Category: Miami Stories

In 1924, Jo and Frank “Spud” Murphy came to Miami from Port St. Joe in the Florida Panhandle. Originally, they were both from Alabama.

My grandfather is nicknamed Spud, after Irish potatoes. He got an offer for a better job as a bookkeeper to move to Miami. They bought a house in Allapattah and my grandfather took a job with Mill’s Rock Company. In those days, rock pits were blasted using dynamite. In a freak accident, there was a premature explosion and the owner, Robert Mills, and several workers were killed. After this happened, Ed Mills, one of the Mills brothers, took my grandfather in as partner. This became a longtime, well-known, road-building business known as “Murphy and Mills.”

In 1923, Rilla and Tom Murrell decided to move to Miami from Alabama to escape the cold and come down to the wonderful weather and easy-going lifestyle. They bought a house in Miami Springs and opened a beauty salon and barber shop together on the circle. My grandfather, Tom, also became the first postmaster of Miami Springs. My grandparents lived in that house until they passed away. My grandmother always grew a wonderful vegetable garden. Men and women would come from all over to have their hair done by my grandmother.

My grandparents all weathered the 1926 hurricane. Back then, they did not have the knowledge of hurricanes like we do today. My grandfather Murphy was stuck out in the storm at a gas station.

My mother, Ann Murphy Murrell, was born in 1931 at Jackson Memorial Hospital in the Alamo Building, which is still there as a historical site. When she was born, that was the only building at Jackson. She went to Miami Jackson High School and was a majorette in the marching band. After high school, my mom attended the University of Miami.

My father, Lee Murrell, was born in 1930 at his family home. He went to Miami Edison High School where he played football and ran track. He played back in the days when they wore leather helmets and facemasks. They did not even know what a mouth piece was. Can you imagine — they traveled around Florida by plane to play other high school teams?

After high school, he also attended the University of Miami. That is where my mom and dad met; a mutual friend introduced them. They dated for a while and then were married in the First Baptist Church of Allapattah.

My mom worked as a secretary before becoming a housewife. My dad worked for Holsum bakery with his own delivery route. Then in the 1950s, they bought property in North Miami at 131st Street and West Dixie Highway. They bought a Carvel ice cream franchise and built a Carvel shop. This was the beginning of their first business. My parents were living in Allapattah at the time, so to be closer to the Carvel, they bought a piece of property in North Miami and built their first home.

In the 1960s, they sold the Carvel store then went across the street and opened an ice cream and hamburger place called Lee’s. This became the new hangout for the North Miami kids. After owning Lee’s for a few years, the long hours were just too much while raising four kids. My father sold Lee’s and started M&M; Landscaping.

In the meantime, he went to the Lowe Art Museum to take a metal sculpting class as a hobby and also went to Coconut Grove in the 1960s to take a class to learn to make jewelry. Well, a hobby became a business. He was making jewelry and metal sculptures and selling them at arts and crafts shows. He stopped making the jewelry, but he still has his metal sculpture business, Copper Creations by Lee. Now, 45 years later, he is still doing art shows and selling online at Etsy. When anybody asks my dad where he is from, he still says, “My-am-uh,” like a native.

My mother and father had four children. The two oldest were born at Mercy Hospital, and the two youngest at North Shore. We were raised in North Miami when it was just a small town where everyone knew each other. We would ride our bikes everywhere and loved hanging out at Haulover Beach and Greynolds Park. We loved going to eat at Pumpernick’s, and then we would go to the First Baptist Church of North Miami. All four of us graduated from North Miami Senior High; we were true “Pioneers”!

Some of us still live here, and some have moved on. My parents have seven grandchildren, who were all born in Miami. My father has one great-granddaughter. We are University of Miami Hurricanes and Miami Dolphin’ fans. When the Marlins came to Miami, we became big fans of them, as well. My mother was one of their biggest fans, going to almost every game. After the games, we would go to Rascal House to enjoy dinner. She had a room in her home dedicated to all three sports teams. My parents always loved Miami, and my mother believed going to the beach could cure anything.

I have written this story in memory of my mother, who always wanted to write this story. Sadly, she passed away July 29, 2013, so I used her notes to write this piece.

I’ve visited Miami often over the past 20 years, sleeping on friends’ couches, perusing thrift stores, gorging on ceviche, watching the ever-changing crowd along Ocean Drive.

