Tag Archives: MacFarlane Homestead

Is Trolleygate Headed For An Out-Of-Court Settlement?

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Before the meeting of the Coconut Village Council got underway

The February 25th Coconut Grove Village Council purred along nicely until the agenda item of Trolleygate. That’s when the wheels fell off the meeting’s diesel bus. Residents broke Robert’s Rules of Order to talk out-of-turn, denouncing the proposed settlement concerning the non-conforming diesel bus maintenance garage on Douglas Road that contravenes not only the Miami 21 plan, but also the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Such was the outrage that the committee presenting the report had to remind the residents that they were just messengers.

So confident are all the parties that an agreement is possible, that they’ve requested a 60-day freeze in all legal proceedings to see if they can all get on the bus. Based on the anger expressed at the Village Council Meeting, it may be an uphill climb on a rough road to a negotiated settlement.

The former future non-conforming diesel bus garage?

The broad outline of the proposed settlement looks like this: Coral Gables agrees to drop its lawsuit against Astor Development that asks a judge to abrogate its contract with the developer. Meanwhile Astor Trolley/Astor Development agrees to stick the new fake trolley garage RIGHT WHERE IT IS NOW, more or less, as opposed to the non-conforming White Elephant on Douglas Road.

Everything old is new again: The new plan is for Astor to build the multimillion dollar mixed use complex with a maintenance bus garage hidden inside. However, because it will take time for Astor to build the multimillion dollar mixed-use development in Coral Gables, these two parties are asking the West Grove residents to allow the Douglas Road vehicle maintenance facility to operate for the next 18-months to 2 years.

That’s when the meeting exploded.

While this is not a scientific survey by any means, it appeared the majority of those present at the Village Council meeting (which was so small a group that it represented only the tiniest fraction of Coconut Grove residents) were vehemently against allowing any use of the non-conforming bus maintenance garage as a bus maintenance garage, even for a day.

And, if those residents read yesterday’s Miami-Herald, they won’t be reassured. According to Jenny Staletovich:

The city would need to use the 12-bay depot that neighbors bitterly oppose in the 3300 block of Douglas Road in the West Grove while the new depot is being constructed. After two or three years, the trolleys would then move out, said Coral Gables City Attorney Craig Leen.

So, the 18-months-to-2-years touted at the meeting is already being stretched to 3 years and that’s before any construction delays — or construction begins, for that matter.

However, let’s assume this deal is accepted. What becomes of the building on Douglas Road after Coral Gables gets done with it? The community is already eyeballing it for some practical use in a community trying to pull itself out of a downward economic spiral. F’rinstance, there is a dearth of grocery stores on that end of Grand Avenue. Or, what about an artist’s cooperative? Indoor/Outdoor all-weather Farmer’s Market? Or a cooperative retail space like that of The Rust Belt, in Ferndale, Michigan, but with a Bahamian/West Grove vibe? These are all ideas already being kicked around. However, that’s putting several carts before all this horsepower.

The main sentiment heard at the Village Council meeting was, “If you give them an inch…” Similar was expressed to Miami New Times’ writer Allie Conti, who writes in today’s Riptide:

Although the plan seems like it could work, the steering committee that represents the West Grove residents says no way. Committee chair Linda Williams says it’s important that the community decide what the garage is used for once it’s vacated. But she is also concerned the plan isn’t binding enough to get the city and developers out of there at all.

“We will not commit to letting them use the garage for two more years, because then we’ll never get them out,” she says. “There will be delays, and even trying to fine them won’t work — these people have deep pockets, so they’ll just pay the fine.”

While an inch hasn’t even been given yet, some people are already planning the next mile of road under these fake trolleys. This vision asks West Grove residents to put up with this non-conforming diesel bus maintenance garage forever, and a day, not just for a couple of years. 

As predicted in these pages only days ago: The Coconut Grove Grapevine asks the musical question, “Maybe we can use it for the Grove trolley?”

In other words: Ignore the
century of institutional racism and the [alleged] Miami corruption that
sited the garage on Douglas Road in the first place. Let’s make West Grove live with it because that’s how Modern Day Colonialists operate.

There’s a fascinating story about that blue triangle
above in which Coral Gables was able to hide its
racism in plain sight by making it a historic district

Speaking of Colonialism: In a totally unrelated, but tangential issue, Coral Gables still plans to run its fake trolleys into the MacFarlane Homestead Subdivision Historic District, which it has ignored up until now. This weird triangle of Coral Gables land, wedged between West Grove and famed U.S. Highway #1, housed the Black enclave of Coral Gables. These folks were the servant class of Coral Gables and this is the only area in which they were allowed to live at one time.  U.S. 1 served as The Colour Line in those days, making this neighbourhood the exception that proves the rule.

