garage?

A sign on the Regions Bank parking lot.

If you want to see some hard-working men and women, wander on over to Main Highway and Charles Avenue and watch the valets at work.

Diners pull up in their cars
in front of The Monstrosity [A] because they are going to one of the 4
restaurants on the property: The Taurus; Calamari; La Bottega; and the
member’s only, private wine club, La Cava. These restaurants were forced
to offer valet parking because they were struggling from a lack of
customers. Blame it on the Broken Window Syndrome; people were loathe to walk
past the boarded-up Coconut Grove Playhouse to get to Falsetto’s
restaurants. In fact, you will rarely see pedestrians walk any further
south on Main Highway than The Greenstreet Cafe, Falsetto’s biggest competitor just up the block. Everything south of that is a virtual No Pedestrian Zone.

When cars pull up the valets collect $6.00, give it a parking tag, and zip them on over to parking lots [B], [E], or [F]
as quickly as possible. Then they run back for the next diner or to
retrieve a car for a satiated diner. At the end of a hot night the valets are drenched in sweat. I have absolutely nothing against these
people and actually admire their work ethic. [In fact, some of them have
become quite friendly and provide me with background information even though
they know I am working against their boss’ interests.] However, there is no denying these valet companies are destroying the quality of life for the residents on Charles,
William and Thomas Avenues.

Recently I was SHOCKED to learn something I
hadn’t discovered in the 6 years I have been researching West Grove: The Monstrosity
has 2 underground levels, one a parking level and
the other the private, members only faux wine cave known as La Cava.

I
can hear a gigantic “So what?” to that news, except this is Florida.
Dig a small hole in the ground with a spoon and it fills up with water. That’s why basements are not built here, as dry basements are hugely expensive in South Florida.

When The Monstrosity was built there were obviously concerns about residential parking, as is standard for any project. To that end the building was designed with an underground
parking lot for the residents in the condos above. Not having to share any above-ground space for parking allowed Aries to build a structure with more residential and restaurant space for the footprint and height for which it was zoned. However, it’s clear that the City
of Miami, or anyone else, did not anticipate sufficient parking for the building’s multi-use — the restaurants — which
is why the valets are forced to use every available parking space in the area.

Last
year, when Miami-Dade County Cultural Czar Michael Spring cut the deal that gave Aries Development the
Bicycle Shop [J], another part of that deal was that the valet companies
could rent 45 parking spaces [E & F] at $6.00 p/day p/space from the Miami Parking Authority.

The Blue Star-lite Drive-In at night

There’s one last player to be introduced into this story and that’s the Blue Star-Lite Drive-In, which uses parking lot [F] several nights a week to project movies onto a screen attached to the back wall of the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

When
I first heard about this new use of the parking lot, I thought it was a
great idea to help revitalize the neighbourhood, not only bringing movies back to that corner, but creating a fun event for the neighbourhood. However, I have since
changed my mind for the following reasons:

1). To begin
with, this is an expensive night out. Just like the rest of Coconut
Grove, to be honest. A normal night out at the megaplex is barely
more
expensive than the Blue Star-Lite Drive-In and you don’t have to bring
your own lawn chairs or cars or bug spray. This is not priced for the
families that live in the areas marked [M].

I’ll take a Sliders Basket and a Hot Dog Basket, please.

2). My next thought, because I know how these things work, was, “How does Gino Falsetto make money off this deal?”

Falsetto’s
valet parking company rents these spaces from the MPA. Is the Blue
Star-Lite Drive-In paying any rent to Paradise Parking or the MPA? I
still don’t have the answer to that question from the MPA, but I didn’t
have to search very far to see at least one way that Falsetto is making
money off the drive-in. He’s selling overly expensive hot dogs and
hamburgers to the people who have enough disposable income to pay these
crazy rates for a movie in a parking lot.