But it wasn’t until 2009, when I stepped outside all comfort zones to research my book, Fringe Florida, that I got an inside glimpse into the diverse and quirky glory that defines Miami.

My research trip was a whirlwind of interactions with everyone from python owners to nightclub promoters. I kicked it off with a day at a swinger’s convention at a hotel downtown, where waiters in guayaberas served drinks to randy nude couples. Fringe Florida is a book about the state’s unusual and sometimes illicit subcultures. In Miami you didn’t have to dig too deep to find Middle Earth.

But as with any major project, many valuable experiences fall to the floor in shaping the final piece. At the time, I was still exploring the notion of juxtaposing Miami’s 1980s cocaine glory days against its modern party drug scene. My impressions of the earlier period were colored by documentaries such “Cocaine Cowboys” and of course, the Hollywood fictions of “Miami Vice” and “Scarface.” All cast the era as violent, but glamorized by easy money and the hedonistic excesses that go along with it.

In search of remnants, I checked into the Mutiny in Coconut Grove. The Mutiny once served as a party palace for drug lords and home to many who sniffed a daily diet of the white powder that fueled the local economy. Nearly 30 years later the Mutiny had transformed into a sleepy sleek condo-hotel. All that remained of the wilder days were second-hand stories. Tips in blow, coked-up residents lighting $5 bills and then climbing balcony to balcony to escape the smoldering fire.

On a walking tour of pastel Deco South Beach, a fellow tour-goer confided he lived at the Mutiny in the day. A tan fit man in his 60s wearing designer jeans, he spoke of all-night parties and nude women running down his hallway. “It was like living in an upscale brothel,” he said. More important, his former Coconut Grove home was a set for – what else, a handful of “Miami Vice” episodes.

I later cruised by the modern three-story house shrouded by lush palms and live oaks. No Don Johnson loafing around in white linen suits and sockless loafers, just a flock of bright blue peacocks wandering the streets, interlopers from a distant land not unlike me.

I tarried through a long list of drug lore sites, real and Hollywood.
In Bal Harbour I strolled the jetty beside the Harbour House condo tower where cocaine smugglers Jon Roberts and Mickey Munday once put up women who acted as lookouts for law enforcement patrols.

On this bright October day, the white sandy beach was nearly empty and the refurbished condo tower appeared lifeless. A vintage runabout cut through the teal waters of Haulover Cut. I imagined someone behind the condo’s glass eyes watching it through binoculars. The illusion faded when a New York condo owner fishing for snook said he knew nothing of the tower’s infamous history.

Too many of the sites were drive-bys with no opportunity for interaction. The banks of Biscayne Boulevard which once laundered millions; gritty Jones Boat Yard where corrupt police raided a boat loaded with 400 kilos of coke as the crewmen jumped overboard and drowned; luxurious mansions of former kingpins in gated communities beyond reach.

By definition, the site of the “Dadeland Mall Massacre” would be available. Many consider what happened on a sunny afternoon in 1979 the start of Miami’s cocaine turf wars. Two men armed with machine guns jumped out of a panel van and sprayed Crown Liquors with bullets, killing a rival drug kingpin and his bodyguard and injuring the store clerk. After a white-knuckle drive in rush hour traffic, I arrived at Dadeland Mall to discover the liquor store had been swallowed by Saks 5th Avenue during a mall renovation.

Miami’s bad-boy glamour was an illusion cast by Hollywood and revisionist history. The world of Miami’s cocaine titans may have been an oyster, but there was no pearl, only a prickly shell that in short order began to smell foul.
As for the modern club drug scene, in the time I spent inside the velvet-roped hot spots, I found trending drugs that spanned the letters of the alphabet: Special K, X, and G. Not so different than you’d find in a nightclub in any major city. At the time, the most distinctive drug culture revolved around pill mills. I visited one. They sent me to a walk-in MRI clinic down the street.
In hindsight, I’m not sure what I expected to find. The cocaine era was a dark time and one that continues to haunt. My Miami friends say tourists still ask where to score an 8-ball.

It wasn’t until I joined the lunchtime crowd at Mac’s Club Deuce that my disillusionment gave way to an appreciation of what Miami had become. Except for the neon gracing its wall, courtesy of the “Miami Vice” crew, it looks like a set from a Damon Runyan novel. Dark and smoky with the original red laminate serpentine bar, Club Deuce has had few alterations since it opened in 1926. The bar’s real treasure is the spell of friendship it casts. Before I finished a screwdriver, I met everyone.

