There seems to be some excitement around here for a bad idea. We refer to the Wave – a streetcar planned for downtown Fort Lauderdale. What we are doing here is going forward to the past – to an idea discarded in most major cities 50 years ago. The idea is a trolley that runs on the same space used by cars, bicycles, drunken pedestrians, etc.
The idea of a vehicle running on tracks is not bad, but it was decided years ago that having the vehicle on the same space as other traffic did not work. You just had a trolley filled with people moving as slowly as everything else, even slowing traffic while it discharged and loaded human cargo.
Now, into the 21st century. In many places there are still streetcars, but they run on dedicated lanes, usually the one closest to the curb. Anyone who has been to Denver, New Orleans, Sacramento, or Portland, Ore., needs no explanation. Those cities have streetcars that have their own alley, so to speak. They stop every four or five blocks, and streetlights are geared to give them a right of way. In Denver those streetcars connect to the railroads, carrying passengers 20 or more miles away, quicker than a car can make the same trip, especially at rush hour. Thus a fast, efficient way of moving large numbers of people.
The price paid for this luxury is giving up a lane of traffic. So the idea won’t work on say, Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale or Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach. Those streets are too narrow. Where it would work, however, and Florida has many examples, are broad, three-lane highways. U.S. 1 is a prime example, up and down much of the Gold Coast. Major east-west arteries also have room to add a dedicated lane on the inside. You could run a streetcar, also known as light rail, from Plantation to downtown Fort Lauderdale, and connect to the Florida East Coast Railway tracks, headed north or south (think airport), and that would be a most useful line.
It is surprising, with so many examples to copy, that our planners come up with an idea that history has negated. The Wave is a good idea on the wrong track. Wave it off.
Time was running out in the first half.“Shoot!” somebody shouted.
You were open and you shot from the right corner, a jump shot from what today would be three-point range. The ball went in, all net, just as the buzzer sounded, the only buzzer beater in more than 20 years of playing disorganized and organized basketball, beginning in grade school and continuing through a pretty good Philadelphia adult league that had some former college players and even one ex-pro from the old Eastern League. He was on our team and technically should not have been allowed, but nobody complained because our team clearly needed some help.
Anyway, the thrill of that buzzer beater was compromised by the fact that as your feet landed, an ankle gave way. You could hardly walk in the second half, but after using ice on the swelling and having a teammate, who was also a football coach, tape the bad ankle, you were able to play a few days later.
It was the only buzzer beater and the only injury in all those years of playing basketball. The memory comes alive this time of year when college basketball winds down, as we watch the NCAA tournament. It is always fun to see some of the old-time film when schools and players with glory in their past are recalled. You see a much slower game, with players wearing shorts that do not resemble prom gowns and often shooting outside shots without leaving their feet. You also see a game with far fewer injuries than today – a game that was designed by Dr. James Naismith in 1891 to be played indoors and in safety.
The fundamental premise was to reward skill rather than brute strength – a sport in which a clever little sharpshooter could compete with a larger person. Until the 1950s, and even into the '70s, his concept stayed intact. Basketball was a pretty safe game. It was unusual, at least on the college level, for a player to miss a major part of a season because of injury.
Over the last several decades Naismith’s game has become almost unrecognizable as the rules have relaxed to permit much quicker movement and physical contact that would have appalled the game’s inventor. The result is that almost every team in the NCAA tournament has been affected by injuries, some of them, as in the case of the Louisville player over the weekend, shockingly severe.
It is a rare team that does not have at least one key player out, or playing hurt. The team closest to home is our La Salle, whose tallest player at 6-11 missed almost the last month of the season after spraining his foot. La Salle managed to win three tournament games without him, but was crushed under the boards in most of its final games, even while winning.
Our main gripe is all the contact, much of it intentional. Players driving to the basket are taught to make contact, and what once was charging now mostly goes against the defense. Size and strength (which translates to speed) are rewarded – just what its founder did not want. Injuries are inevitable. Sorry, Dr. Naismith.
We see it all the time. Heavy traffic on I-95, but at least it's moving. Everybody doing 65 to 70. Suddenly some maniac comes racing by at a much higher speed, changing lanes like a juking running back, recklessly cutting in front of other drivers, often followed by another car or two doing the same thing. We suspect these people drive like this all the time, and we wonder how they get away with it.
