One of the sadder effects of the cutbacks in the newspaper business is the virtual elimination of non-paid obituaries. It doesn’t seem to be good business, because most people who read obits are candidates for the space themselves, and they are also among the dwindling numbers who still read newspapers regularly. Sure there are obits, lots of them, clustered together like the markers in a military cemetery, but they are all paid and written by family members. They are often maudlin, amusingly pious, and they usually don’t really tell you much about the real life of the departed.
Thus, we fill the gap. Patti Phipps, also known by various names due to various marriages (Bates, Brannan and Houston come to mind), died recently at a nursing home in Washington, D.C. According to her brother-in-law, Ted Drum, she was in her early 70s and died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. Until her illness, she was for much of her life one of the prominent socialites in Fort Lauderdale. For more than 30 years she was a regular in the pages of Gold Coast. So much so that the above photo of her in the early 1970s appeared in our April 50th anniversary celebration issue.
She had a running start. Her mother, Zada, who is still going at 98, was a Burdine, the daughter of the founder of Burdines. It was for years the leading department store in the area. It is now Macy’s. Patti was beautiful, blonde and ebullient. Her father, who left her life early, was a romantic figure who flew in World War II in China with the 14th Air Force, successor to the legendary “Flying Tigers.” Her last marriage was to prominent banker Ed Houston.
She was a good friend of Margaret Walker, associate editor of Gold Coast from the 1960s until her retirement in the 1980s. As such, she became an early friend of Gold Coast’s new owners in 1970, and was helpful in giving strangers in town valuable recognition. She literally matured with the magazine. She appeared in the 1990s on a group cover promoting the revival of “The Showoffs”—a live review staged by prominent people in Fort Lauderdale, which she helped start in the early 1970s. She even made the magazine after moving to Vero Beach, in a piece on locals who had migrated to the Treasure Coast.
John Therien’s obit did make Sunday’s Sun-Sentinel—in the paid listings—and although it mentioned he was prominent in the restaurant business, it failed to emphasize a contribution he made, which was revolutionary in the bar business at the time. In 1971, he was a partner in launching the Banana Boat on Commercial Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale.
The restaurant was a dramatic break from the traditional dark, smoky bar. It was blonde and airy, and featured a U-shaped bar where people could relate to each other. It was one of the first of what now is a standard design for a dating bar. Its great popularity made Commercial Boulevard one of the fun streets in South Florida, as a number of other restaurants, with some of the most popular bartenders and barmaids, open nearby. They were constantly in and out of each other’s places, trading dollars. The late Jack Riker, known as “Turtle,” was one of the original Banana Boat staff members. He used to say he was working on a book—How To See Commercial Boulevard on a Thousand Dollars a Day.
John Therien’s most visible partner in the Banana Boat was Pat Kirk, a former stockbroker. Kirk was a bit of a wild man; John Therien was not, which is why he outlived Kirk by several decades. The Banana Boat concept spread to a number of locations with various partners, but all using the same concept. Today only one survives in Boynton Beach.
Therien, joined by three sons (Luke Therien is president) went on to succeed in a number of ventures, including the Fifth Avenue Grill in Delray Beach, which is still going under different ownership; and another in Deerfield Beach, which closed in 2012. He also opened Old Calypso in Delray Beach. His company, Restaurant Holdings, still runs the Banana Boat and also the more upscale Prime Catch in Boynton Beach. John Therien made it to 80, pretty good for a man in a high stress business.
Finally, we bid farewell to Rosemary Jones, who died at 85 on June 20th. She was a long-time freelancer for Gold Coast and she was active for decades in literary organizations. She earned a special place in the magazine’s history in 1992 when she introduced publisher Bernard McCormick to Fred Ruffner, her boss at Omnigraphics Inc. McCormick was looking for investors to rebuild Gold Coast after a long legal fight to regain control.
Instead of investing, Ruffner bought the magazine, and in one year restored its credibility as the leading South Florida magazine. He then sold it back to a new investment group headed by McCormick.
Grandfather Sweeney probably never went beyond grade school, but he managed to become a publisher more than a hundred years ago. None of his books dealt with the Civil War, but he saved some beautiful volumes on American history. In them, before we even started grade school, we admired the detailed lithographs of battle scenes of the Civil War. Confederate flags flew over neat rows of even neater soldiers, all uniformed splendidly in gray. The pictures were not in color, but that did not make any difference when it came to gray. The Confederate flags, of course, in real life were red.