The longhaired fashion photographer wearing more silver bangles than I thought humanly possible who worked on his laptop to be able to write off his drinks. The young businessman in a starched shirt unbuttoned enough to show a white undershirt. A blustery former cop who ranted about Obama. An Ecuadorian pottery wholesaler who for years in the 1980s wouldn’t leave his home at night much less venture to South Beach — three men with a gun and a machete had mugged him outside a club. “It was extremely dangerous on South Beach,” he said. Now he lived there and wouldn’t dream of moving.

Mac Klein, Club Deuce owner, was 95 when I met him and looked as if he could take a man 20 years younger. He was wearing an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt; his glasses were thick and black. He didn’t talk much, but kept reemerging from the back with memorabilia. The bar’s original menu. A flier for the “Miami Vice” wrap party. A thank-you note from the cast. A dog magazine featuring his champion Doberman pinschers. Sensing my love of dogs, he insisted that I keep the magazine, which I now treasure.

My drug scene exploration may not have turned up the type of fringe I sought for my book, but I have no regrets aside for the credit card debt I racked up. And on any trip, I make a point to duck into Club Deuce and say hello to my friends, whoever they may be that day.

I moved to Miami after returning from my Fulbright Scholar Program in 2002. The same muggy air, car horns, heat that I left in the Philippines greeted me as I walked out the doors of Miami International Airport.

The cab driver spoke to me in Spanish and I understood everything he said, but I was slow to respond. I had spent the last year speaking Tagalog, a language full of Spanish words after 300 years of colonization. When I instinctively replied to him in Tagalog, he just kept on, unfazed, in Spanish.

My job at the University of Miami started right away. For the first year, I lived in Kendall, or “Kendalia” as I liked to refer to it. It took more than an hour in rush-hour traffic to get to and from the Coral Gables campus. In Manila, traveling five miles from Quezon City to Makati had taken an average of two hours each way. Now, instead of getting anxious, I could let go of the frustration and instead spend time listening to the Latin stations, dancing in my car and practicing Spanish.

In 2009, I moved to a neighborhood along Coral Way, a historic urban boulevard that runs through Miami from Brickell Avenue to 37th Avenue. My house had been built in 1939 along with other bungalows and mission revival-style homes. Everyone on my street spoke Spanish almost exclusively.

My casita stood between two houses of the sadme style, and within these houses lived viejas. On the right, there were three widowed sisters — Marta, Olga and Paula. On the left was Elsa, also a soltera. The women were best friends, and I’d see them on the sidewalk in front of my house, sometimes laughing together, sometimes shouting in anger. Right away, they befriended me, a single woman much younger than they were and never married. They called me China even though I told them, “Yo soy Evelina, la Filipina. No soy China.” They laughed at me, calling me China anyway.

Elsa was a small and quiet widow. From afar, I never knew how she was feeling, but face to face, I could see it in her eyes and in the path of her delicate wrinkles. Every day I would notice her standing by the chain-linked fence in her front yard, watching the street, waiting for the mail, and talking to passersby.

One afternoon I brought her a mango from my tree.

I can hold a polite conversation in Spanish, but when it gets malalim — deep — I mix my languages. Sometimes Tagalog comes out when I mean to speak Spanish, or vice versa.

Elsa recounted the story of her life to me at her kitchen table. She had suffered bouts of depression since she came to this country. Never in Cuba, only in this country. She wouldn’t even say it — the United States of America. Solomente en este pais, pero nunca en Cuba. These days she felt nervous constantly. Everyone she loved had died — su mama y papa, su esposo y hermana. Seven years ago, her husband and sister had died months apart. Though she had the abuela sisters, who took her everywhere, and a daughter in Boston, she couldn’t calm her nerves. The noise of her memories crowded her head, kept her up at night.

We sat for a long time. She picked up the mango, smelled it, and handed it to me. “Que rico,” she said.

I told her she needed a novio. She laughed.

When I married last year, Elsa quickly took to my husband, who spoke absolutely no Spanish. They exchanged words each day. She sneaked up behind me one day to tell me my husband was a good man. “Y guapo tambien,” I told her jokingly. Yes, yes, he’s handsome, so be careful, she said, women will try to take him away from you. She gave me a look. I told her I’d be careful. No mujer would come between us. We laughed and then she told me she liked my dress. A moment passed, and she said, “Tu esposo es una buena persona.”

