At Home with the Flow
North Beach has a certain flow. It's the kind of place where traffic and people congest the neighborhood streets and sidewalks, and there's a real arterial feel. So even as we sit and congregate at restaurants, bars and coffee shops, planning our next walk upon the sand, it somehow seems as if we're all just passing through.
Northbound Collins, the main vein, is an oceanfront semi-expressway lined with high rise condos and hotels, many lying in a state of decay only slightly masked by the intent of redevelopment and signs meant to entice passersby to cash in on pre-construction savings. The Beatles stayed here in the 60s, and now developers call the style of architecture MiMo, or Miami Modern. Some new buildings are actually under construction, and a new luxury set moving into four new high rise developments could change the otherwise workforce aspect of this area within the next year.
By now I've lived in nearly all the extremities of NoBe, South Beach's oft ignored sister to the north. When I first came here in 1996, I lived in the historic Olsen building, then a pre-renovation example of art deco on Ocean Terrace, a two block stretch along the ocean from 73rd to 75th Street. The place gentrified, as the "low-class" tenants, myself included, were displaced when the city condemned it in 2000. Later I moved to a cottage apartment on Normandy Isle, which is a more family-oriented neighborhood just west of the main beach areas on 71st Street. This area is best known for its quaint restaurant district, centered by a fountain, the site of a weekly farmer's market. My new apartment, a studio in a small, run down three story building of garden apartments--with a lush, if overgrown, courtyard and a pool--is located near the southernmost end of the North Beach area, near the classic Casablanca and Sherry Frontenac hotels.
NoBe has in recent years been referred to as Little Buenos Aires due to the en masse migration from Argentina of the past five years, spurred by that country's all-but total economic collapse in 2001. In a short time, these immigrants have helped transform the area from an up-and-coming community to a vibrant first-class city neighborhood complete with a variety of restaurants, shops and confiterias, or coffee shops. Before the Argentines there were outposts of successful businesses, run by Cubans, Venozuelans and others, but the Argentines have filled in the gaps of underdevelopment along the main corridors of commerce in this part of the city, even launching transnational franchise operations here.
This is the place where I first learned Spanish. In the Olsen, I found a community of recently arrived Cubans, one of whom took me in when I was broke and after my car broke down. He spoke little English, and only recently had been released from a year's stay at the Guatanamo Bay refugee camp, which followed a brief but harrowing raft escape from his country's oppressive government. I spoke no Spanish, and only recently had arrived after having escaped from a monolingual Stepford community up north. My committing a cultural faux pas ultimately forced me to learn his language. He refused to communicate with me in English after that, and I began to study Spanish so at the very least I could understand what had gone wrong.
I moved down the street into a shady oceanfront motel; this place wasn't in the shade of palms, it was full of folks with shady intent. In fact, the only redeeming qualities here for me were good air conditioning and an abundance of Spanish language television channels, and so I commenced my studies. With a dictionary and phrase book, and a book of verb drills, I would sit each evening and watch telenovelas and do various exercises to increase fluency. After a month I returned to Antonio's apartment and asked, "Porque te enojaste conmigo?", or "why did you get angry with me?" He explained that I had lit a candle in front of his parents' picture. In Cuba, he said, candles are lit for the dead. By placing the candle in front of the living, I was somehow wishing their demise. I wanted to argue with him at first, for having fought with me over such an arbitrary misunderstanding, for not realizing that my culture had different views on candles, and that by placing one there, in front of the family he left behind, I wanted to shed light on them. But I soon learned to go with the flow. There was no fighting it. So I moved out, not bitter, but ready to learn from my mistakes.
Over the next eight months of my "first time" in Miami, I really broke my proverbial cherry. I lived in probably eight different apartments, with maybe 15 different people representing nearly all the Latin American nationalities. I moved in with a Venezuelan girl near North Shore Park, somewhere in the upper 70s and west across Harding Avenue. Then I lived with a Chilean guy on Normandy Isle. I shared an apartment with two guys from the Dominican Republic and a Nicaraguan. I even tried South Beach for a while, first with an Argentine and a Colombian in a run down place on West Avenue with no electricity, and then with a Brazilian in a less run down apartment on Pennsylvania Avenue, between Lincoln Road and Espanola Way.
Still, I always go back to North Beach. My second time around I enjoyed a more tranquil existance in a small "mother-in-law" cottage behind a home on Normanday Isle. Now I'm back again. There's just something about that flow. And every time I take a step out on the crushed coral sand and seek silence at that glistening blue-green shorelline amidst the impulsive sound of Salsa, Merengue, Son or Rumba blasting from someone's boom box, I feel, more or less, at home.