The Blue Star-lite Drive-In during the day
The Blue Star-lite Drive-In during the day

3). Josh Frank, owner of the Blue Star-Lite, has
turned his portion of the parking lot [F] into a junk yard, complete with
rust imported from other locations. Admittedly, all this junk gives
the drive-in a funky, street- level feel, despite its sky-high prices. However, if any of the homeowners along Charles, William, or Thomas
Avenues [M again] loaded up their property with this junk, they’d
be cited by the city for creating a hazard and/or an unsightly mess.
The Blue Star-Lite Drive-In is allowed to load up this property with
everything from camper trailers to porta-potties. The only thing missing
is the junk yard dog.

The fine facilities at the Blue Star-Lite Drive-In

4). The first time I met Josh Frank I gave him my
card and he was friendly, quite open, and willing to talk. The second time I tried
to talk to Frank he was not only rude, but told me where I could line my
car up to pay an admission to see a movie. I declined the offer.
However, I couldn’t help but wonder whether he had seen any of my posts
on Falsetto posted here in the interim.

I have now
spent many hours over the past year just observing these various parking
lots and the traffic patterns along these streets. As well, I have interviewed valets, security guards, and neighbours at properties
surrounding the Coconut Grove Playhouse. Consequently, I now have answers to some of my questions. 

The answer to
Question #7 above is this: This gate is opened to traffic on Friday and
Saturday nights so the valets working the restaurants on Commodore
Plaza [N] — which I never knew about until this all blew up — can zip in and out the back way [H and pics above and below] without having to drive out onto
Main Highway. Therefore, the valets are entirely responsible for the
added traffic onto William and Thomas Avenues because they are the only reason
that gate is left opened on busy Friday and Saturday nights.

IRONY ALERT: It
was actually the valets on Commodore Plaza [N] and not The Monstrosity
[A] that caused the mess on Charles Avenue which led to the neighbour
outrage. [Which is a distinction without a difference because all these
valet companies are owned by Falsetto and/or companies owned, in part,
by Falsetto.]

On December 12th there was a big event at the Cruz Building — the fake New
Orleans structure on Commodore Plaza [N] rumoured to have been built with cocaine money — and
the valets needed a place to park all those cars. Gino Falsetto
graciously lent the 2 residential lots across the street from the E.W.F.
Stirrup House that had been used for overflow parking for the last
year. They had been getting away with it for so long, but they finally overplayed their hand by trying to park that many cars at once.

And so
finally we come to how all of this leads the Not Now Silly Newsroom to
conclude that the Playhouse rehab is really the cultural Trojan horse to
build a huge, misshapen glass and steel parking structure — the kind Arquitectonica is best known for — with a 300-seat
auditorium attached.

An artist’s rendering of a massive development on Main Highway at Charles Avenue hiding a parking garage, possibly 2 theaters, and what could turn out to be condo-style residences for thespians and others who might eventually work in the theaters. A secret source tells me I can discount the rumour that there will be retail on the premises because it’s all State of Florida land, despite Miami-Dade County running all the backroom deals, and the charter prevents retail. However, that’s assuming a gift shop doesn’t count and the rules don’t change.

Another view of the arrows on the ground directing
traffic out to Charles Avenue. Picture was taken from
the approximate location of the unlocked gate [H].

To begin with all of the valet
parking machinations have proven 2 things: 1). Parking is the only thing
generating money at Charles and Main Highway; 2). There’s a growing
need for parking surrounding the Playhouse. [I don’t want to get too
deeply in the weeds, but there’s also a plan for nearby Ransom School to use
these parking lots for overflow.]

Second, it always
struck me as odd that the MPA was on the committee making decisions
about the future of the Playhouse. It had a place at the table by virtue
of [G], the parking lot it wrestled away from the squatting Paradise Parking.

