THE OTHER MIAMI

Downtown Miami

When I make my trips to the US from Patagonia, I always stay a few days in Miami. I don’t really come to Miami for pleasure. It’s business that brings me here. But my Colombian friend Saúl has shown me the side of the city that he loves, and few know it like he does, since he makes his living here driving all day. He has introduced me to the port, to Brickell Avenue, to Downtown and to Bayside. He has taken me out to Florida City to see the Coral Castle, to Coral Gables, to South Beach and to Biscayne Bay. He has driven me to every mall and shopping center in the city, to the Freedom Tower Museum and to the Wynwood art neighborhood. We’ve climbed a lighthouse together, had powerful Cuban coffee at the famed Versailles coffee shop and restaurant, and have lunched together in more than a couple of good and truly authentic Colombian eateries. So although I would usually abhor a town where I feel like I’m melting most of the time—Saúl swears it sometimes gets chilly, but I’ll believe it when I see it—my friend has managed to endear it to me in ways I never thought possible.

That said, on this trip, I’m soloing. Saúl picked me up at the airport on my arrival in the US a month ago, but while I was up in Ohio promoting my two books—The Rock Garden, and Visions of What Used To Be—and visiting friends and family that the pandemic had prevented me from seeing for several years, Saúl had a knee operation. So now that I’m back in Miami, my friend is out of commission. He had a Cuban friend of his—Jorge, who is also a professional driver—pick me up at the airport, drive me to my hotel and take me to the business appointment I had on Friday morning. But the relationship has been strictly professional between Jorge and me. So I’ve been entertaining myself entirely on my own since I returned from Ohio on my way back to Argentina.

My friend and guide to Miami, Saúl 

Had Saúl been available, I wouldn’t have minded being stuck here for four days. But since I’m flying out Monday afternoon and Monday is a US holiday, Friday was the only day I could make my appointment for. So, I arrived Thursday evening, had my appointment Friday morning and was stuck for the rest of that day and the weekend in the city.

There was what I thought was a bad surprise waiting for me when I got to my hotel. It was my first time staying here—here being the Comfort Inn Downtown. My regular haunts were the Hotel Urbano at Brickell and I-95 and the Hampton Inn a couple of blocks off of Brickell on Twelfth, but the Urbano has become a Hilton Garden Suites and the other one has also been upgraded and both have become quite pricey. So I chose the Comfort Inn on the basis of price—which was slightly less jaw-dropping than the other two. Anyway, on arrival, I was advised that, due to some credit card snafu, the reservation I’d made two months earlier had been canceled. Basically, I had no room.

I’d been traveling since morning, from Cleveland to New York and from New York to Miami, and hadn’t eaten anything all day but a couple of English muffins early in the morning, and two Delta Airlines cookies in the afternoon, and it was now 8pm, so I was in no mood for getting jerked around and I immediately lost my temper and went ballistic on the poor desk clerk.

But dark clouds sometimes have a silver lining. He politely invited me to calm down and told me he was giving me a twelfth-floor suite for the same price as the room that they’d canceled. When I told him I was hungry and asked where I could get a bite to eat, he asked if I liked Peruvian food and sent me around the corner to a place called La Granja, with cold beer, good food and even better prices.

A room with a view

I had no real idea where I was. I mean, generally, yes: Downtown. But, as I say, I’d chosen this new venue on the basis of price rather than location. At night, it looked less than inviting—surrounded as the hotel was by highway bridge abutments and other towering buildings. But the room was comfortable and enormous. After supper at La Granja, all I wanted to do was shower and go to bed, which is what I did. It wasn’t until morning that I raised the shades and saw for the first time that my suite had a panoramic view of that other Miami: namely, the Miami River, and the whole downtown area surrounding it.