Northbound Collins, the main vein, is an oceanfront semi-expressway lined with high rise condos and hotels, many lying in a state of decay only slightly masked by the intent of redevelopment and signs meant to entice passersby to cash in on pre-construction savings. The Beatles stayed here in the 60s, and now developers call the style of architecture MiMo, or Miami Modern. Some new buildings are actually under construction, and a new luxury set moving into four new high rise developments could change the otherwise workforce aspect of this area within the next year.
By now I've lived in nearly all the extremities of NoBe, South Beach's oft ignored sister to the north. When I first came here in 1996, I lived in the historic Olsen building, then a pre-renovation example of art deco on Ocean Terrace, a two block stretch along the ocean from 73rd to 75th Street. The place gentrified, as the "low-class" tenants, myself included, were displaced when the city condemned it in 2000. Later I moved to a cottage apartment on Normandy Isle, which is a more family-oriented neighborhood just west of the main beach areas on 71st Street. This area is best known for its quaint restaurant district, centered by a fountain, the site of a weekly farmer's market. My new apartment, a studio in a small, run down three story building of garden apartments--with a lush, if overgrown, courtyard and a pool--is located near the southernmost end of the North Beach area, near the classic Casablanca and Sherry Frontenac hotels.
NoBe has in recent years been referred to as Little Buenos Aires due to the en masse migration from Argentina of the past five years, spurred by that country's all-but total economic collapse in 2001. In a short time, these immigrants have helped transform the area from an up-and-coming community to a vibrant first-class city neighborhood complete with a variety of restaurants, shops and confiterias, or coffee shops. Before the Argentines there were outposts of successful businesses, run by Cubans, Venozuelans and others, but the Argentines have filled in the gaps of underdevelopment along the main corridors of commerce in this part of the city, even launching transnational franchise operations here.
This is the place where I first learned Spanish. In the Olsen, I found a community of recently arrived Cubans, one of whom took me in when I was broke and after my car broke down. He spoke little English, and only recently had been released from a year's stay at the Guatanamo Bay refugee camp, which followed a brief but harrowing raft escape from his country's oppressive government. I spoke no Spanish, and only recently had arrived after having escaped from a monolingual Stepford community up north. My committing a cultural faux pas ultimately forced me to learn his language. He refused to communicate with me in English after that, and I began to study Spanish so at the very least I could understand what had gone wrong.
I moved down the street into a shady oceanfront motel; this place wasn't in the shade of palms, it was full of folks with shady intent. In fact, the only redeeming qualities here for me were good air conditioning and an abundance of Spanish language television channels, and so I commenced my studies. With a dictionary and phrase book, and a book of verb drills, I would sit each evening and watch telenovelas and do various exercises to increase fluency. After a month I returned to Antonio's apartment and asked, "Porque te enojaste conmigo?", or "why did you get angry with me?" He explained that I had lit a candle in front of his parents' picture. In Cuba, he said, candles are lit for the dead. By placing the candle in front of the living, I was somehow wishing their demise. I wanted to argue with him at first, for having fought with me over such an arbitrary misunderstanding, for not realizing that my culture had different views on candles, and that by placing one there, in front of the family he left behind, I wanted to shed light on them. But I soon learned to go with the flow. There was no fighting it. So I moved out, not bitter, but ready to learn from my mistakes.
Over the next eight months of my "first time" in Miami, I really broke my proverbial cherry. I lived in probably eight different apartments, with maybe 15 different people representing nearly all the Latin American nationalities. I moved in with a Venezuelan girl near North Shore Park, somewhere in the upper 70s and west across Harding Avenue. Then I lived with a Chilean guy on Normandy Isle. I shared an apartment with two guys from the Dominican Republic and a Nicaraguan. I even tried South Beach for a while, first with an Argentine and a Colombian in a run down place on West Avenue with no electricity, and then with a Brazilian in a less run down apartment on Pennsylvania Avenue, between Lincoln Road and Espanola Way.
Still, I always go back to North Beach. My second time around I enjoyed a more tranquil existance in a small "mother-in-law" cottage behind a home on Normanday Isle. Now I'm back again. There's just something about that flow. And every time I take a step out on the crushed coral sand and seek silence at that glistening blue-green shorelline amidst the impulsive sound of Salsa, Merengue, Son or Rumba blasting from someone's boom box, I feel, more or less, at home.
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