I
was recently able to get my hands on the Notice to Professional
Consultants, the document that lays out the criteria to which anyone bidding on
the project should adhere [emphasis added]:

Providing
a master plan which may include both immediate and future development
based on the existing property’s historic designation, programming goals
for the facility, and the available funding. The components envisioned
for the site include a state of the art theater (target capacity:
300-600 seats), including all required front-of-house and back-of-house
spaces necessary for the successful operation of the theater, parking, and future compatible development that may address the need for additional parking, a second theater (target capacity 600-900 seats) and complementary site amenities such as retail, restaurants, etc.;

No
sooner had I acquired that document than Cultural Czar Michael Spring
announced that Arquitectonica won the bid. In an email to Javier
Gonzales, Chair of of the Coconut Grove Village Council, Spring put the
best shine on all the backroom machinations. One paragraph stuck out
[emphasis added]:

The
5-person CSC appointed by the Mayor to evaluate the teams included: the
Executive Director of the Black Archives (who has overseen the
renovation and expansion of the historic Lyric Theater in Overtown and
who currently serves as a member of the City of Miami’s Historic and
Environmental Preservation Board, and was its chair from 2007 to 2009); a
representative from FIU, the co-lessee of the Playhouse property (a
senior university executive who has expertise in finance and served on
the committee that negotiated the eventual contract with
Arquitectonica); the CEO of the City of Miami’s Parking Authority
(who will be involved in assessing the potential for a parking garage on
the site and who has extensive experience managing and improving
Gusman Center for the Performing Arts); the capital projects manager
from my department who will be the lead in managing the architectural
process (who has a background in architecture and extensive experience
in building and renovating theaters); and myself.

When I talk about backroom decisions, I am not talking about the selection process that just ended. I am talking about all the backroom decisions that were made before the process was set out for tender. Even
before any designs were considered Michael Spring downsized the
size of the theater from 1100 to 300, and added a possible second theater. The presence of the MPA assures there will be a giant parking structure on the property and the choosing of Arquitectonica,increases the likelihood that it will be some gigantic glass and steel structure that will look totally out of place viewed from the quiet residential neighbourhood marked [M] on the map.

And, I am willing to place a bet that when this new monstrosity is being argued in front of whatever baords are going to vet it, they will point to Gino Falsetto’s Monstrosity as the thing that opened the door to this kind of over-development at Main Highway and Charles Avenue and, OH, BY THE WAY, we just gotta solve the parking problem around the Coconut Grove Playhouse if it is ever to be taken seriously as a tourist destination for the kind of folks who have the kind of money it takes to live in Coconut Grove.

And that, dear readers, is why I believe the Coconut Grove Playhouse renovation is a Trojan horse for a big, huge, honking garage. I would love to be proven wrong.

Another rendering of a potential structure to replace, not renovate, the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

Save The Coconut Playhouse
is a Facebook group not affiliated with the Not Now Silly Newsroom. It
has far more detail about the backroom machinations of the current plan
to renovate and/or tear down the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

Please join if you care about historic preservation.

The Coconut Grove Playhouse Trojan Horse; Part I

, , , , , , ,
Some of the parking lots described in this post.
[See map legend below for matching location.]

Background: Looking south towards [C] the E.W.F. Stirrup
House, dwarfed by [A] The Monstrosity, aka Grove Gardens
Condominiums. Foreground: Looking across [F] The Blue
Star- Lite Drive-In and [E] the 45 parking spaces leased from
the MPA for Valet Parking. Behind the fence at right are [D]
the two vacant residential lots used illegally for parking rich
folk. Immediate left: The back wall of the Coconut Grove
Playhouse, the Blue Star-Lite Drive-In screen, and some junk.

Events have been moving quickly this week. Just as I was finishing a blog post writing up a full year’s worth of research on the parking lots
surrounding the Coconut Grove Playhouse, Miami-Dade County selected Arquitectonica to restore/ renovate/raze the structure (depending on who you ask). That forced a drastic rewrite to what follows.

