The very dangerous precedent for the future that the Hollywood and Miami Beach City Commissions are making by showing thru both word and deed, that their own land use ordinances mean nothing when The Related Group comes calling

Residents and stakeholders of #HollywoodFL and #MiamiBeach are quite rightfully fearful of the very dangerous precedents their two respective City Commissions are clearly making by showing thru both words and deeds, that their own land use ordinances mean nothing when The Related Group comes calling. 

Mean nothing, that is, IF there are deep-pocketed real estate developers interested in doing something the clear majority of the community is opposed to, but the firm is willing to ignore existing public sentiment against it because they have the resources not to care about the optics to others of ignoring the community's desires.

I've been meaning for the last few months to share my thoughts regarding this New York Times story by former Miami Herald reporter Patricia Mazzei, at bottom, involving The Deauville Hotel, 

The Deauville is a historic Miami Beach property and also is one that I had occasion to go to several times over the years while growing-up in South Florida from 1968-1979, before I left for college and the cream and crimson of Indiana University, Bloomington.

I hasten to add, in my case, I was always going to The Deauville to see people visiting from out-of-town, NOT to stay overnight and make myself known to room service. 

For me at least, the story on The Deauville, below, serves as a timely reminder that the worst thing about The Related Group's incompatible plan for 1301 S. Ocean Drive on Hollywood Beach isn't merely that Mayor Josh Levy's snarky, passive-aggressive, and decidedly anti-transparent approach led to approximately ZERO of the REQUIRED public in-person COMMUNITY meetings taking place. either before (or since) the first public Hollywood City Commission meeting, when the Hollywood public was NOT even allowed inside Hollywood City Hall to directly confront the very people trying to change the charm and ambiance of that part of Hollywood Beach. The most natural part of Hollywood Beach that remains..

Nor was it even the City's thin-skinned Communications Dept. peevishly and repeatedly attacking and demeaning people like my friend, Cat Uden and I online in our individual efforts to let the larger Hollywood and South Florida community know via the South Florida news media what was REALLY taking place. 

That includes the continuing lack of good faith the City's elected officials had shown Hollywood's citizens and stakeholders, whom THEY work for.

As it happens, Cat and I both have strong backbones and thick skins, plus, we have the advantage of having the facts on our side, and if you didn't already know it, the City's elected officials and Communications Dept. really, really hate... facts.

So this discrepancy, this ability to use their own information against them, really burns them, as does our success in getting the facts out to the larger public and the local, state and national news media.

Especially self-evident facts that can be wholly substantiated by both contemporaneous photographs and video.

No, it's not even the fact that supposed nature-lover, water sports-loving Josh Levy would, if successful, destroy, FOREVER, for nothing more than money, a place with a certain and unique ambiance that the community places a very high value on maintaining for future generations - THE most natural part of Hollywood Beach.

 

vs.

 

It isn't even that both proposed projects are -coincidentally- the handiwork of The Related Group. That almost was predictable, given the landscape of real estate development in Florida in 2022.

No, what's the worst thing of all in the case of the Hollywood Beach project is the terrible precedent it sets for the future, since it would likely set in motion a constant game of musical chairs on the beach, as local Mom and Pop hospitality businesses owning smaller properties decide that if the city's elected officials are publicly declaring by both their words and their deeds that the city's own rules and ordinances don't mean anything -since Related wants to build a luxury condo tower there for multi-millionaires that's 5-7x's larger than what's currently allowed on that part of the beach- why should they stay on the sidelines and be played for suckers?

If you understand anything at all about human behavior and how things have traditionally operated in South Florida when it comes to real estate, then you know that I'm right.

The reason is simple.

Because, suddenly, as a result of what Hollywood City Hall will have done, there will be no incentive at all for the smaller and successful property owners to invest more of their money and time to improve their current low-scale site.

They'll simply wait the neighborhood out until someone comes in with such a huge offer for their property that they decide to seell.

When that happens, goodbye Hollywood Beach ambiance and charm.

Forever.

If you didn't know it or may've forgotten it, The Deauville is where The Beatles, famously,  stayed and performed in February of 1964 on CBS-TV's Sunday night blockbuster, The Ed Sullivan Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEzPROIIlk4

One last thing, and it's a sign of the times about journalism as it's practiced in South Florida these days. You know what I could not find?