Last month, when my husband and I came home from a trip, nobody was standing at Elsa’s gate. On the fence and the trees nearby, someone had posted “No Parking” signs.

“Something’s wrong,” I told my husband.

“It could be anything,” he said.

For days, the neighborhood was quiet. The abuela sisters were nowhere to be seen.

One day soon after, my husband came home and told me he had found out what happened to Elsa.

“Who told you?” I asked him.

“Olga.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t know. It was in Spanish. But she was talking, talking, talking and she went like this.” He put his hands together and leaned his head on them with his eyes closed. “And then I said, ‘She died?’ And she said, ‘Sí, sí, sí.’”

Elsa was not the first to pass away since I moved into this casita. There was an old man across the street during my first year. And last year, Marta, one of the abuela sisters, died of a brain tumor. Now Elsa. I like to think the spirit of these viejas are circling the bamboo, the mango and the avocado trees, whistling love songs, blessing us from afar. I like to think they are a part of a Miami that will never die.

They have taught me that you don’t need the right words, or even the same language, as long as you are willing to sit with one another and listen.

Miami will always occupy a special place in my heart. My beloved grandmother spent such a great portion of her life here that the two are now synonymous in my mind. She had impeccable taste, which means Miami is the second-greatest city in the world; of course, our native Petionville, Haiti, comes in first.

My grandmother passed away April 2, 2012. I know she is in a better place now. The nationalist in her wanted to reach eternity via Haiti. Since that was not meant to be, Miami opened its arms – as always. It is where her remains are interred.

With a smile brighter than all the lights on Ocean Drive, my grandmother was the city personified. She wrapped her head in colorful scarves, reminiscent of Miami’s golden age, pulsing with the roar of turquoise and chrome convertibles. She loved the Fontainebleau for its Old World glamor and once-upon-a-time elegance.

My grandmother’s Miami was quite similar to our native country. Many friends gathered on her porch on Sunday afternoons to enjoy lodyans – a form of storytelling drenched in humor.They reminisced and laughed about old times back home. Most of her friends spoke only Creole, even if they had lived in the States for decades.

Her front door stayed open all day – as it did in long-ago Haiti. Restaurants that sold food cooked like back home, if not better, were just around the corner from her house. The grocery stores’ shelves were stocked with the ingredients she used to buy in Haiti’s open-air markets. Miami was her second Haiti. When back home was not accessible – because of various coups d’état and other inconveniences, Miami was her sanctuary.

My grandmother’s last visit to Haiti was in late 2009. She was thrilled to see the house in which she planned to spend what remained of her life. She had spent years sending money for builders to make her house just so. She was ready to move in the fall of 2009.

When she flew home to begin the rest of her life, friends and neighbors received her as though she had never left. Just as they did in Miami, everyone gathered at her house for marathon conversations and tasty food.

But the longer my grandmother stayed in Haiti, the more she pined for “home” – meaning Miami.

Three months after arriving in Haiti, she decided she had lived so long in Miami that perhaps she could not live anywhere else, including her birth country. She flew back to Miami on Jan. 10, 2010.

Two days later, a devastating earthquake struck Haiti, killing hundreds of thousands. She sobbed for the lost lives. I sobbed with her, but took comfort in the fact that she had returned just in time; she might have been among the still-unaccounted-for victims. That would have destroyed me.

As stories poured in about the quake’s aftermath, the utter destruction, the chaotic medical situation, my grandmother wept in silence. Her South Beach smile dimmed. Not even Miami could console her.

She mourned the fact that she could no longer return to her other, sometime home. She mourned the loss of long-ago Haiti – the Haiti that pulsed with turquoise and chrome convertibles, the lush and Miami-green Haiti, the Haiti she knew as a child. She was secretly grateful that her adopted city’s arms were always ready to envelop her. Miami had become her own private Haiti.

Five months before my grandmother passed away, she was admitted to University of Miami hospital. With each passing day, she became more and more frustrated about having to be in a hospital bed. She was accustomed to living life standing up. She detested the hospital gown, and wanted instead to wear her colorful wardrobe that reminded me of the sea, sunshine and coral reefs.

She told the doctors to send her home. By “home” she meant both Miami and Haiti. The intensive care unit was drab. It lacked vibrancy. It lacked life.