And in real life, those neat uniforms on Confederate soldiers were often not gray, and often not even uniforms. Many Southern soldiers wore what they had worn on their farms. And those who had gray uniforms often found that the sun quickly turned them into the natural color of the fabric. "Butternut scarecrows" is the term historian Shelby Foote used to describe the underfed, poorly dressed Southern soldiers. And in real life—this was in the 1950s—there was nothing sinister about the Confederate flag. It was just a memory from the Civil War, like the little gray replica caps we bought in Woolworth’s. It even had entertainment value, as when the rowing teams from Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia showed up in Philadelphia with Confederate flags on the backs of their rowing shirts.
We hardly noticed it, but that all changed a decade later when the red flag—The Stars and Bars it was nicknamed—began assuming a new sense of rebellion, showing up in the livery of motorcycle gangs and license plates on pickup trucks. It said, “We’re looking for trouble.” It was the time of the civil rights movement, and to many, the flag symbolized resistance to change. To blacks especially, it became a racist symbol. So much so that during the recent debate on the flag one black TV commentator likened it to the swastika—the symbol of Nazi horror in World War II.
Under the circumstances, who can argue with taking the flag down on official state grounds, or deleting it from the Mississippi state flag? But one wonders about calls to change the Florida state flag, which is the St. Andrew’s Cross, the same X as on the Confederate flag. The cross was often used throughout history. It is part of the British Union Jack, for instance. It showed up on some colonial flags of Spain and Russia.
What is also disturbing, however, is the tendency among the anti-flaggers to distort the whole background of the Civil War, in an effort to change history. For years some Southerners contend it was about states' rights. To others, it was all about slavery. In fact, it was both. Slavery was the economic cause for that great conflict, but it is not the reason most men fought. They fought, as men have done for centuries, for their neighborhood, and for country—right or wrong. It is easy to forget that until that war, there was a real conflict between federal and state priorities. Many thought their state loyalty superior to a national interest. Robert E. Lee, a moral man as our history has produced, said he could not fight against his native Virginia.
Lee, who was wealthy, owned slaves, but was in the process of setting them free. Most soldiers, on both sides, did not own slaves and may have had no opinion on the issue, one way or the other. Especially in the South, where much of the war was fought, people considered themselves invaded. They fought for family and home.
How else can you explain the notable contribution of Irish soldiers in that war? Most of the Irish—who were practically all immigrants—were in the North, but there were strong pockets of Irish in the older Southern cities. They had all come to America at about the same time, and for the same reason—to escape oppression and famine in their homeland, which was under the rule of the British flag. In fact, many were not far from slaves in Ireland. They lost their land, and during the famine could not even eat the food they grew on the owners' farms. When the Civil War broke out, the famed Irish Brigade went to battle for the North flying the same green flag they had flown in revolt against British rule.
Although far fewer in numbers, and in much smaller units, the Southern Irish waved the same flag and exhibited similar valor in battle after battle. Very few moved north or south out of moral conviction. They simply fought for their new homeland, for identical motives. The classic example was Irish-born Confederate general Patrick Cleburne, who had prospered in Arkansas and died fighting in gratitude for that state, even though he became unpopular with politicians when he said he favored freeing slaves.
It was a great irony of our history, that a war meant to set men free had so many combatants on both sides fighting in appreciation of their own newfound freedom. Those in the South fought with honor under the Stars and Bars, and most of them, if alive today, would probably understand the lowering of that flag.
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Do you want to know what happened in Baltimore? Here’s what happened.
“From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families… never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos.” – Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
When Moynihan wrote that passage he was not thinking of Baltimore. But then again, he was. He died in 2003 and the quote is from a 1965 report he wrote when assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration. Moynihan was a sociologist by training, and went on to become a much admired U.S. senator from New York. Criticized by some as a racist at the time, he has since been recognized for his vision. He saw the future by observing the past. A year before his report, there had been a race riot in Philadelphia.