Get comfortable, kiddies, because this is a long one. It needs to be long so I can develop the thesis in the headline: “Why is the reno of the Coconut Grove Playhouse really a Trojan horse for a gigantic glass and steel parking garage with a small theater attached?” It’s a sprawling Michener-like story — so long I’ve had to chop it up into 2 parts — covering almost a century and a cast of characters that number in the tens. Like Michener, lets take a quick look at who you will be meeting:  

  1. First and foremost, E.W.F. Stirrup, one of Florida’s
    first Black millionaires, who had more to do with the creation
    of Coconut Grove and the building of West Grove than anyone else you can
    name. Almost with his own hands he built an entire, cohesive Black neighbourhood in the Jim Crow south that lasts to this day. His house and his legacy have been allowed to undergo Demolition
    by Neglect; 
  2.  Commodore Ralph Monroe, a contemporary of Stirrup’s whose house The Barnacle, only a few thousand feet away from Stirrup’s, is now a State Park [K] and polished within an inch of its life, for whom Commodore Plaza [N] is named, and who gets most of the credit for creating the early Coconut Grove;
  3. Aries Development in the Snidely Whiplash persona of Gino Falsetto, who built The Monstrosity that changed the entire character of West Grove, has allowed the  E.W.F. Stirrup House to go to wreck and ruin through nearly a decade of Demolition by Neglect, and who, through several of his valet and parking companies, is destroying the quiet enjoyment of his neighbours; 
  4. The [allegedly] corrupt Miami District 2 Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff, who refuses to answer any questions posed to him by this reporter and is now running his puppet wife for his seat, now that he’s been term-limited off the City of Miami Gravy Train; 
  5. Miami-Dade Cultural Czar Michael Spring, who recently defended the legitimate “cone of silence” during the Coconut Grove Playhouse selection process, but doesn’t mention any of the backroom deals and decisions that were made prior to starting the selection process and dropping the cone of silence; 
  6. Arquitectonica, chosen by Michael Spring’s selection committee to oversee the Coconut Grove Playhouse destruction, or renewal, depending on which side of the fence you sit;
  7. Luis Choter, of The Miami Parking Authority, who has likewise refused to answer the questions forwarded to him by [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff, despite his email to me of January 27th apologizing for his lack of attention and promising he will be “looking into all the concerns and responding accordingly within the next couple of days.”;
  8. Cameo appearances by Sharie Blanton, of [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff‘s office; Ron Nelson, of same; Arthur Noriega, CEO of the Miami Parking Authority; Alejandra Argudin, who does something or other with the MPA; and Rolando Tapanes, another MPA employee; all of whom are in the email’s CC: field dodging my questions;
  9. Entrepreneur Josh Frank and his Blue Star-Lite Drive-In; 
  10. Jeremy D. King, a media flack at Regions Bank’s HQ; 
  11. The Movers and Shakers of Coconut Grove, both now and then;
  12. 1920s architect John Irwin Bright who designed the Coconut Grove Playhouse; 
  13. Several valet companies with dozens of valets;
  14. A number of private parking companies;
  15. A number of different parking lots;
  16. And, neighbours both good and bad.

Let’s begin:

After a years research — and a lack of clear answers from the city of Miami — Not Now Silly concludes the small 300-seat theater being proposed as a replacement for the Coconut Grove Playhouse, is nothing more than a cultural Trojan Horse being used to sneak a huge parking structure onto the corner of Charles Avenue and Main Highway.

I started researching the parking problems around the Coconut Grove Playhouse a year ago as a natural outgrowth of my research on the E.W.F. Stirrup House and The Colour Line in West Grove. Six years ago, when I first started researching Ebenezer Woodbury Frankling Stirrup, I could have hardly imagined that his house, The Coconut Grove Playhouse and the Playhouse parking lot were interconnected in a very complicated ways, both now and historically.

The Bright Plan shows the proposed city hall and golf course,
with “Colored Town” moved to “the other side of the tracks.”