It would be an irony indeed if this under-served area of Coral Gables is finally brought into the 20th Century as a result of opposition to Trolleygate by their West Grove neighbours. Maybe one day West Grove will be treated with the same belated dignity.

As the Merry Pranksters were fond of saying, “You’re either on the bus, or you’re off the bus.” Can the lawyers get all parties on this bus before the 60-day deadline expires?

If It’s News, It’s News To The Coconut Grove Grapevine

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Let’s have a Tomversation, Tom.

Longtime followers of Not Now Silly can attest, I have been trying to Save the E.W.F. Stirrup House for more than 5 years.

Back in 2009 I tried to get Tom Falco, publisher of the Coconut Grove Grapevine, to help me. We engaged in a series of emails that went south really quickly. I explained my background. Then I offered my early opinion (which has only grown after researching more history) that much of what happens in West Grove is informed by Systemic Racism, I received the following reply from Falco, grammar, lack of punctuation, and misspellings unretouched:

[8/31/2009] Well some of the residents on the block are to blame too.

The first house was given over $700,000 by the city in grant money to renovate and the owner painted it white and took off.

Other areas were to be an arts district, but someone involved and part of the black community bought up all the land cheap and then tried to sell it to the artist for exhorbatant prices, so they just walked away.

You were wrong to place this on the facebook page it is off topic and really if you want to be taken seriously you need to do it by not spamming places. It makes you look unprofessional and people won’t take you seriously.

I do since I have done stories on the subject, but it is best to try to spreaed your info the proper way, and spamming blogs and facebook is not the proper way.

I’m just sayin.. Also it wasn’t “Whitie” who scammed the artists, it was the black something initiative that screwed the hood.

Thanks,
Tom Falco


Tom Falco [L] sharing information in downtown Coconut Grove

Wait!!! What???

I was surprised that Falco was so unconcerned about Charles Avenue and the E.W.F. Stirrup House. His larger issue — one he has to this very day — is about SPAM. All links in comment threads are SPAM, as far as he is concerned. It would never have occurred to me that a post about news in Coconut
Grove would be considered Off Topic on a blog with the rubric COCONUT GROVE’S ONLY
DAILY NEWS.

Silly me!!!

As for professionalism: I’ve been a professional writer-journalist for more than 40 years. While it’s so easy to dismiss that experience in the cyber-world, where anyone can claim to be a writer, at least I spell words correctly and know how to use punctuation properly. Yet, Tom Falco has a sizable readership despite his grammar and run-on sentences. More’s the pity.

Clearly Tom and I have a fundamental disagreement. Falco feels sharing information through a link is SPAM. I believe information should be shared. I’m not sharing the link to get traffic to Not Now Silly. I don’t make money off web traffic, like he does. I am sharing the link in order to share the information contained within. Three days later he wrote to me because I transgressed again:

I asked you in a nice way to stop spamming my face book page.

If you do it again, I will have you blocked from the page.

Thank you.

Falco did eventually block me from his facebookery. I was never successful in recruiting him to my efforts to save the E.W.F. Stirrup House, even when I tried again in 2012, when he dismissed me with:

Hi,

I really don’t want to get involved with that.

I am really trying to ease out of the Grove these days and am not taking on any more causes.

Thanks,
Tom

Nor was I successful in recruiting him to the other West Grove issue that cropped up a year ago, Trolleygate.

Funny story about that. Al Crespo, the great Miami muckraker and publisher of The Crespogram Report, tried to get him involved in Trolleygate. Without knowing of the enmity that had built up, Crespo made the mistake of including in his email a link to one of my blog posts and CCed me. Falco blew a gasket, which was so funny and outrageous that I wrote all about it in Go Home, Coconut Grove Grapevine, You’re Drunk! Hilarity ensued. However, Falco’s yet to apologize for the libelous statements in his email.

That’s why it was so surprising to see the Coconut Grove Grapevine recently take up the issues of both the E.W.F. Stirrup House and Trolleygate. What was not surprising is how he has continued to block my comments on his threads because I continue to link to my blog posts.

However, I recently learned that it’s not just me who is being blocked at the Coconut Grove Grapevine. I am now in email communication with someone else (with Tom Falco CCed). This person has also been trying to get comments posted on Falco’s blog. Falco not only refuses to publish the comments, but has refused the courtesy of a private reply as to why the comments have been blocked.

Let me be the first to defend Tom Falco. Only Tom Falco should decide on what gets published on the Coconut Grove Grapevine. Having said that, no one”s trying to SPAM his blog. We are trying to provide his readers more information on issues of importance to Coconut Grove. A real writer would WELCOME that kind of dialogue with its readers. Falco really should drop the pretense that he’s serving his readers; he’s serving his advertisers.

This advert was out-of-date on
March 1st when the MPA took
over the Playhouse parking lot.

