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Fool's Paradise 365 Days (Year 3) #251 07/09
I grew up about 15 miles north of Miami Beach but on a weekly basis (during the six months of the winter season) my father would take me and my brother down there to visit our grandmother Mama. South Beach in the 1970's wasn't the glamorous place most people envision today. She lived in a converted motel room one block west of Washington Av. (4 blocks from the beach) behind the post office . We would take our weekly walks around the neighborhood and see mostly kosher shops and stores with signs advertising "notions” and "sundries" selling the same Florida tourist crap everyone buys on vacation down here. Mama knew everyone walking down Washington Av. and didn't hesitate to introduce her son and two grandsons. We endured lots of pinched cheeks on those walks- she was so proud. But my dad hated those trips. He did it in the hopes of convincing her to move up closer to us- away from the old Miami Beach- it was a sad place. The beach was poor and old- "God's waiting room" was what many called it. But mama loved it. She roomed with a woman by the name of Mrs. Katz. They were roommates for years and wandered those streets together endlessly. She didn't want to move for reasons that we couldn't see at that time, but the beach was her world. She was safe with the people she knew in a world that was both exotic to the eyes of a immigrant from eastern Europe, and familiar to a senior existing in an almost exclusively senior world.
Miami Beach is a very different place today. Mama's "motel" room is a "studio" condo selling in the high $300's, a tube of suntan lotion goes for about $10 on Washington Av. and anything "Kosher" is hard to find around there today.
For a historically young place, Miami Beach has a unique history unto itself. A history very well told in a book I am reading now. Fool's Paradise by Steven Gaines paints a portrait (in pastel colors- of course) of the history and people who made "The Beach" what it is today. Not the pretty history you would expect, but a truthful one filled with hookers, con-men, and drug lords all chasing after the same thing my grandmother was chasing after...
...a moment in the sun.
Check it out!
And the next time you are in town, give me a call and I will show ya around!
Click here for this years 365 collection.
Fool's Paradise 365 Days (Year 3) #251 07/09
I grew up about 15 miles north of Miami Beach but on a weekly basis (during the six months of the winter season) my father would take me and my brother down there to visit our grandmother Mama. South Beach in the 1970's wasn't the glamorous place most people envision today. She lived in a converted motel room one block west of Washington Av. (4 blocks from the beach) behind the post office . We would take our weekly walks around the neighborhood and see mostly kosher shops and stores with signs advertising "notions” and "sundries" selling the same Florida tourist crap everyone buys on vacation down here. Mama knew everyone walking down Washington Av. and didn't hesitate to introduce her son and two grandsons. We endured lots of pinched cheeks on those walks- she was so proud. But my dad hated those trips. He did it in the hopes of convincing her to move up closer to us- away from the old Miami Beach- it was a sad place. The beach was poor and old- "God's waiting room" was what many called it. But mama loved it. She roomed with a woman by the name of Mrs. Katz. They were roommates for years and wandered those streets together endlessly. She didn't want to move for reasons that we couldn't see at that time, but the beach was her world. She was safe with the people she knew in a world that was both exotic to the eyes of a immigrant from eastern Europe, and familiar to a senior existing in an almost exclusively senior world.
Miami Beach is a very different place today. Mama's "motel" room is a "studio" condo selling in the high $300's, a tube of suntan lotion goes for about $10 on Washington Av. and anything "Kosher" is hard to find around there today.
For a historically young place, Miami Beach has a unique history unto itself. A history very well told in a book I am reading now. Fool's Paradise by Steven Gaines paints a portrait (in pastel colors- of course) of the history and people who made "The Beach" what it is today. Not the pretty history you would expect, but a truthful one filled with hookers, con-men, and drug lords all chasing after the same thing my grandmother was chasing after...
...a moment in the sun.
Check it out!
And the next time you are in town, give me a call and I will show ya around!
Click here for this years 365 collection.