A QUICK HISTORY LESSON: Prior to the illegal annexation of Cocoanut [sic] Grove by Miami in 1925, the town’s monied interests — the Movers and Shakers — of The Grove envisioned turning the small, nascent tourist village into a big tourist destination. So they hired Philadelphia architect John Irwin Bright, who came up with The Bright Plan in 1921, the very first of an untold number of urban renewal plans for Coconut Grove over the years.

The Bright Plan called for a fancy hotel; a golf course across most of West Grove, from Main Highway to Douglas; and a city hall approximately where Cocowalk now is. A wide boulevard ran from city hall to Biscayne Bay with a reflecting pool down the middle. The entire Bright Plan was based on Mediterranean-style architecture and would have been beautiful. However, it never got built. The bottom fell out of the Florida real estate market almost before the ink on The Bright Plan had dried.

However, there was one item on the Bright Plan that eventually got built: The Coconut Grove Theater (now the Coconut Grove Playhouse) was erected in 1927 and was based on Bright Plan drawings, which is why the building has a faintly Mediterranean feel. It first showed movies, but was later converted to live theater before it closed in ignominious bankruptcy 2006.

This is just one rendering of a potential gigantic development on Main Highway.
Don’t be fooled. The facade will be a facsimile. There is no plan to save it.

Save The Coconut Playhouse is a Facebook group not affiliated with the Not Now Silly Newsroom. It has far more detail about the backroom machinations of the current plan to renovate and/or tear down the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

Please join if you care about historic preservation.

Another rendering of a potential glass and steel parking garage hiding a tiny theater..

Back in 1927 monied interests — the Movers and Shakers — got together to built the movie house to bring culture to Coconut Grove. However, before the theater could be built the land had to be acquired from E.W.F. Stirrup, by then one of the largest landholders in Coconut Grove. It’s still an open question whether Mr. Stirrup, who was Black, could even go into the movie theater just 200 feet from his front door. At the time movie theaters were heavily segregated. The Ace Theater, on Grand, was later built for the Black folk of West Grove.

Back in 1927 parking cars wasn’t a big issue, but there are times these days when it seems like the parking of cars is the only issue.

When Miami developers present plans for new buildings one of the first questions that needs answering is “Where’s the parking?” Providing adequate parking often seems more important than an eye-catching design or quality of life considerations. This is especially true of Coconut Grove, where residents are howling over the fact that Cars2Go and Citi Bike are taking up precious parking spaces in The Grove because parking for their precious cars is more important than taking a chance on new, alternative forms of transportation.

A year ago Miami-Dade Cultural Czar Michael Spring untangled the Gordian Knot of the Coconut Grove Playhouse in an attempt to revive and renovate it. In other words: Bring culture back to the corner of Main Highway and Charles Avenue.

And, that’s when today’s monied interests — our modern day Movers and Shakers — got involved to screw the taxpayers behind closed doors. 

The backroom Playhouse deal had many moving parts. One part of the deal was to give to Aries Development the former-Bicycle Shop [J on map below] and $15,000. This was done because Aries floated a loan [in an amount I’ve never been able to determine] to the former-Playhouse board before it went belly up. At the time Aries was given a lien on the Bicycle Shop as collateral. That’s not that unusual. What is unusual is that Paradise Parking (another tentacle of the rapacious developer Gino Falsetto, aka Aries Development) is said to have squatted on the Playhouse Parking lot in order to satisfy the loan.

In my exposé from last year, The Coconut Grove Playhouse Deal begins to Unfold, I speculated that a possible future use of the Bicycle Shop could be a restaurant:

[T]urning the Bicycle Shop into a restaurant makes sense because
that’s another cash business. Gino Falsetto [allegedly] learned how
lucrative restaurants can be when he (and his brothers) bankrupted four
of them in the Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, area. When the government
finally moved in to seize the assets (cash in the till and the cutlery,
essentially), Canadians lost an estimated $1,000,000.00 in unpaid taxes.
However, that’s chump change compared to what Falsetto’s investors
lost. That figure is estimated to be upwards of ten million dollars. And
then, next thing you know, Gino Falsetto has enough resources after his
business went bankrupt to buy his way into the hot Miami real estate
market.