When Falco falsely labels informative links SPAM, it’s a convenient excuse not to publish comments that might lead to criticism of any of his advertisers. F’rinstance: Gino Falsetto (the marauding developer I have written about extensively) has been an advertiser at the Grapevine through various companies, including his (possibly illegal) parking concession at the Playhouse and the several restaurants in the Grove Gardens Residence Condominiums.

With Aries Development Group‘s fingers in so many Coconut Grove pies, much of the reporting Falco does is compromised. His recent two-parter on the Stirrup House, spurred on by the destruction of the trees and the public outcry, is an exercise of saying almost nothing while giving the Stirrup House lip service. Laughably he says in one of those posts:

For some years now, a few people asked me to get involved but I always felt there was nothing I could do. After so many years, the Stirrup family gave up the house, which was given historic designation in 2004.

And, nothing is what Tom Falco did. He ignored the Stirrup House from the day I tried to get him to help until now.

And, nothing is what Tom Falco still does. In neither post does he really come out and criticize the rapacious, marauding developer, Gino Falsetto. Furthermore, he won’t publish comments that do.

TO BE FAIR: Falco’s absolutely right that there’s nothing he can do, unless he’s willing to piss off his advertisers. However, if he wants to serve his readers and the larger community can help me pound the drum to Save the E.W.F. Stirrup House.

Either run as the Unofficial Mayor of Coconut Grove, or do some real reporting.

Even his reporting on Trolleygate is back-asswards. He never comes out in favour of his neighbours against the non-complying Coral Gables bus garage, although he mentions the controversy almost tangentially.

What Falco actually has done is to start a petition to demand that Miami bring its fake trolleys into Grove Center. He takes no position on whether these fake trolleys should loop along Grand Avenue into West Grove. Nor does he mention the latest news in the fake trolley story, that Coral Gables has voted to loop its fake trolleys to the MacFarlane Homestead Subdivision Historical District, but not to Douglas Road, in West Grove, just one block away and where its developer sited the fake trolley maintenance garage.

The MacFarlane Homestead Subdivision Historical District has a fascinating history. I barely touched on it in No Skin In The Game ► Part Three. In short: Coral Gables hid its racism in plain sight by making its only Black enclave, where it ALLOWED its servant class to live, an entire historic district.

Once again West Grove is being frozen out while Center Grove is begging for crumbs from Miami for a fake trolley. However, for a change, Historic Black Coral Gables might finally get served. But, you’ll never learn any of the context from the Coconut Grove Grapevine.

If Falco remains true to form he will next take another wrong position. In no time at all I expect to read him call for grandfathering the illegal, non-conforming Douglas Road diesel bus garage because, with the expansion of the fake trolley lines he’s pushing for, it will be needed, despite the fact that it belongs to the next town over.

I guess what really has me irked, however, is he managed to get quoted recently by other publications who jumped on the both the E.W.F. Stirrup House and Trolleygate issues. He had to be dragged — kicking and screaming — to barely write about these Coconut Grove issues in the first place. Then Miami media quotes him as if he knows what he’s talking about.

Clearly, he’s got a much better press agent than I do and I am jealous of the attention he gets.

However, I’ll warn Falco publicly (again) that he needs to be careful who he says what to. Some of what he says actually gets back to me. In fact, people seem gleeful to repeat it. Some of it sounds suspiciously like slander. People he believes are his friends do not keep his confidences. Who knew FAM would provide so many Friends of Falco a night to unload?

On the other hand: Everything I have said to people in private about Tom Falco, I have also stated in public on my blog more than once:

The Coconut Grove Grapevine is a joke, and Tom Falco is a panoply of a parody of a journalist.

No Skin In The Game ► Part Three

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History is complicated.

Little did I realize how accurate I was in intimating Coral Gables has a long history of Racism, going back to its founding. As reported in Part Two of No Skin In The Game, to this day Coral Gables has a population that is 98% White. This demographic never happens by accident. 

However, there is one Coral Gables neighbourhood that turns out to be the exception . . . the exception that proves the rule.

In my research I recently, accidentally, stumbled across something called the MacFarlane Homestead Subdivision Historic District. It was an odd little reference in the Sun Sentinel that caught my attention. In the article Reference Guide Lists Historic Black Sites, were mentioned Black sites across Florida, including one in 98% White Coral Gables, of all places:

CORAL GABLES

MacFarlane Homestead Subdivision Historic District:

Bounded by Oak Avenue, Grand Avenue and Jefferson Street. The residences were built primarily in the late 1920s and 1930s in a vernacular type of architecture not seen elsewhere in Coral Gables. The styles in the district include bungalows and one-story frame “shotgun“ houses. St. Mary`s Baptist Church at 136 Frow Ave. was built in 1927.

Detail of map showing the MacFarlane Homestead Subdivision Historic District,
the oddly shaped triangle in blue. Everything to the south and east is Coconut
Grove. Everything north of the tracks and U.S.1 is Coral Gables.

