At one meeting I protested and they said, 'give young people a chance,' and I said, 'What do you expect us to do? Drop dead? Wait until I die.'''
He brushed the air in front of him with a gnarled hand. He wore slippers and trousers too big, bunched and notched with an old belt at the waist. He sat on the whitewashed apartment porch at First and Ocean Drive white hair combed back from high cheekbones, his senior citizenry masked by a patina of perpetual tan.
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We can't march, but we can sit! We will sit in the streets," said one man, echoing the thoughts of many, in a torrent of broken English, as soon as redevelopment is mentioned.
"We will not go! They are trying to push us into the sea.I am staying in my chair. The agency says only half the residents expressed a desire to remain in the area - but during several days of wandering the streets and parks by the sea, it is hard to find anyone who wants to move.
Over and over, they say they plan to spend $40 million to move residents up the beach a few blocks to apartments "better than they have now," or into the 750 units earmarked for elderly people in the new project. The rich businessmen pushing the redevelopment are sensitive, close to paranoid one said, about the criticism heaped on them for obliterating one of the nation's most distinct elderly enclaves. That world is now but a few inches high in model form, but the Miami Beach redevelopment board, actively wooing prospective builders and developers, plans to launch the $500 million project next spring - simultaneously moving some 200 of the 6,000 residents that must eventually be relocated. It is considered the largest redevelopment and relocation project attempted in one location - covering 255 acres along Ocean Drive, Collins Avenue and Washington Avenue between First and Sixth streets. The same architects who designed San Francisco's Giardelli Square have created hotels, condominiums, marinas, canals, theaters, convention centers and "Wet World," a recreation facility that includes flume rides, scuba diving and rafting. This colorful and tumultuous ghetto is now being threatened with extinction by a multimillion-dollar redevelopment project that would create a man's paradise out of the decaying streets and 1930s apartments the elderly call home. One man is asked what he likes most about South Beach.
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They fill their days with free concerts and movies and dances and chess and pinochle and kibitzing and that great joy of being Yiddish, arguing. Some face this querulously, but for many more, just being alive is a social event. They sit in their aluminium chairs on the old hotel and apartment porches in all but the worst weather, staving off the time when they must go back to their damp efficiencies and hot plates and night-time memories of other days.įor these elderly, mostly European-born Jews who dominate South Beach, the southern-most dozen or so blocks of Miami Beach, there is the knowledge that this will be their last home.
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