My grandmother has been gone two years now. I will always owe Miami a debt of gratitude for opening its arms to welcome my grandmother for as long as she wanted to be here. Whenever I come to the city, I sense her presence in the air. Everything she loved about the city is still here: the Fontainebleau, the banyan trees, the blue-blue water that hems the coast.

And just as my grandmother did when she was alive, I go to stores where only my native language is spoken. I eat Haitian food morning, noon and night. (I’ll admit I love Cuban cuisine just as much.) I visit Libreri Mapou and chat with the friendly owner and customers who cannot get enough of Haitian literature. Each visit makes it clear to me why my grandmother loved Miami so.

Perhaps one day, the city will claim me, too.

My mother hanging on to the top of a telephone pole is one of my earliest memories of South Florida. It lingers in my mind some sixty years later. Soon after we moved here from up north, a hurricane blew through. My father was away on business, so it was just my mother, my two younger sisters and me.

We were lucky to have long-time Florida residents as neighbors, so we did whatever they told us to do to prepare. We made it through the storm with little damage, but, as usual, we lost power, and telephone. The power came back on in a day or two, but the telephone didn’t.

Over the next week, everyone else on our street got their telephone service back, but ours was still out. Using a neighbor’s phone, we’d call every day, only to be told to be patient. Finally, after about ten days, I watched with amazement as my short, slim mother (I was only eleven, but already taller) shinnied up the telephone pole. Wrapping one arm around the pole in a kind of “death hug,” she used her free hand to reconnect the wires into the main line.

From her perch she sent me back into the house to make sure the telephone worked before she came back to earth. One try and she managed to get it connected. No one from the telephone company ever came.

That definitely “low-tech” repair job was accomplished many years before women would be seen wearing hard hats and working on telephone lines. My mother’s climb provided a telephone that still worked when she moved out of the house thirty years and many hurricanes later.

I grew up in Miami Shores beginning in the mid-1940s, a beautiful place to live where you can still view Biscayne Bay today, as you could then. I went to Miami Shores Elementary School and have fond memories of the teachers and my friends, some lifelong friends. I remember our teachers who were special, such as my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Gonzales, and the Easter Parade for our class. My fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Dees, played classical music for us during rest time after lunch. We sometimes drew pictures to interpret the music.

I took ballet, tap, and toe dance lessons in a home studio where many young people took lessons. We had our dance recitals on the stage of the Shores Theater. We went to the movies there every Saturday morning.

I learned to swim at the Miami Shores Country Club. There was an Olympic-size pool with a high-dive and low-dive boards. It took great courage just to jump off the high dive! Miami Shores did have one real Olympic swimmer, Shirley Stobs. Her swimming specialty was the butterfly stroke. The pool has since been removed to expand parking and a water park has been built on the north side of the main clubhouse.

It wasn’t necessary to swim when I had a water adventure around the third or fourth grade. My friend had a grandmother who lived in a house on Biscayne Bay, just south of Miami Shores. They had a small boat dock. Toni and I tried a little fishing off the dock. After a while, I got a nibble on my line that kept getting stronger and stronger. I pulled and wound and finally landed the fish on the dock. It was a baby sand shark! It was thrown back into the water.

Brockway Memorial Library opened in Miami Shores in 1949, made possible through funds donated by industrialist George A. Brockway. I often felt like I had read my way through all the books in the children’s section and can remember checking out stacks of books during the summer months. A couple of years ago the library requested donations of Miami Shores historical items so I donated my Miami Shores Troop 39 Girl Scout badge sash with earned badges. Troop 39 members started with the Brownies in the first grade, continuing with the Girl Scouts into junior high school. In scouting our troop visited places in Miami such as Greynolds Park, Camp Mahachee, Parrot Jungle and Matheson Hammock. Our last farewell to Troop 39 was a weekend hotel stay on Miami Beach.

We had our meetings after school at the Miami Shores Community Church, the longest established church in the community and near the school. Many of us rode our bicycles to and from school. I rode my bicycle to school starting in the first grade. Miami Shores Elementary was a little over a mile from my house. I continued to ride my bicycle to Horace Mann Junior High School in the first year or two.