The Philadelphia riot was nothing if not complex (to this day people argue about it) and laden with irony. In 1964, Philadelphia had a new police commissioner, Howard Leary. He was progressive, reaching out to the black community and initiating a review board to handle claims of police brutality. But that made no difference one August day when a black couple on Columbia Avenue, not far from Temple University, got into a fight at an intersection. She was blocking traffic, but the woman refused to move her car, and when police tried to get her to move it, the neighborhood moved in. One man attacked the police (one black and one white officer), and soon word spread that a pregnant black woman had been killed by white police. Keep in mind, this was long before the Internet was around to fuel such wild rumors.
Three days of rioting and looting followed. The destruction of stores made the recent Baltimore violence seem tame. Commissioner Leary avoided heavy force, although hundreds of people were arrested. He sort of let the fire burn itself out, working to contain the looting to one busy street. Some contend black militants fueled the flames while local black clergy tried to stop it. Most of the destroyed stores were Jewish owned, adding an element of anti-Semitism to the incident.
After things settled down a bit, we were sent by Philadelphia magazine to analyze what had happened. We had a good guide. A black guy in our circulation department lived in the neighborhood. Our most vivid memory of that story is visiting a pool room at night. There was a bare bulb over the table, which seemed surrounded by 100 young guys, whose faces appeared olive green in that dim light. Some wondered if this white guy was a cop.
We met some of the guys who had been involved in the looting. If you asked them if they were angry, they would of course say yes, offering a litany of excuses for their behavior. But that mood seemed staged, and temporary. For the most part, they seemed pretty happy, joking around. None appeared to have any guilt about destroying the shopping street in their own neighborhood. One young man, a leader in the riot, actually gained stature for his role. "Street cred," before that term became popular. We had never heard of Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the time, but we were seeing up close and personal what he had written about. These were young men who, in another Moynihan phrase of “furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure.” All they needed was an excuse.
Not long after, we had a much different view of the same problem. We did a freelance piece for the United Presbyterian Church magazine. The church had poured money into a grade school in the same black neighborhood. They offered every program available to give little kids a better start in education. We spent some time in the back of a class of youngsters, second graders, we recall. Their teacher was an idealistic young white woman. We admired her for even venturing into that neighborhood on a daily basis. Not many would. Although we were a long time removed from our own early grade school days, we sensed that with these kids something was missing. The Olympics were going on at the time, and when the teacher asked if anyone knew what the Olympics were, dozens of hands crowded the air. The boy she called on said, “That’s where the man jumps over with a pole.”
As our assignment was ending, the teacher asked us to stay a few minutes after school. She showed us her book. Of about 30 children in her charge, only two or three came from homes with both a mother and father. The rest were either single parents, or in a number of cases, relatives, often grandparents.
“That’s the problem,” she said. This brings us back to Moynihan.
Fifty years later, that problem has only gotten worse. Even as educated or talented blacks have ascended to prominence, in such fields as the media, the military, sciences and the professions, and not the least, politics (notice who’s president of the U.S.), the black underclass has grown enormously. Seventy percent of black children are born out of wedlock. Single mothers struggle to support them. It takes two middle-class wage earners to raise a family today. Poverty is almost inevitable. Crime is its predictable accomplice. There are no father figures creating examples or exercising control.
The media, many of which are black, tell us the problem in Baltimore is poverty, unemployment, boarded up houses, crime, etc. But those are symptoms of the disease. Moynihan identified the germ so long ago, and to date no cure is in sight.
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It was November of 1977. Peggy McCormick was having a baby, and the delivery was tough. The obstetrician was Dr. Warren Stough, who had been delivering half of Broward County wee-ones for decades. He was greatly respected; in addition to his professional competence, he had a delightful Southern style, which put everyone at ease. As the labor dragged on, we asked him if there was a problem.
“No, Mac,” he said, “This is just a big doggone ole baby.” The big baby was 10 pounds and ultimately required a C-section. The baby was fine, but the mother had heavy bleeding, which took a few days to control. We took the baby home while the mother remained in the hospital. For those first few motherless nights, Mark McCormick, age 11, got up for the two o’clock feeding, burping and rocking to sleep his new little sister as if he did it for a living.
When the mother came home, the bleeding started again in the night. It was heavy and we called Dr. Stough. He said we better take her to the hospital. He would be over in an hour. We got there fast; the bleeding was getting heavier. We were scared. When we got to the hospital, we alerted the first nurse we saw. The nurse said OK, they’d check her out.
