My own thought, why not a quality bookstore, taking advantage of that great view of Biscayne Bay?
As a kid in high school, I used to spend LOTS of time every month at the late Cox newspaper,
The Miami News, that was in the same building, as part of their JOA, and fortunately for me,
the Sports Dept. and the Entertainment desks were right near the windows with their awesome views.
It may be different now, but back then, the mid-to-late '70's, during powerful summer thunderstorms,
being near that window meant the thunder sounded THREE times normal volume, and would positively
make you jumpy after a few hours, plus, the view looked like you were watching the end of the world
with ominous clouds right on top of you.
I specifically mention bookstore because as we all learned in November of 2007, per the Miami Book
Fair International held downtown every year, there was not a single general interest bookstore within the City of Miami? Es verdad! http://www.miamibookfair.com/ ----------------------------------------------------------
Miami Herald
SHOPPING: Miami is a bookstore desert - THE HOME OF NEXT WEEK'S FAIR HAS NO
GENERAL-INTEREST BOOK SHOPS
By Andres Viglucci
November 2, 2007
Next weekend, during Miami Book Fair International, the lecture halls
and streets in and around downtown's Miami Dade College will become
the nation's largest bookstore as mobs of readers snap up 70,000 books
from 300,000 titles on display.
But if you're looking for a comprehensive, general-interest bookstore within city boundaries any other time of the year, buena suerte. There is none.
You read that right: Miami , a major city of more than 360,000 people, has not a single such bookstore anywhere. Not downtown. Not in Coconut Grove. Not in the Upper East Side. There is no Borders, no Barnes & Noble, no multilingual independent beyond a smattering of niche stores.
"Shocking," said Robert Gibbs, a Michigan-based planner and urban retail consultant who has worked all over the country, including Miami . "We even have a Borders in downtown Detroit."
And there isn't much in the offing, apart from a planned independent store in the Grove. The city 's two new retail developments -- Midtown Miami and Mary Brickell Village -- have no bookstores and no immediate prospects.
Certainly, Miami has some well-established specialized booksellers -- among others, Lambda Passages, a gay and lesbian bookstore on upper Biscayne Boulebard and Afro-In Books & Things in Liberty City . It also has a few Spanish-language stores, including Libreria Universal, long a beacon for Cuban literary culture and history on Southwest Eighth Street.
And there are general-interest bookstores aplenty in the suburbs -- from chain stores in Aventura and Kendall to the redoubtable independent Books & Books, with branches in Coral Gables, Miami Beach and Bal Harbour.
So why should it matter that in Miami -- with its diverse population, the region's largest employment center downtown, an ostensibly sophisticated international repute, and a recent wave of intense urban redevelopment -- there's zilch?
Booksellers, book lovers, retailers and planners say bookstores function not just as fulcrums of culture, learning and community, but as key ingredients in a successful mercantile mix in urban commercial centers.
And can Miami claim to be a center of arts, culture and commerce without a major bookstore in its city limits? How can a city have a new half-billion-dollar performing arts center but no bookstore ?
"I would have thought someone would have put a bookstore in there somewhere," said Les Standiford, bestselling author and chairman of Florida International University's creative writing program, referring to new development across the city .
MANY FACTORS
Why the lack of stores? No one is quite sure, but many factors may play a role, including high rents, a large non-English speaking population and the absence of a retail district with foot traffic sufficiently heavy and deep-pocketed to sustain the low-margin business of bookselling.
The independent Bookworm in the Grove is but a distant memory. More recently, chain stores pulled out of Bayside Marketplace downtown and Cocowalk in the Grove.
"It's tough," said Miami Book Fair co-founder Raquel Roque, owner of the tiny Downtown Book Center, which her father opened in 1965 after arriving from Cuba. Though she still carries some English-language books, newspapers and magazines, she said, "we've had to switch to Spanish to survive. It just reflects finances and the population."
Her store's clientele, she said, is mostly now recently arrived immigrants looking for English-instruction books and bargain novels. She keeps the doors open thanks to a thriving wholesale Spanish-language book distribution business.
Other Spanish-language bookstores in the city also look beyond a local clientele to Web sales. Customers for Libreria Universal's broad stock of Cuba-related books are all over the country, said owner Juan Manuel Salvat.
The trend is clear, Salvat said: General-interest bookstores , especially those trading principally in English, have gone where the biggest concentrations ofbook-buyers are, in well-off enclaves like Pinecrest, Coral Gables and Aventura.
Census estimates tell part of the story. Book-buying is closely linked to education, experts say. In 2006, only 22 percent of adult Miamians had a bachelor's degree. In Coral Gables, it was 58 percent.