A single local story where Cuban-American Alex Meruelo, owner of the Meruelo Group, the owner of The Deauville, was/is actually asked why he allowed the property to become so run-down that it was deemed unsafe by the City of Miami Beach. 

How do you explain that?

Exactly.

"Today, the Deauville is shuttered, enclosed by an ugly chain-link fence. Soon, it is likely to be demolished. Preservationists fear the hotel’s slow demise will set a troubling precedent in their efforts to protect South Florida’s history."

 

Miami Beach owes its iconic status in no small part to the preservation of its Art Deco district, known the world over for the string of pastel-colored boutique hotels. But it has not always been easy to preserve buildings elsewhere in South Florida.
In its heyday, the Deauville Hotel in Miami Beach hosted the likes of The Beatles, Sammy Davis Jr. and President John F. Kennedy. Soon, the hotel is likely to be demolished, which historic preservationists fear will set a troubling precedent.
“Miami is a place where the land has always been more valuable than the building...There’s no shared history, and when you have no shared history and no shared culture, you have no shared commitment to maintaining that history or that culture.”
"The four-acre property, valued some years ago at $100 million, is owned by a corporate entity registered to the Meruelo family, which runs other hotels and casinos and also works in construction."

New York Times

A Grand Miami Beach Hotel, and Its History, Might Be Torn Down.
The Deauville Beach Resort played host to the Beatles, Frank Sinatra and John F. Kennedy. But it has been deemed unsafe after years of neglect.
By Patricia Mazzei
Published Jan. 17, 2022, Updated Jan. 20, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/17/us/deauville-hotel-miami-beach.html

FYI: "In the event of a total demolition, Miami Beach would be legally entitled to limit future construction to the Deauville’s same size."

Dave 

David B. Smith  

Hallandale Beach/Hollywood Blog: http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/ 

Twitter: @hbbtruth, https://twitter.com/hbbtruth/with_replies

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Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/david-bruce-smith-b945b376/

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South Florida Journalism in 2016: The ever-expanding gulf between what the South Florida press corps offers up and the quality, local-centric news coverage the South Florida public craves, has never been as large as now; Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets in her final NY Times Public Editor column that hits out against elite/institutional bias

South Florida Journalism in 2016: The ever-expanding gulf between what the South Florida press corps offers up and the quality, local-centric news coverage the South Florida public craves, has never been as large as now; Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets in her final NY Times Public Editor column that hits out against elite/institutional bias

Revised April 21, 2016 at 3:15 p.m.

As most of you longtime readers of Hallandale Beach Blog know well by now -but which you newer readers don't, especially those of you who have only discovered me the past two years via my tweets @hbbtruth- I started this blog in 2007, largely out of a fit of frustration and anger at the self-evident failure and lack of individual/collective effort I saw on a daily basis by the South Florida news media. Specifically, its collective failure to evolve from what it once was -home to nationally-respected who were in some cases some of the best and most-dogged investigative news sleuths in the country.
It's why so many of them eventually wound up at the then-three national U.S. TV networks and the fledgling CNN when that cablenet debuted.

My complaint, summed-up, was that the South Florida's press corps' failed to build upon this track record, and failed to expand its level of news coverage of public policy and local government in ways that readers/viewers clearly wanted to see and rather expected.

Though I was born in San Antonio, Texas a few years before, my family arrived in Miami from Memphis when I was seven years old in the Summer of 1968, the day after Miami Dolphins #1 Draft pick Larry Csonka of Syracuse signed with the Dolphins.

As everyone who knows me then or now can tell you, I have been a devout news, sports and public affairs junkie ever since then.

But the difference between then and now is that when I was growing-up in South Florida in the '70's, there was an All-News AM radio station, WINZ AM 940 that was a CBS News affiliate and provided lots of news reportes to new York, especially those covering weather, immigration and the Sapce Shuttle.

That has NOT been the case in several decades, nor has there been even one attempt by anyone to lay the groundwork for a Local News Cable channel of the sort that has existed in many media markets throughout thsi country, including some smaller than South Florida's.

Why has COMCAST, long the dominant cable provider in South Florida, utterly failed to deliver on that potential? Well, you know who never asks?
The South Florida news media themselves, including the Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.
If you want to waste an hour, try going thru their newspaper archives and try to find a single story about the subject in the past 20 years.
That's the sort of media area South Florida is.