Long minutes passed and the bleeding did not slow. It got worse. We told the nurse she better get moving. This was serious. She said OK. We also saw a doctor we knew and asked him for help. He said he would. More long minutes passed. Finally, seeing the bleeding was becoming a torrent, we grabbed a nurse. “She’s not bleeding, she’s hemorrhaging!” we almost screamed, literally pushing the nurse into the room. The nurse took one look and all hell broke loose. She ran from the room, a look of guilty panic on her face, and within seconds it seemed every nurse and doctor in South Florida was running into the room. A blood transfusion was underway quickly, but it still took several days to get the bleeding under control. During those nights Mark McCormick, pushing the ripe old age of 12, continued his two o’clock baby feeding. Almost forty years later he recalls his nocturnal activity as lasting about three months, but it was actually about a week.
This event occurred in Broward General Hospital (now called Broward Health) and it did not leave a wonderful impression of the hospital. At that time our opinion was shared by others. Broward General did not have an outstanding reputation.
This was written almost 40 years later in the same hospital, and this time the father was the patient. And the situation could not have been more different. From the moment we were admitted after a strange spell that ended a memorable 50th Anniversary celebration of Gold Coast magazine, the staff of the hospital could not have been more attentive. From the emergency room staff, who were our first contact, to the nurses, who popped in every 30 seconds to take blood or record blood pressure, to the lads who wheeled you around for various tests, this staff seemed to be addicted to nice pills.
Everybody introduced themselves by name, and the nurses were the polar opposite of the indifferent people who scared us half to death decades ago. They popped into the room often, often simply to ask if we needed anything. Due to local spies, we learned that a big part of this avalanche of attention is no accident. The hospital administration for the last four years, led by CEO Calvin Glidewell, emphasizes such good conduct because one of the criteria Medicare uses to reimburse hospitals is patient satisfaction. That remuneration trickles down to the lowest employees. This is obviously an induced behavior, but behavior tends to be habit forming. If there wasn't a person in the hospital who wasn't high on happy pills, we didn't meet them. This was not one man's opinion. Visitors who visited during several days all commented on the obvious dedication of the hospital staff.
Nobody wants to be wished a hospital stay, but if you need one, it is hard to beat Broward Health. Especially compared to 1977.
Everybody in South Florida is complaining about traffic. And half of South Florida is complaining about one part of what could be a mild remedy - the idea of running passenger trains on the railroad that built Florida in the first place.
Just yesterday, we overheard a conversation, which started out about youth soccer and quickly morphed into a discussion about problems the marine industry will endure due to the expanded use of passenger trains on the FEC Railway. We have discussed this before; the concerns of the marine industry could not be more real – especially in downtown Fort Lauderdale where raising the lift bridge over the New River many times a day would play havoc with the busy boat traffic on that waterway.
This is in Fort Lauderdale. Meanwhile, in Dade County there is enthusiasm for the plan to use All Aboard Florida’s terminal station in downtown Miami to connect to Tri-Rail trains. Those trains currently use the CSX tracks that miss the downtowns of all the cities along Tri-Rail’s route. It is proposed to move some of those trains to the FEC tracks, where they should have been all along, but this would only increase the number of bridge delays in Fort Lauderdale.
Meanwhile again, in northern Palm Beach County and points above, the opposition to All Aboard Florida has reached the point of lawsuits. The Indian River County Commission has filed to stop All Aboard Florida on the grounds that the proposed fast train service from Miami to Orlando will cause harm to that county.
Alas, the FEC is suffering from wild speculation over its motives for running the fast train. A columnist in Palm Beach suspects it ties in with secret plans for a casino on its large Miami property. Whisk betters in from distant places. Letter writers to papers say it isn’t for passenger trains at all, but rather to run fast freights from ports in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
What we have here is a failure of communication, and it may be on purpose. But nobody seems to put together the long range picture in all its parts. For starters, this should be regarded as the first step in modernizing the FEC corridor to serve the same purpose as the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington. This means far more than just improving crossing gates and silencing horns, which help people near the tracks avoid sleep at night. It means closing crossings where feasible, elevating tracks in some cases, bridging over them in others.