That address puts it in the odd triangle section of Coral Gables immediately adjacent to West Coconut Grove. It’s just a little more than a block away from the Coral Gables diesel bus garage that the residents of West Grove have been saddled with.

Reading between the lines:

  • “…built primarily in the late 1920s and 1930s…” can be translated to say “this neighbourhood was created contemporaneously with the founding of Coral Gables;”
  • “…in a vernacular type of architecture not seen elsewhere in Coral Gables. The styles in the district include bungalows and one-story frame “shotgun“ houses…” translates to “built in the inexpensive and expedient Bahamian style, styles of house that would never be allowed elsewhere in hoity-toity Coral Gables, but seen in abundance in neighbouring Black Coconut Grove.”

In other words: this neighbourhood was created so the Black folk who were doing the back-breaking labour of building Coral Gables — and, later, serving Coral Gables — would have a place to live. My understanding of the racial implications was instinctive and immediate. Proving that point would be more difficult.

1913 Poster

One thing that made Coconut Grove unique in this country — aside from having the highest percentage of Black home ownership in the nation — is that the Black community in Coconut Grove was NOT on the “other side of the tracks.” Think about that expression for a moment. The “other side of the tracks” was the poor part of town, where Black enclaves originally started near the railroad tracks. That was generally an area where no decent, self-respecting White person would find themselves living, or even traveling. Black folk had far fewer choices for neighbourhoods. And, as has always been true in this country, once there were a few Blacks in an area, it became all Black over time.

While Coconut Grove didn’t have an “other side of the tracks,” it’s clear that Coral Gables did. The blue triangle on the map above (or on this interactive map) is the only area in Coral Gables that Blacks could live. South of U.S. Highway #1, which runs parallel to the railroad tracks, is the other side of the tracks if you live in Coral Gables. It may be technically a part of Coral Gables, but it’s not OF Coral Gables, if you get my meaning.

It turns out the proof I was looking for was tucked away in a book called “African American Sites in Florida” by Kevin M. McCarthy. Within I found the following:

Coral Gables

When I took pictures of George Merrick and Coral Gables City
Hall in August of 2009, who knew they would come in handy?

Coral Gables may have been the second planned community in the United States, after Washington, D.C. George E. Merrick spent much time and money designing the city, including what became the University of Miami, which opened in 1926. To promote the planned community, he used the oratorical skills of William Jennings Bryan in the mid-1920s; Bryan, who had been President Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State and a three-time Democratic Party nominee for President, gave impassioned speeches around Merrick’s fabulous Venetian Pool, encouraging visitors to buy and settle in the planned community.

The city never had a large number of blacks, and in 2000 only 3% (1,348) of the total population of 40,091 were black.

MACFARLANE HOMESTEAD SUBDIVISION HISTORIC DISTRICT is a black enclave within the city of Coral Gables. It is bordered by Oak Avenue, S. Dixie Highway (U.S.1), Brooker Street, and Grand Avenue east-northeast of the University of Miami. The district takes its name from Flora MacFarlane, who homesteaded 160 acres of land there and in Coconut Grove in 1892. Some of the houses in the district predate the expansion of the Gables in 1925 and 1926, while others were built in the 1930s at a time when blacks were not allowed to build in the wealthier parts of Coral Gables. One of the earliest structures, St. Mary’s Baptist Church, was built in 1927. Most of the homes in what is called the black Gables are small, single-story homes built from Dade County pine. Many of the blacks worked in the homes of the wealthy white residents or in the construction of such buildings as the City Hall and the Biltmore Hotel. The area is changing rapidly today, with many large homes being built.

The historic 120-year old E.W.F. Stirrup House,
still undergoing Demolition by Neglect

Here’s the supreme irony: Coral Gables is so proud of its little Apartheid Triangle that in 1994 it had it listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That’s like hiding its racism in plain sight. Now, if anyone exposes Coral Gables’ long and complicated history of racism, it can point to the MacFarlane Homestead Subdivision Historic District and claim, au contraire mon frere, it has honoured the original Black builders of Coral Gables.

Which is more than neighbouring Coconut Grove has done. Coconut Grove has continued to ignore its history. Rapacious carpetbagging developers have now taken control of some of the historic elements of Black Coconut Grove and no one seems to care.

People tell me that the E.W.F. Stirrup House is on a registry of historic city homes. I’m calling bullshit on that claim. I can find no historical designation for the E.W.F. Stirrup House by Coconut Grove, the City of Miami, Miami-Dade County, the State of Florida, or the country. Yet E.W.F. Stirrup created a unique place in this country, which is slowly disappearing.

SAVE THE E.W.F. STIRRUP HOUSE!!!

No Skin in the Game – Part One
No Skin in the Game – Part Two