That's made worse because with my crazy accurate memory, I've been able to recall  at the drop of a hat the names of individual reporters and anchors at local TV/radio stations and reporters and editors at the Miami Herald and the late Miami News -that I spent so much time at as a High School student- and the individual beats their reporters covered and owned .
And the important news stories they broke or gave much-needed historical context to when it really mattered to residents of South Florida, NOT after-the-fact months later in some investigative piece clearly designed to win journalism awards, NOT keep South Florida properly informed.

I still have an institutional memory of what those people were able to do with much less in the way of resources and technology than the current crew of South Florida journalists have and take for granted, for whatever reasons.

That doesn't just rankle, it makes me cringe, because so much of what I regularly consume from local South Florida media isn't just parochial but even shallower than the above ground swimming pools that once seemed to dominate South Florida and North Miami Beach in the 1970's.

And that means that getting to the heart of some of the endemic and unique problems of South Florida, much less their possible solutions, are one day farther away than they need to be for our community's long-term sake.

Over the past nine years that I have been writing this blog, a recurring theme here has been the cleavage between what the South Florida news media believes is perfectly acceptable in terms of effort and end product for news consumers, and what the public wants and expects from them. 
A graph where X never meets Y.

Over the years, the insufficient level of individual and collective effort expended by the South Florida press corps and the dominant English-language news outlets has only gnawed away at me and other well-informed observers I know and trust, as we are continually see both individual reporter bias, institutional lack of historical knowledge and lack of torpedo every well-intentioned effort to make local South Florida residents better informed about their community and the state that is now the third-largest in the country.

We see the growing gap between what the public expects from print/TV reporters and columnists and TV Assignment Editors and News Directors, in the form of interesting and compelling ways to cover local news, and what is actually presented to us as readers and viewers, as the very seeds for our area's growing technology and information gap.

A growing class and income chasm that won't be made smaller by simply pretending that it doesn't exist.

These same national trends are regularly and correctly decried in Washington as harmful to the nation's future and economic vitality when presented calmly as facts by politicians of varying political persuasions and august public interest groups with demonstrated track records for being non-partisan, but somehow, closer to home, these same problems are largely ignored when they are pointed out by people like myself and other public observers in South Florida who want this community to be MUCH BETTER than it is,.
Even when we use self-evident facts and the news media's own track record as our opening and closing arguments.

It's not exactly a secret that compared to the rest of the country, South Florida's relative youth historically -the City of Miami not being founded until 1897- and large and ever-growing population of Northeastern and Midwestern transplants whose history and allegiances remain elsewhere years after they've moved here, has always worked against the long-term interests of South Florida institutions, civic groups and foundations, even ones who profess laudable societal goals and do try to show some spirit and verve.

But this also means these groups are NOT front-of-mind and front-and-center when it comes to focusing the community's attention on problems the way similar groups are elsewhere in the country.

It's not an excuse, merely a reflection of history and common knowledge, borne of experience living in and growing-up in South Florida.
But at some point, these same groups current unwillingness to point out the problems at hand and suggesting tangible solutions, has to be called out, and I will be doing just that in a future post with some energy and enthusiasm that I know will surprise and anger many with its ferocity and focus.

So be it!
My blog has never been interested in carrying the water for South Florida's elites or well-off.

#disrupt

But as it concerns today's theme of journalistic lack of effort in South Florida, it's hard to shake the notion that many of these civic groups ansd foundations, so dependent upon the South Florida news media for positive attention and charity dollars when they can get it, seem to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy denying self-evident problem in large part  because of whose oxen may well need to be gored. (Or is it a case of being afraid to bite the hand that feeds them?) 

The South Florida news media's.

To me and many of the people I regularly speak with and confide in here in South Florida and throughout the Sunshine State -even many reporters, editors, columnists and TV anchors whose names are known instantly to many of you- the gulf in South Florida between what is possible in local journalism because of advances in technology that make it easier than ever to report accurately and in real-time, has, unfortunately, never seemed so large as at it does at present.

This is made all the worse by what takes place everyday with the two largest South Florida-based daily newspapers, McClatchy's Miami Herald and the Tribune Company's South Florida Sun-Sentinel, both of whom are and have been going in the wrong direction from readers desires for far too many years.

