»If you have a cookie-cutter, I've an urban planning project for you
San Francisco's monumental Mission Bay project boasts more lofts -- 6,000 units -- than Alphabet City or Docklands, but more than half of all retail will be chain stores.
Building a city neigbourhood, especially one from scratch, poses great challenges to developers. How to seed the area with enough retail that urban dwellers will feel engaged? Does a neighbourhood feel like a 'hood if it's got the same stores one would see at the other end of a BART line? At the other end of a plane ride? If Lofty Q. Public comes home to San Francisco one evening and home looks like Phoenix, will Lofty throw himself in front of the convenient MUNI or CalTrain?
On the other hand, Jackson park callsitself a neighbourhood and now boasts a Wal-Mart on its main drag. Doesn't get more cookie-cutter formulaic than that. And then again, some places don't care for individuality: Jose Montaner, a Cuban refugee living quietly and cleanly on a city-owned island hurts the posh attitudes of his neighbours, who perhaps can't see because of the mote in their eye. They want him out (and a Wal-Mart in?).
Barcelona is doing this with Barceloneta; London with Docklands;
April 12, 2004
MIAMI JOURNAL
A Paradise of Detritus (Plus Ducks)
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
MIAMI, April 11 No one was home but the chickens, so the visitors could only peer like Hansel and Gretel into the mysterious makeshift home on the tiny mangrove-tangled island. They walked gingerly back to the dock, so as not to collide with the bedraggled stuffed animals, bright lobster buoys, faded flags, rusty buckets and shiny CD's swinging from the trees.
Then he appeared: a small, stooped man of 70, paddling his weathered dinghy with a pointy-eared dog at his feet. Having checked his crab traps, the man, Jose Montaner, was back for another evening of breeze-kissed solitude on this tropical island, a few hundred yards from mainland Miami, that he has claimed as his own.
"Hola, muchachos!" he said, and offered up a tour of his compound: two jury-rigged structures with roofs of striped tarpaulin, a yard teeming with chickens and a few ducks, a well-groomed beach with views of the downtown Miami skyline, and every salvageable item to wash up on this city-owned island since Mr. Montaner, a homeless Cuban-American, quietly took it over four years ago.
Here are the neat piles of coconuts that float from Key Biscayne, from which Mr. Montaner has lovingly coaxed green sprouts. There is his flip-flop garden a collection of lost sandals delivered by the tide and his tree with a battered shoe outfitting every branch. The playground with tire swings, the lean-to where he watches a generator-powered television by moonlight, and the place he calls home: a kitchen and a bedroom built of crude wooden planks, decorated with religious statues and cozy as a child's treehouse.
Take it all in, because Mr. Montaner and his possessions might not be here much longer. A movement is under way to evict him from the island, one of five created decades ago with dredge spoils from the construction of Dinner Key Marina, a few hundred yards away. Some boaters have complained about Mr. Montaner, and while city officials are sympathetic to his plight, they say he has no right to inhabit public land.
"I thank the Lord every day for this place," Mr. Montaner, who speaks only Spanish, said on Thursday, easing into a wobbly kitchen chair on his beach. "Are they going to leave me here, or are they going to throw me to the wind?"
His allies and there are many among the small-craft boaters who launch from the marina say Mr. Montaner is not only harmless but also an exemplary resident of Coconut Grove, a lush, affluent section of Miami where some of its original pioneers settled. Some of the neighboring uninhabited islands are blanketed with garbage, they said, while Mr. Montaner keeps his spotless.
Stuart Sorg, a Coconut Grove resident and member of the Miami Waterfront Advisory Board, sees the situation differently. He wants Mr. Montaner off the island immediately, especially after reading in The Miami Herald last week that Mr. Montaner had been arrested for minor crimes in the past. "We've got to go through that island and disassemble everything," said Mr. Sorg, who has complained about Mr. Montaner to city officials. "This city has become too sophisticated, too cosmopolitan for that type of thing."
Mr. Montaner's island sits in sight of Miami City Hall, surrounded by the marina, a restaurant and Shake-a-Leg Miami, which teaches disabled people and poor children how to sail. Shake-a-Leg sailors like to visit Mr. Montaner and explore his hideaway, as do members of the Coconut Grove Children's Environmental Group, who clean the other islands and look to his as a model.
Asked how he got here, Mr. Montaner waved his arm dismissively. "It would take many books," he said. He was born in Caibarien, Cuba, where he was a carpenter and boat builder and was jailed, he said, after stealing milk for his family. In 1968, he said, he set sail in a fishing boat for Key West, ending up in Miami and, later, New York City.
He worked there as a parks maintenance man and salt spreader until, he said, "I couldn't stand the inhuman frozen conditions and I needed to come back to the tropical paradise that reminds me most of Cuba."
Back in Miami, Mr. Montaner lost a job because of an injury and became homeless, he said. He lived in shelters and abandoned buildings until he discovered the island, where he collected detritus for a month before building his house in a single day.
His routine is steadfast, Mr. Montaner said: rising at 4 a.m., making his beloved Cuban coffee on a propane burner and listening to Radio Mambํ, a popular Cuban-American station. By 6, he starts his daily cleaning, traversing the long, skinny island to collect whatever washed up overnight. He rakes seaweed, checks his crab traps and feeds his birds, which provide him with eggs.
After dinner rice and beans that friends bring, or groceries he has picked up from the mainland Mr. Montaner watches television for two hours before turning in at 9 sharp. To get to sleep and stave off chronic back pain, he drinks a homemade brew of fermented mangrove root.
Audrey Eckert, a Miami police officer, said there had been an outpouring of concern for Mr. Montaner, and someone had even offered to give him a houseboat.
"That way he can enjoy his island, continue to visit it, but he just can't live on it," she said.
Mr. Montaner said the only thing he could not bear would be a forced return to homelessness on the mainland. He would love to stay on the island until he dies or at least until Fidel Castro, just a few years his senior, does.
"Then it's a whole different story," he said, staring over the water as if to see his other tropical island, and Caibarien, at last.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