We have twice ridden on FEC freights and have checked out the railroad from Miami to Vero Beach. There are many stretches, even in Dade and Broward counties, where relatively minor improvements would clear the tracks for several miles and permit trains to hit high speeds – up to 90 miles and hour. In Hollywood, for instance, the tracks run in a median along Dixie Highway for long stretches. An engineer has a clear view far down the tracks and could react to an emergency. It is not like stopping a freight train a freight train a mile long. Modern passenger trains can speed up or slow down quickly.
This is now. In the long run, tunnels need to be built under waterways. We suspect that the proposed schedule of 32 All Aboard Florida trains is too ambitious. It will likely be scaled back to perhaps half that, and still suit the railroads purpose, so the impact on marine activity, while considerable, will not be as bad as forecast.
We think All Aboard Florida’s ridership estimates are wildly exaggerated. So what? What would not be exaggerated is the benefit if Tri-Rail begins using the same tracks for commuter service. A few stations in Palm Beach County would do a lot to silence critics in that area. Tri-Rail is reluctant to estimate ridership when that happens. It is still touchy that its original 1988 estimates took years to be realized. But we would be surprised if current ridership does not double in a short time.
Since All Aboard Florida will only go to Palm Beach for the first year, it will be in effect a fast commuter service. And with Tri-Rail aboard, that service could be stretched to Jupiter. And if that happens, people in Stuart will start driving to Jupiter and begin complaining that the service should include their town. And on up the railroad it will go, a domino effect as Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties become part of Tri-Rail.
If viewed in perspective, which few people seem to be doing, this rail initiative is a game changer, a game whose change is long overdue.
Monday’s Miami Herald had an informative piece by Eric Barton on the problems facing Florida’s solar industry. Barton, one of the most talented contributors to Gulfstream Media Group’s publications, collaborated with The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting to explain how Florida’s Legislature is thwarting efforts of the solar industry to grow in the state.
As usual, the reason is money. The article details the enormous contributions from Florida’s power companies to almost anything that moves in Tallahassee to assure that any legislation to benefit solar development goes nowhere. Since 2010, the state’s Big Four of Energy – FPL, Duke Energy, Gulf Power and Tampa Electric – have contributed $12 million to the campaigns of state lawmakers.
They give to everybody, but mostly to Republicans, and in a Legislature dominated by very conservative GOP members, the handful of legislators who want to capitalize on Florida’s natural gift – abundant sunshine to provide renewable energy – get no movement on their bills. What they do get is pariah treatment, sometimes in an insulting manner. Barton quotes Representative Dwight Dudley (pictured above), R-St. Petersburg, on an encounter with a utility company lobbyist. Dudley was talking to an acquaintance at a function.
“Oh my gosh, do you know who this is? The devil’s holy man,” said the lobbyist. “It was loud and unpleasant,” recalled Dudley, “and it became very uncomfortable.”
This is exactly the opposite of what should happen. Good men should not be attacked. Those whose votes are bought by campaign contributions should be those suffering the boycott. Boycott, by the way, comes from the Irish land wars of the 1800s. A land agent named Charles Boycott was despised by the peasants who were losing their homes when they could not afford the rent. Instead of killing him, which they would have preferred, the people shunned him. Absolutely. No one talked to him or recognized his existence. Restaurants would not serve him. Carriage drivers would not transport him. People closed curtains on windows when he passed by.
It worked. Boycott became a sordid celebrity in the British Isles, and he could not stand it. He left Ireland, and the publicity gave momentum to the land reform movement, which ultimately regained much of the land the Irish had lost over the centuries.
The solar situation is just the latest example of money corrupting our Legislature. Big Sugar buys votes to prevent money already approved for restoring the Everglades from being spent. Any gun law opposed by the National Rifle Association has no chance, even though police departments and most Floridians favor gun control. School administrators and police are appalled by the current bill to allow guns on campuses. It makes no difference to this Legislature.
The pro-solar community is trying to get around the Legislature by means of a constitutional amendment, perhaps next year. That would likely pass. Most Floridians, at least those who vote, care about the environment. But even that is no guarantee of action. The voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to provide funds to buy land for the Everglades cleanup. But the Legislature has approved only a fraction of the money. It is obviously responding to Big Sugar dollars, now that the sugar companies have decided they don’t want to honor previous agreements.