Since the majority of my focus on this blog, despite my 1,001 other interests and passions, has always been what is happening in South Florida -for good or for bad and why- I write to day to share some much-needed wisdom from a trusted source I have long depended upon, even while never mentioning her previously: Margaret Sullivan, the departing New York Times Public Editor.
At the end of her term as the the Reader's Ombudsman, just as was true throughout when she never hesitated to challenge long-established Times icons and the Times' often counter-intuitive ways of thinking about the larger public interest, Margaret Sullivan gives as good as she gets.

As I have remarked here many times in the past with fact-filled blog post and copies of letters to the Miami Herald's management, the Herald never replaced their Ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, after he left for NPR. And they consciously ignored many of the common sense suggestions he made about journalists.
That includes his April 25, 2010 column, Reporter-columnists tread fine line with readers' trust about the need for journalists to publicly come out to readers as one one thing or the other, i.e. not being both reporter AND columnist, because of the damage that such dual roles can cause to perceived bias and credibility with readers.

The Herald ignored that advice when it came to dealing with both Beth Reinhard and later, Marc Caputo. If you want a copy of that column, just write me and ask for a copy.
It's not been available at the Herald's website for many years.

To see how indifferent the Herald's management was to reader perceptions of bias or unfairness, take a poke at my blog post from May 21 of 2012 titled, 

"What's going on at the Miami Herald? More than a year after the last one fled, the Herald still lacks an Ombudsman -and shows no sign of getting one- to represent readers deep concerns about bias, misrepresentation and flackery on behalf of South Florida's powerful & privileged at the Herald. And that's just one of many unresolved problems there..." 

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/whats-going-on-at-miami-herald-more.html

See also, among many others to choose from:
11/12/10 - A day in the life of McClatchy's Miami Herald, as viewed by a reader who's largely given up on them fixing their problems, or surviving long-term
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2010/11/day-in-life-of-mcclatchys-miami-herald.html

12/21/11- 

For another consistently lousy year of journalism at the Miami Herald, esp. covering Broward County, more lumps of coal in the Christmas stocking of One Herald Plaza -Part 1

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2011/12/for-another-consistently-lousy-year-of.html

8/13/13 - Former Miami Herald Ombudsman Edward Schumacher-Matos -whose position at the Herald remains unfilled 27 months later by McClatchy execs- as NPR's Ombudsman, lays the wood into NPR's Laura Sullivan & Amy Walters for a 2011 investigation re foster care in South Dakota, which officials there took umbrage with, and for good reason it seems. “My finding is that the series was deeply flawed and should not have been aired as it was”

http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2013/08/former-miami-herald-ombudsman-edward.html

I hasten to add that this was also during the McClatchy era when the Herald ran a multi-weeks old story about Donald Trump in the "Breaking News" section of the Herald's Broward homepage on Monday December 19th, 2011 at 11:21 p.m.
And there it stayed for days...
Really. :-(

Margaret Sullivan's final column from last Friday is a column of pure gold, for it has much that the South Florida press corps could and SHOULD learn from in the way of perceived reporter/editorial/institutional bias, attention to accuracy and willingness to publicly admit mistakes.

I highly commend it to you and ask you to consider sharing it with others you know in South Florida and throughout the Sunshine State who think as I (we) do -that South Florida and the rest of the state would be much better off with a fully-engaged and curious press corps year-round, not the one we have had for years that habitually takes a Summer slumber or vacation come mid-June, never to be seen again until after Labor Day, no matter how important the story.

http://www.adweek.com/fishbowlny/most-people-dont-trust-the-media/372988

New study by "the American Press Institute - almost no one trusts the media. The report found that just six percent of Americans have a great amount of confidence in the press.  To put that into perspective, the API ‘s study showed that Americans trust only Congress less than the media. Other organizations that the public has more confidence in than journalists: banks, organized religion, the Supreme Court, and the military.  The number one reason people mistrust the media is that they found reports one-sided or biased. Following closely behind was that readers found something factually inaccurate. Interestingly, respondents to the API report said that how a media outlet responds to inaccurate reports is extremely important.  “Several focus group participants said they do not expect news sources to be perfect and how a source reacts to errors can actually build trust,” stated the report. “Several people said that owning up to mistakes and drawing attention to errors or mistakes can show consumers that a source is accountable and dedicated to getting it right in the long term.” 