Of course, it has to be said, that there are many honest and reputable
restaurant owners. In fact, the vast majority are. However, that doesn’t
mean that restaurant ownership has not been known as a source of illegal profit skimming. Just sayin’.


Speaking of cash businesses, that brings us to the Playhouse parking
lot. On March 1st the Miami Parking Authority (MPA) will take over
control of the Playhouse parking lot. On February 25th the new signage
was being erected. However, most of the old signs hadn’t been removed
yet.


Who had the parking concession until now?


Double Park, Paradise Parking, and Caribbean Parking. Bring Truth To Light
has written extensively about Gino Falsetto; his several various
partners in several various companies; Aries Development Group; shady
Coconut Grove real estate deals; and this particular parking lot. It’s worth quoting extensively: [Click the link to read more of this alleged nefariousness.]

How much money did these companies collect from parking fees in the
time it [allegedly] squatted on the Playhouse parking lot? Was it forced to
return any of that money to the MPA, or was it all just gravy on top of getting the Main Highway frontage, potentially worth millions? And, while I’m asking questions: How much money did these companies report on their income taxes for the years it allegedly squatted on the parking lot?

When I learned these parking companies may have been squatting on the
Playhouse Parking Lot for who-knows-how-long?, I began desultory research on the issue of parking in West Grove, but I had no real reason to write it all up into a post until December 12th.

The area surrounding the
Coconut Grove Playhouse
[Click map to enlarge]
LEGEND:


A). Grove Gardens Condominiums;
aka The Monstrosity;
B). Regions Bank;
C). The E.W.F. Stirrup House;
D). Zoned residential lots, used
for illegal parking;
E). Part of the 45 parking spaces
leased for Valet Parking;
F). Blue Star Drive In & remaining 45
spaces leased to Valet parking;
G). Playhouse Parking Lot
operated by the MPA;
H). Unlocked gate directing traffic
onto William and Thomas Streets
and location of arrow directing cars
to exit onto Charles Avenue;
I). Main entrance/exit for main
Playhouse parking lot;
J). The Bicycle Shop;
K). The Barnacle, now a State Park,
once belonged to Commodore Ralph
Monroe, a contemporary of E.W.F.
Stirrup;
L). Rich people in gated enclaves;
M). Far less well off people in West
Grove, which has remained
predominately Black and depressed
during the last 125 years;
N). Commodore Plaza, named after
Ralph Monroe, is lined with pricy
eateries and more expensive art
galleries, meant for people with
more disposable income than
those on the surrounding blocks.

Not Now Silly has often highlighted the Bad Neighbours on Charles Avenue. For a change of pace let me introduce you to a good neighbour.

Immediately west of the E.W.F. Stirrup House [C] lives Cynthia Hernandez, her husband, and their 2 children. I knew little about Cynthia’s credentials until a recent exchange of emails. That’s when I realized she is a Senior Research Associate, Instructor, & Director of Internship Programs, Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy, Center for Labor Research & Studies, at Florida International University. That’s a mouthful.

I first met Hernandez while photographing the Bicycle Shop for last year’s story. We started talking and, as always, I started pitching the history of the area, especially the E.W.F. Stirrup House. That’s when I learned she lived right next door to the Stirrup House, designated a historic site by the City of Miami, which hasn’t prevented it from undergoing nearly a decade of Demolition by Neglect.

Why is preserving the E.W.F. Stirrup House so important to the cultural history of Coconut Grove? Read: Happy Birthday Coconut Grove!!! Now Honour Your Past

Since then we’ve exchanged information on the house and Charles Avenue whenever I’m visiting. Hernandez couldn’t care any
more about what’s going on if she were an actual home owner. Unfortunately, she just
rents. One of the issues we’ve talked about extensively over the past year is the valet parking business that operates out of the Grove Gardens Residence Condominiums, aka The Monstrosity [A]. She feels her complaints about the additional valet car traffic on Charles Avenue have fallen onto deaf ears.