In 1948 I participated in a pet and doll show at the Miami Shores Community House. I didn’t win any prizes but someone took a photo that was published in a newspaper. It was spotted by Mrs. Carnegie Cline who later taught me modeling and drama. She was also involved with the Miami Daily News Youth Roundup of Dade County. I got to know the youth editor of the paper and was involved with many of the Roundup activities. I had the opportunity to model in fashion shows at the Burdine’s Tea Room and The Surf Club, ride floats in the Orange Bowl parades and meet famous people like Olympic champion Pete Desjardins at the Deauville, movie star Preston Foster and some of “the little people” who starred in The Wizard of Oz.

The Cuban revolution was taking place while I was at Miami Edison Senior High School. I remember hearing the news announcement on the radio that “Batista has left the island of Cuba.”

After graduating, I went off to college, and then moved to Atlanta, Georgia, but made visits home for brief periods. In recent years I’ve been to Miami for extended periods. When I referred to the Miami News building in downtown Miami, no one knew what I was talking about. It wasn’t until I went to an Art Basel 2012 exhibit in the Freedom Tower that I learned the Miami News building had become the Freedom Tower. Miami-Dade College unveiled the adjacent Pedro Pan sculpture to mark the 50th anniversary of Operation Peter Pan, which resulted in over 14,000 unaccompanied children sent from Cuba to the United States.

I’ve enjoyed subsequent visits to the tower for special exhibits. I learned that a year after this Spanish renaissance revival tower was built it was damaged during Miami’s1926 killer hurricane and was rebuilt twice. It was donated to Miami Dade College in 2005 by a local developer. It’s a tribute that Miami has saved this U.S. National Historic Landmark that stands tall as a reflection of the city’s history while new development grows around it by leaps and bounds.

Suddenly there is fire in the treetops along the turnpike. The sidewalk is carpeted with orange petals and the Poinciana preens itself above the jacaranda’s demure lavender feathers and the frangipani’s pink and yellow pastels. The calendar doesn’t tell us it is time for our yearly Poinciana Walk, but the world does. While we go for the sake of the trees, the homes in the Gables that they guard and grace have become characters in a never-ending story.

On one of our earliest peeking-through-the-Rangoon Creeper days in the French Village, we stumbled onto the storybook house at the southwest end of the block of chateaus. Double garage doors and peeling white paint abutted the perfectly restored wall and manicured yard we had been admiring. A diminutive arch with a black iron gate opened out diagonally to the corner of the street from a postage-stamp herb garden. Above and below, casement windows hinged inward, screens offering only the filmiest filter. The wavy glass panels of the butler’s pantry cabinets were clearly discernible from where we stood outside. Farther down the walk, a vase of fresh flowers bloomed in the window, and next to it a gray top-knotted head was turned toward the flickering screen across the room. We were mystified and mesmerized by the house, a vestige of the neighborhood’s 1920s legacy. We ached to get inside.

Then, one afternoon, we rounded the corner to hear the sounds of pans scraping through the kitchen’s casement window. Pungent garlic and onions sizzled on an unseen stove top, and plates clattered on an imagined table. Two shadowy figures floated in the lampless kitchen, one seated and one busy in the evening light lingering along the freckled street, while a gray head watched at her post, as always, next to the flowers in the living room window.

Months later, as we paced back and forth along the length of the house, by now the object of fantasy and imagination, two wiry little ladies appeared in the open door and looked out at their stalkers. The tiniest one, with delicate bird fingers, pushed open the wrought iron, screen-covered door and smiled at us. Her face was encircled with a white cottony halo and the parchment skin on her face creased into smile lines from her eyes to her chin. The woman behind her seemed younger, more serious and stern, or just responsible and justifiably wary. “Hello ladies,” The snowy one spoke. “Are you enjoying your walk?”

We were nearly speechless. For all our wishing, we weren’t prepared for this sprite to actually speak to us.

“Oh, yes. This is our favorite street. Yours is our favorite house.”

“We think it is pretty special, this house. That’s why we have stayed here all these years. Of course, the Realtors won’t give us any peace. They come by here nearly every day.”

“You aren’t going to sell it are you?” Our simultaneous question belied fears of contractors and realtors circling like vultures.

A little giggle slipped into the pixie’s voice. “Would you sell paradise?”

The taller woman reached out for the handle of the iron door and began drawing it toward her and closing the little doll lady inside. “Enjoy your walk.” She gave a tiny wave, her open palm nearly as papery as her face. A walk in paradise.