The hotel breakfast room overlooks the river, and I watched while eating my initial breakfast there as the first tour boats and container barges of the day made their way along the river’s course to and from the Port of Miami. I would locate the port later, when, following my Friday morning appointment, I took a stroll along the boardwalk that runs behind the hotel as far as I could before running into a construction site that blocked my path. From there, I could see in the distance the towering cranes that marked the port.

Container barge passing by the breakfast room

Since then, I have whiled away more than a few hours walking back and forth past three major bridges from one end to the other of my promenade, observing the traffic on the Miami River. There are a couple of things that are extraordinary about it. First of all, except for the rail bridge, which is so very, very tall that any boat capable of fitting in the Miami can go under it, the others are draw bridges. I found the entire process of their opening and closing—as powerful tugs ushered through huge container barges, whose massive bulkheads nearly scraped the bridge abutments—utterly fascinating. One of them (the one I could see clearly from my twelfth-floor vantage point) is a four-lane structure and the operation of it is really impressive to see. The other thing that grabbed my attention was the incredible number of astronomically expensive yachts and cabin cruisers that one can see while standing on the quayside for a mere half hour.

As an aside, I should clarify that, for more than a decade, I was the chief (only) translator for a Panamanian publication entitled Luxury Road—now defunct, thanks to the 2008 worldwide economic crisis and its aftermath in the luxury industry. It was a lingering death, but fatal all the same.

While it lasted, the glossy magazine’s main function was to spotlight some of the most expensive and sumptuous items on the planet. Baume and Mercier, Vacheron, Longines, Tag Heuer, Rolex, Omega and Patek Philippe watches; McLaren, Ferrari, Aston Martin, Bentley, Lamborghini, Mercedes and Bugatti automobiles; Visconti, Caran D’Ache, Mont Blanc, Cartier and Aurora writing instruments; six-star hotels and Michelin-rated restaurants; private islands, private jets and private choppers; and, among many other things, yachts. So when I see a Ferretti, Riva, Heesen, Galati, Broward or other famous-name (often bespoke) vessel, I tend to recognize it. And the Miami River is loaded with them. Sleek, breathtaking, incredibly streamlined, they sail back and forth along the river’s course, their speakers bellowing salsa music and delighted guests gyrating to the Latin rhythm on their decks.

When you scratch the surface, Miami is a small town. In its downtown area—the older shops, city government buildings, etc.—are provincial, almost poky in nature. The original Miami, the “local” Miami, if you will, is nothing at all like the glittering Miami that one sees in the movies. It’s no secret that much of the extraordinarily stunning architecture of the more usually visible Miami that we see in TV series, films and magazines mushroomed out of the drug trade of the seventies, eighties and nineties.

Miami's glistening Brickell-Downtown

Even back then, cocaine was a twenty billion-dollar-a-year industry, and it’s a pretty fair guess that many of the sumptuous office buildings housing international financial institutions that line Brickell Avenue didn’t spring from the tourist trade, but drew their early sustenance from the soaring resources that the drug trade generated—an illicit activity often managed by the ever more savvy and sophisticated bosses of the Colombian drug cartel. The transformation from backwater to mafia-chic was not without hiccups, however. The city lived through a period of drug war violence that, back then, gave it a widespread reputation as a scary, dangerous place.

But Miami law enforcement and federal agents fought back and cracked down hard. Nowhere was that fight better documented than in the TV series Miami Vice in the mid-nineteen-eighties. The show was not only well-researched and wildly popular, but also introduced the salsa sound into mainstream music, and the “Miami look” into male fashion (a sort of Latino-cool, mafia-casual look) and into high-end interior décor.

That said, although Miami has become a much tamer version of the earlier warring cocaine capital that it had become, the wealth to which drug traffic first gave birth appears not to have waned in the least. In fact, Miami is now the second least affordable city (after New York) in the country. And it recently surpassed the Big Apple as the city with the nation’s least affordable housing.