Chain stores in particular have developed location formulas that demand lots of well-heeled, well-educated people, said Gibbs, the Michigan consultant: within a five-mile radius, 75,000 people with a bachelor's degree or higher and annual incomes of $75,000 or more.
They also require several contiguous anchor stores selling clothing and home furnishings, and as many as 10 restaurants, he said. "They can't work by themselves," Gibbs said. "All of those retailers reinforce each other."
But Miami has long suffered a shortage of retail of all stripes, from supermarkets to clothing stores.
That has prompted an effort by Miami Mayor Manny Diaz to lure new stores to the city . High on the wish list: a bookstore , said Diaz' retail consultant, John Talmage, CEO of Social Compact, a nonprofit that promotes investment in inner- city areas.
"It's hard to say you are a literate, knowledge-based community if books are not part of the mix," Talmage said.
The best option for Miami , Talmage and others say: independents who can tailor themselves to the local market.
A COMMUNITY SERVICE
That's what Felice Dubin hopes to do in Coconut Grove, where giant Borders couldn't make the numbers work. The longtime Groveite and Village Council member and a business partner, Sandy Francis, are installing a bookstore in the old Banana Republic space on a prime corner on Grand Avenue .
Call it a community service, said Dubin, who has no bookselling experience. The Bookstore in the Grove will have not only books but a bar serving wine and organic free-trade coffee, unusual gifts, and toys for a targeted clientele of both locals and tourists.
"We're working every angle," said Dubin, who hopes to open by Thanksgiving. "Everybody is so desperately wanting a bookstore that, if we're any good at all, people will come."
The rest of the city will eventually catch up, others say, maybe once downtown's new condo towers fill up.
"There will be bookstores in the city of Miami ," said Books & Books owner, Mitchell Kaplan, who has considered Miami but hasn't found a viable site. "It will have to be something so powerful it becomes a destination by itself. But it's just a matter of when and how."
Alan D. Mutter's Sunday blog posting at his Reflections of Newsosaur site was particularly fantastic and
really had me sighing and laughing, and gave me a lot to think about.
Mostly, it made me think of all the hours I spent at the IU Library cafeteria on Sunday nights, especially after the last NFL game of the day during the winter, talking and and listening to my friends who were either journalism students at the Ernie Pyle School or on the school newspaper, the ids, or both.
As I've mentioned here before, since we were a pretty well-read crew, on Sundays, most of us had usually polished off the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Chicago Tribune and the Indy Star, so by the time we made it down to the cafeteria, we were like eager Editorial Board members, ready to diagnose and solve most of the problems on campus and in Bloomington -and the NFL- over Cokes, cheeseburgers and slices of pizza.
After we'd done that, some would wax rhapsodic about someday starting a newspaper that would be different and innovative and...
Yes, we were all going to be smart and savvy vertically-integrated media moguls who'd sometimes dabble in sports ownership.
Of course, I didn't know Marc Cuban back then.
Alan's Sunday post clearly shows what happens when people with good intentions get into the newspaper biz... It literally takes over their lives and their finances and affects everything they do, good and bad..
Another interesting perspective on what's happened to local news coverage is this one from Gary Imhoff, editor of the feisty DC Watch, on the coverage in Washington, D.C. since I left the area, and from DC Watch contributor Jason Lee-Bakke on what happens when a powerful-but-useless DC pol threatens a tiny neighborhood newspaper that reports/exposes his longstanding incompetency and apathy, compared to his colleagues. http://www.dcwatch.com/themail/2009/09-03-04.htm
I also encourage you to read all the reader comments to David Carr's excellent New York Times article
from Monday on the futures of American newspapers that quoted Alan, United, Newspapers May Stand
Readers comments at:
There were some spot-on comments there reminding everyone that many papers have all but given
up the ghost when it comes to being serious local news hounds, and are now just the middlemen
in handing readers over to advertisers, as this excerpt from Times Reader #3 says:
Yes, newspapers need to start getting their share of revenue from freeloading aggregators.
However, this idea that charging subscriptions online will ultimately keep papers afloat is
totally ludicrous. Newspapers don't sell news - they sell audiences to their advertisers.
They're losing, because they've failed to do so. Charging for content will only drive readers away
- The Wall Street Journal might be able to pull that off, but the San Francisco Chronicle just can't.
----------------------------------------------------
If you're not that familiar with The Miami News, a great overview is available at:
History of The Miami News (1896-1987) by Howard Kleinberg, Tequesta, 1987
http://digitalcollections.fiu.edu/tequesta/files/1987/87_1_01.pdf
Above, looking south at The White House as seen from Lafayette Park, with statue of President Andrew Jackson in foreground. Early evening, Fall 2002 photo by South Beach Hoosier.