Today, perhaps because we had already walked on many streets, we drove to Cotorro Avenue, turning in from the northern end of the French Village block. Maybe if we had been on foot, the awareness would have come gradually. Instead, we were shocked to find the Garlic Sisters’ house standing naked on the sidewalk. The grizzled hedge, ripped from the ground, exposed ancient pipes and spigots that had quenched its thirst for perhaps as many years as we were old. The Florida honeysuckle vine that circled and wound and draped luxuriously over the garden wall was now twisted dry and gnarled in the side yard under piles of debris, boards and nails and chunks of plaster.

Tears blurred our vision, but we scarcely hesitated to duck through the arch and tiptoe gingerly around the rubble that had once been a garden, to French doors, standing open in the back. We stepped through onto original tile floors, terra cotta cool, and looked up to a black, wrought iron chandelier dangling above. Straight ahead, the wood paneled front door, directed a turn into the living room where a TV antenna wire dangled onto the floor.

Off the front hall, a door stood open to the kitchen where black and white tiles checkered the floor. In the empty butler’s pantry, wooden drain boards, grooved and stained, sloped down to an old porcelain sink with iron faucet and knobs still intact. On the drain board stood a vase of flowers, once fresh cut carnations, daisies, and spider pompoms, now drooping with curled and wilted petals. Not the stuff of potpourri, but of memories.

A simple ribbon circled the vase, its color indistinguishable. A florist card stuck out from a stiff plastic stem. The envelope was addressed to Virginia O’Dowd, 1032 Cotorro Avenue, Coral Gables, Florida. Dreading to see what the message would say, fearing a get well wish or sincerest sympathy, my hands shook as I turned over the card. The typed letters read: Happy Birthday, with Love.

Outside, a child’s riding toy rumbled by, a stroller wheel complained and young women’s voices drifted up through the pantry casement. Neighbors. Maybe they would think we had no right to be there, to find the flowers, to sniff for garlic, to walk over dining room tiles the sisters’ feet had crossed and re-crossed until they wore a pattern in the stone, to listen for the echo of a little birdlike chirp. “Enjoy.” So we left the French door just as we had found it, passed through the garden wall, and whispered an apology to Virginia for not somehow leaving her flowers in the open window.

I was born at St. Francis Hospital in March 1947.

My parents both came to Miami Beach for work, my mother in 1936 and my father in 1939. They met while working together at a deli, owned by my great aunt and uncle (Mary and Dave Alper).

We lived on 15th Street, near Washington Avenue and the old Miss Ehrman’s dance studio. We were one of the first families to move to the very new Morton Towers. A lot of my family moved to Miami Beach soon afterward.

My grandmother Fannie Malschick, already retired, lived in one of those apartment/hotels on South Beach that now host the rich and famous. She played cards with her cronies, did group exercises on 15th Street and safely walked everywhere.

My uncle, Gilbert Malschick, worked at the Eden Roc as a bartender from the 1950s to the 1970s. My cousin, Allen Malschick, was a well-known Miami Beach photographer who took pictures of many celebrities who entertained at the hotels on Collins Avenue.

My father eventually opened his own deli with partner Phil Seldin (Raphil’s Deli on 41st Street). His customers included the famous and infamous. Before that, my dad owned The Little Inn restaurant in Miami, a popular hangout for soldiers and friends during World War II.

I attended Flamingo Park preschool, Central Beach Elementary, Fisher Jr. High and Miami Beach High School. Many of my friendships, born during those years, have stood the test of time and I am in touch and close to many of those “kids” today.

In 1960, the first wave of Cubans came to Miami Beach. All of a sudden a new culture was introduced, and we had tons of new friends. We spent the sweet years, as I now refer to my childhood, at Saturday afternoon matinees, shopping on Lincoln Road, and eating at Liggett’s or Wolfie’s. Friday night was dedicated to dancing at the 10th Street auditorium, and on Sunday, many beach parties were held at 14th Street and Ocean.

As we began to drive farther from the Beach, we hung at Fun Fair and the bowling alley across the street, Corky’s and Marcella’s Italian Restaurant, known for the amazing garlic rolls. We ventured even farther to the Coconut Grove coffee houses and playhouse.

I left Miami Beach after high school graduation in 1965, but my heart remains in the memories of those wonderful years. Our lives are richer for the experience and we have grown both up and together these many years later.