ANOTHER QUICK HISTORY LESSON: Across the street from the Stirrup House, are 2 residential lots [D] devoid of residences. They once had residences, of course: 2 cute little Conch-style houses. In the same complicated swap that gave Aries Development a 50-year lease on the Stirrup House, it acquired ownership of these 2 lots. The first thing Aries did was knock the houses down to use as a marshaling yard in order to build The Monstrosity in 2006.

The Monstrosity is the mixed-use, 5-storey condo complex, with 3
restaurants offering valet parking. While it fronts onto Main Highway,
it’s immediately behind the Stirrup House and dwarfs the modest 2-storey structure. While Zyscovich Architects did its best to design a building with a Key West/Bahamian feel, The Monstrosity looks totally out of place and out of scale when viewed from Charles Avenue, designated a Historic Roadway as the first street in Miami.

After these 2 lots were no longer needed to build The Monstrosity, they remained empty and poorly maintained. The property has been cited several times for a lack of upkeep, when the weeds were more than knee-high in some places. I have been told off the record, by someone in the know, that these two lots can NEVER be zoned for anything other than Single Family Residential use. However, the same thing was once said about the E.W.F. Stirrup House before the developer managed to get its zoning flipped to Commercial in anticipation of turning it into a Bed & Breakfast.

In mid-December I got an out-of-breath phone call from Hernandez about new parking shenanigans on Charles Avenue. While we had spoken many times over the last year, she had never phoned me before.

I took these pictures of residential lots [D] being used illegally for overflow
parking on November 8, 2014, long before the December kerfuffle. [There
are several cars parked to the right of this open gate which can’t be seen.]

Coconut Grove Village Council Chair Javier Gonzales may remember
me calling him that evening to suggest popping over to check it out for
himself; one of several times this reporter alerted him to this problem.

Hernandez’s concern was that the two residential lots across the street were ONCE AGAIN being illegally used as overflow
parking to the 45 spaces the valet parking companies rent from the Miami Parking Authority behind the Coconut
Grove Playhouse [E & F]. She described to me how there were some 40 cars parked on these residential lots, with the valets zipping cars in and out, and creating a traffic jam Charles Avenue, a residential street.

What made her even angrier was that when she called the police to complain she was told nothing could be done about it because — get this — the property owner had not complained. However, the property owner, through a complicated series of companies and familial relationships, also owns the valet parking outlets and the restaurants in The Monstrosity. He benefits financially by illegally parking cars on these residential lots. Why would he complain?

That’s when she called me. I told Hernandez to take pics and video. I also advised her to call the police back and ask, if they couldn’t do anything, would they at the very least make a written report so that there was proof a complaint had been made because previous complaints to the city fell upon deaf ears.

To their credit, after her second call Miami Police sent out a higher-up, who actually ordered the lots cleared. That took some 45 minutes and led to the 2nd traffic jam of the night on Charles Avenue.

I also advised Hernandez on a list of people she should send the pictures to come Monday morning, which she did. She then forwarded me the entire email chain generated by her complaint. That’s when I decided to collate my year’s worth of parking research for a Not Now Silly article. However, I needed some questions answered to adequately flesh out any such article. Consequently, I shot out an email to [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff asking 11 pointed questions in order to finish my article.

READ MORE . . . 

PART TWO of ‘The Coconut Grove Playhouse Trojan Horse quotes my email to [allegedly] corrupt Miami Commissioner Marc D. Sarnoff, his lack of adequate reply, and outlines why the Coconut Grove Playhouse is the Trojan horse for the gigantic Coconut Grove Parking Garage, coming soon to the corner of Main Highway and Charles Avenue.