As I say, two of the places where this glitzy high lifestyle is high-profile is on the river and on the downtown streets. On the weekend the river is jammed with super-sleek speedboats and luxury yachts. The outer decks of the sedately engineered millionaire-class small craft come, it almost seems, inevitably equipped, with voluptuous, string-bikini-clad, young women, whose purpose, judging from their extroverted performances, would appear to be to remind the boatless clowns on the quayside that money really can

buy anything. Penurious macho guy-guys, who hang out on the quayside path with apparently nothing better to do, express their envy for the revelers with wolf-whistles, catcalls and shouted compliments. Often they are rewarded with a wave, a smile and a few bumps and grinds from the scantily-clad yacht-ladies to the infectious rhythm of the blaring tropical music that travels the river with them. The impromptu go-go dancers seem only too happy to express their joy at being chosen as part of the Miami River in-crowd. Without a doubt, some of the same owners of these lavish vessels are among the drivers of the incredible array of luxury-elite automobiles that cruise Brickell Avenue and the streets of the Downtown area, especially on the weekend. Although, just about any day of the week, you need only stand on one of the central downtown street corners of Miami to collect enough images to create a veritable catalog of the highest-end automobiles on the planet.

One of the places they can go—apart from the city’s many bars, restaurants and nightclubs—is the new downtown mall known as Brickell City Centre. No, it’s not naïve of me to think that people who own those cars and those boats might entertain themselves in a shopping mall. Because this is no ordinary mall. It has got to be one of the highest-end shopping centers in the country.

You won’t find a Macy’s, Penney’s, Sears or Footlocker here. No Auntie Anne’s Pretzels or Sbarro or Cinnabon. Indeed, nearly every store represents at least one of the elite brands that I translated articles about in Luxury Road. And there are others that are even too exclusive for me to have heard about before. For instance, only in Miami could you have not one but two

Brickell City Centre

enormous stores devoted entirely to ultra-high-priced sunglasses—one selling exclusively Italian designer shades and the other, the world’s priciest brands in sunglasses (Fendi, Cartier, Prada, Dior, Ray-Ban, Saint Laurent, etc). Allsaints sells exclusive biker leathers, Acqua di Parma craft fragrances, and the alphabetical roster of high fashion luxury brands continues with Bally, Boss Menswear, Chanel, Coach Leather, Diptyque Candels and Fragrances, Edite Mode, Eternity Gallery, Intimissima Italian lingerie, Kiton tailored suits, Lafayette 148 New York women’s fashions, Michele Lopriore tailored womenswear, Orlebar beachwear, Porsche Design and Richard Mille timepieces, Swarovski crystal, Trousseau luxury bed and bath items, Violet’s Bacarrat Crystal and, among others, the Wolf Boutique that sells some of the world’s most renowned high-style brands.

The purse - "a steal" at $2.700!

Fittingly, the anchor store for this exclusive mall is Saks of Fifth Avenue, which occupies all three floors of one end of the building. There was a thirty-percent-off sale the day I was there. Innocently, I thought I might pick up something nice for my wife. But a quick look around immediately dissuaded me of the idea. Prices weren’t expressed in tens or even hundreds, but almost exclusively in thousands. Out of curiosity, I picked up a sale item, a horrid little sixties-style black and white purse. At thirty percent off, it was a bargain at “only” two thousand seven hundred dollars.   

For me, the whole scene has a carnivalesque quality to it. No part of this world is a corner where I wouldn’t stand out as a total alien. It’s a place for easy money, not for money earned in a job where you get paid by the word. But there’s a sideshow quality to being able to wander for a while along the midway, observing the attractions to either side with no real thought of participating in what seems, essentially, to be a freak show—a place where the unusual and, indeed, the outrageous are on full display.  

Back to reality...

Clearly, it wouldn’t be hard at all, if I were so inclined, to blow my life savings in a day—or in an hour—in this place where I have no business being. But for me it’s been fun to venture for a spell into an environment that is completely beyond my means or comprehension, and to observe how the other two percent lives in that “other Miami”.

And now…back to reality.