Results at:
https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/lose-trust/

On the heels of this not-at-all surprising survey comes this great rear-view column from Sullivan, soon-to-be the Washington Post's new media columnist.

@Sulliview re Articles celebrating excesses of 1%, i.e. “four-pack” inc. #Miami winter condo - sadly, this attitude INFESTS #SoFL media. :-(

— HallandaleBeachBlog (@hbbtruth) April 18, 2016

New York Times
The Public Editor's Journal - Margaret Sullivan  
Five Things I Won’t Miss at The Times — and Seven I Will  By Margaret Sullivan 
April 15, 2016 10:00 am 
April 15, 2016 10:00 am

While preparing to leave the public editor’s office and move to Washington, I’ve been getting together in recent weeks with some people I’ve met while living in New York. One was Ben Smith, the editor in chief of BuzzFeed, who asked me over lunch what columns I planned to do before I left. I tossed it back to him, asking what he would like to read, and he suggested I take up “what I love and what I hate about The New York Times.”

This guy’s definitely got a future as an editor! I decided to tweak his idea, with a nod to Nora Ephron’s list from her book, “I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections.” (Of all the people I wish I had been able to meet in New York, she tops the list.)

Read the rest of her great post at:
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/five-things-i-wont-miss-at-the-times-and-seven-i-will/?module=BlogPost-Title&version=Blog%20Main&contentCollection=Opinion&action=Click&pgtype=Blogs&region=Body&_r=1

Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 - Eighty-seven years ago today, what there was of Miami and South Florida was largely destroyed by a powerful Category 4 hurricane that devastated everything in sight, ending the Florida land boom in a heartbeat, plunging South Florida into an early economic Depression and retarding this area's growth and maturity forever in very profound and fundamental ways that have never been fully explored or understood, even now; The great "IF only" question - what if IT never hit?; And THAT is why they're called the University of Miami Hurricanes

moviemagg YouTube Channel video: The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 Uploaded August 27, 2012. http://youtu.be/3cEfsp3Mn1s

Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 - Eighty-seven years ago today, in 1926, what there was of Miami and South Florida was largely destroyed by a powerful Category 4 hurricane that devastated everything in sight, ending the Florida land boom in a heartbeat, plunging South Florida into an early economic Depression and retarding this area's growth and maturity forever in very profound and fundamental ways that have never been fully explored or understood, even now; The great "IF only" question - what if it never hit?; And THAT is why they're called the University of Miami Hurricanes 

South Beach surge at 9th and Collins during 1926 Miami hurricane 87 yrs ago tomorrow via @Tropmet pic.twitter.com/eKGU3nQJkZ
— Michael R. Lowry (@MichaelRLowry) September 18, 2013

At this moment 87 years ago residents of Miami were nervously awaiting the arrival of a hurricane that local... http://t.co/3GQlzJccij
— Michael Laca (@Tropmet) September 17, 2013

Miami's 1926 #hurricane wd cost $125bn insured today + much gov aid @TheRAA's Nutter tells Senate on #ClimateChange. http://t.co/PGTgwOzrIt
— Lee Coppack (@coppackonrisk) July 19, 2013

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1926_Miami_hurricane

"as late as the morning of September 17, less than 24 hours before the category 4 storm's effects would begin in South Florida, no warnings had been issued."
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/mfl/?n=miami_hurricane

"At the height of the storm surge, the water from the Atlantic extended all the way across Miami Beach and Biscayne Bay into the City of Miami for several city blocks."
See map: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/images/mfl/events/1926hurricane/inundation.jpg

Pictorial history of the Florida hurricane: forty-seven views and five pages of information, September 18, 1926
http://www.wolfsonian.org/explore/collections/pictorial-history-florida-hurricane-september-18-1926-pictorial-history-florida-

Photo of Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 historical marker:
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/images/mfl/events/1926hurricane/1926_marker_1.JPG


Don Boyd - Miami's new drydock near Biscayne Blvd. as a result of the Hurricane of 1926
http://www.pbase.com/donboyd/image/77164210/original

More photos at:
http://www.pbase.com/search?q=1926+Hurricane&b=Search+Photos&c=sp
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