What can we do about the arrogance of these elected officials who deny the will of the people? It is illegal in most parts of Florida to have them drawn and quartered. Maybe the Irish had the right idea.
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The problem with the world is that there are too many names. There was a time when we were young when the names controlling the world were easy to remember. Churchill, who was named after a famous racetrack; Roosevelt, who was named after a bridge in Stuart; and Hitler, who was named after his father, did not twist the tongue.
Famous generals had easy names – Eisenhower, Marshall, Patton, Montgomery, Bradley, MacArthur. They did not challenge brain cells. Even the enemy had fairly simple names, such as Tojo, Hirohito and Rommel. Some Teutonic monikers were a bit challenging, but historically there was usually a way to associate them with real life. Hindenburg was named after a blimp. Bismarck after a town in North Dakota. The B-17 was named for a popular vitamin used to counter blitzkrieg syndrome.
Today, one feels for any serious student of world affairs. Just in the last 20 years or so, major events have taken place in places nobody heard of. It started in the 1990s with the awful war in Bosnia. The names of prominent political and military leaders were uniformly hard to pronounce, and impossible to remember. Alija Izetbegovic, Radovan Karadzic, Milomir Stakic, Ratko Mladic, Sefer Halilovic, Haris Silajdzic and Slobodan Milosevic were among the many who made the news. If some of these spellings are incorrect, keep in mind most of these people could not even pronounce their own names, much less spell them.
You had to feel for the poor broadcasters dealing with this problem. Several had nervous breakdowns on camera, and to this day, there are cases of newsmen being treated for brain trauma, a lingering effect of years of tongue twisting.
The painful thing is that as soon as we begin to come close to getting these names right, the world crisis tends to change to other places and other names nobody can get straight.
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the Middle East where the shifting tides of turmoil have forced upon innocent Americans names that only a mother could abide. And as soon as we come close to getting them straight, they disappear and are replaced by equally challenging names.
We are assaulted with names such as Muammar el Qaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Nouri al Maliki, Hosni Mubarak, Benjamin Netanyahu (Pictured above, thank god they call him Bibi), Khaled Meshaal, Asif Ali Zardari, Hamad bin Khalifa-Thani, Zine El Abidine Benali, Abdullah Saleh and others for which there are no letters in the English alphabet.
Perhaps the natives have dealt with that problem over the years by naming half the people Muhammad. Indeed, even in the U.S. we have seen creative solutions to difficult names. In our old high school, on the first day, a teacher named Gallagher (O Gallchobhair in old Irish) was going through the names of the class when he came to Szymkowski. We can only spell it because he became the stroke of a championship crew and as a sports writer, we had to deal with it on a regular basis.
Mr. Gallagher fumbled with the pronunciation and then said to Szymkowski, “From now on, you’re Murphy.” And Murph Szymkowski it is, 50 years later.
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The opposition to a railroad being a railroad is growing. Last week Indian River County (that's Vero Beach) commissioners voted to sue to stop All Aboard Florida – the proposed fast train from Miami to Orlando on the Florida East Coast Railway tracks. Comments from some elected officials up that way make the high-speed line sound like the worst thing that ever happened to their communities – the very destruction of their way of life.
Actually, the idea is one of the best things to happen, not just for the Treasure Coast, but for all six counties from Indian River to Miami-Dade. It is just going to take time for the public to get it. And the longer government figures continue to view the situation in short time, the longer it will take. In the long run, All Aboard Florida is the beginning of a transportation reformation that is long overdue. It is the modernization of the railroad that literally built the east coast of Florida. Its tracks run through the heart of every city, large and small, from Jacksonville to Miami. Those tracks are the reason many cities exist.
The FEC is partly to blame. It gave up passenger service in the 1960s, and over the years, it permitted hundreds of grade crossings as new roads to serve new communities were built. Between Miami and northern Palm Beach County there are only a few bridges over the tracks. They are so rare they should be designated tourist attractions. Most northern railroads eliminated grade crossings a century ago, as it became obvious that motor vehicles and the iron horse had an inherent conflict of interest. There could be no Northeast Corridor, one of the busiest rail lines in the world (with Acela trains hitting 150 mph) if cars and trucks crossed the rails every few blocks or so.
But the FEC has new management with new ideas. We have noted before that this is an obvious real estate play, which over time will benefit the railroad. Most obvious is the major redevelopment already underway for its large and idle rail yard in Miami. Critics – almost all of them are well north of Miami – see this as some sort of evil. They do not see that, again in the long run, it is one of the best things that could happen to their increasingly traffic-jammed towns.
Making the FEC a busy passenger corridor – and it sure will be – will necessitate rebuilding the entire line, closing crossings where feasible, bridging others and ultimately (and very expensively) tunneling under the major waterways, such as Fort Lauderdale's New River and Stuart's St. Lucie River, where the trains now cross on lift bridges. Those opposing the railroad see only the problems – and they are very real – without perceiving the solutions.
Some perceptions are absurd. Letter writers to the Palm Beach Post suspect All Aboard Florida is a ruse to permit increased high-speed freight traffic on the FEC tracks. One writer suggests building a new railroad along U.S. 27 to carry all the freight expected to arrive at South Florida ports when the expansion of the Panama Canal is complete – as if constructing a new railroad is as simple as adding a flight on an airline.
What is disturbing is that media north of Broward County are not putting this historic opportunity in perspective. It was announced last year that the FEC, CSX and Tri-Rail are cooperating in an unprecedented way. Some of the long, slow freights will be transferred to the CSX, which has far fewer grade crossings. Tri-Rail had already identified potential stations in Palm Beach County when it shifts some trains to the FEC tracks where they always belonged. Opposition to All Aboard Florida would fade quickly if stations in Boca Raton, Delray Beach, West Palm Beach and Jupiter could serve commuters.
And looking deeper into the future, the entire east coast of Florida could have commuter service and fast inter-city trains on the same railroad. If those Indian River commissioners foresaw a station in Vero Beach from which they could get to Fort Lauderdale in an hour, they might not be so fast to write checks to lawyers.
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Last week we took a trip to Naples for a weekend getaway. We wanted to beat traffic, so we left at 2 p.m. The drive from downtown Fort Lauderdale to I-595 normally takes about 10 minutes, sometimes even quicker. This day, it took 30 minutes to go a few miles. Once on I-595, we traveled the 109 miles to Naples in about 90 minutes.
We wish our experience was unusual, but everywhere we go we hear the same complaint. The neighborhoods surrounding downtown Fort Lauderdale, which have for years been unusual for their suburban-like atmosphere while at the same time been wonderfully convenient to the city core, are becoming unlivable because of the traffic congestion.
Just yesterday comes a letter illustrating the frustration of long time residents. The family is old – dating to the 1940s – and the letter writer would be the first to admit that growth has been good for his business. It was written personally, not for publication, but we share a few of his thoughts:
After recalling the pleasure of living here for so many years, he adds: “Once the developers got control of the city and the county commissioners, the almighty dollar took precedence over our quality of life.”
The writer criticizes the city’s decision to increase heights, eliminate parking regulations and waive impact fees, causing “land values to skyrocket and our great restaurants and single-story ranch-type homes could no longer stand the onslaught of developers throwing money at them to build something bigger and better.
“The developers were successful in selling the theory that high-rise tax income would fatten city bank accounts when in reality the cost of services, congestion and quality of life have suffered to the point where there is no monetary gain.”
The bottom line: Preparing for retirement, he and his wife are moving.
This writer is hardly alone, and it isn’t just limited to Fort Lauderdale. In Aventura recently, there was an arrest of a couple that drove over fresh concrete on a sidewalk poured on their property. But the background is trying to prevent a developer from putting in a large complex in an area that residents say is already overbuilt.
In western Palm Beach County, there is an ongoing fight between homeowners who bought on promises that their area would remain rural, and are now being challenged by builders seeking to chip away at designated open space.
In all of these situations, people feel betrayed by elected officials who buy office with pro-growth contributions and ignore the will of the voters. Often the politicians pretend to be on the people’s side when they are definitely not. We are seeing this today in the effort to clean up the Everglades. Elected officials routinely say they are all for saving the environment, then vote for the polluters and pretend that helps the public. The Palm Beach Post recently reported that elected officials from the Treasure Coast cities suffering the damage of discharges from Lake Okeechobee often talk like champions of the environment, and then vote just the opposite.
This is in a word corruption. And it goes on throughout the state in many areas. But their hearts are not the problem. Their wallets are.