Well, we are learning most of them don’t. News reports last week explained that many drivers involved in recent serious accidents had terrible driving records – suspended licenses, DUIs, multiple unpaid tickets, no insurance – sometimes all of these. And they keep driving until the kill themselves and maybe somebody else.
That’s what happened to a 26-year-old man last week. He and a passenger died in a high-speed crash in Hollywood. He had racked up 12 traffic violations since 2007, including five speeding incidents and driving with a suspended license and failing to pay traffic fines. Because he had a lawyer in court, most of those incidents were not officially on record.
Another case separately reported by the Sun-Sentinel involved a driver who has a 13-year record of infractions, was involved in a fatal 2010 crash, and continued driving and getting six more tickets.
Bottom line: It is very hard to keep people with terrible driving records from continuing to drive terribly. One way to do that might be to impound vehicles of habitual offenders or anybody caught driving illegally with a suspended license. It has been reported that thousands of such people are driving our roads every day. They simply ignore the law until the day they kill themselves or somebody else. Note the stats reported by the Sun-Sentinel. In 2012 there were 195,467 Florida drivers – including more than 15,000 in Broward and 16,000 in Palm Beach – cited with criminal violations for driving with a suspended or revoked license. If that doesn’t scare sober people off the road, what will?
Cars can be impounded, but it doesn’t happen often. Suppose a bad driver had his car (or whosever car he was driving) taken away immediately, and required to pay a stiff fine - $1,000 sounds nice – and clear up all outstanding tickets, just to get it back. Perhaps that would send a message. It is not that this situation has been totally ignored. Some judges and legislators have been pressing for stiffer penalties, and penalties that can be enforced. But like gun control, such efforts manage to be thwarted in Florida’s legislature.
It does not seem to matter that such drivers, like crazy people with guns, kill people. They just choose a different weapon.
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| Rendering: Marina Lofts/BIG |
The case of Brennan of The Tree is getting a lot of publicity, mostly in favor of Brennan and The Tree. The tree is the famous rain tree that sits on the south side of the New River in downtown Fort Lauderdale. It sits where a developer wants to put up another high-rise building in a section that already has too many. The tree is in his way. Brennan is Chris Brennan, the chap who lost his job with the Water Taxi because he refused to stop advocating for the tree. This happened after the developer, who happens to be Water Taxi’s landlord, complained about him. He is now a bartender, according to Sun-Sentinel columnist Mike Mayo. Judging by his quotes in the paper, and a video he posted online, Brennan should make a good one. He’s exceptionally articulate and bartending is one profession where advocating for almost anything will build a loyal following.
The rain tree may be the largest of its kind in the country. It received a protected designation from Fort Lauderdale some years back. The developer bought the property with the tree on it. Now he wants it gone to make room for two big buildings, including Marina Lofts (pictured here). He wants to move it. Many tree experts say the tree would not survive.
Does this situation remind you of people who move in on top of an airport and then complain about the noise of the airplanes or expansion of runways? Or souls who buy houses near railroads – railroads that were there 100 years before them – and then clamor for ordinances to prevent the trains from shattering their sleep with horns, horns designed to warn motorists at crossings that never should have been allowed in the first place?
This fight comes at a strange time. Those in favor of the project say it will provide needed jobs. There were plenty of jobs 10 years ago, and the buildings they went into now are filled with foreclosures. Do we really need another high rise on the New River, with thousands of units already approved and underway not far away in downtown Fort Lauderdale? And with traffic, at least in season, getting so bad that you actually have a hard time at rush hour getting out of your office parking lot?
We confess to a bias on the subject of trees. Our neighborhood, a famous hammock, is defined by its old oaks. You do not get such neighborhoods by cutting down the oaks. Enough go away naturally, and one, which sat on our property line behind the house, was uprooted in Hurricane Wilma. It was an unnatural natural event. There was an ancient mango tree in the yard behind us. The storm blew a huge section from the top of the mango down on our smaller oak. The oak was not ancient, but it wasn’t a kid, either. It was a foot thick when we moved in 42 years ago. Anyway, the oak was uprooted. Trees were uprooted all over the area that year, and many of them were propped back up, took root and are still there and growing.
In the frantic effort to clean up (we also had a major oak snap and land on our roof) we chose not to raise the tree on the property line. Had we done so, a builder would not have been able to put up a big (and currently unoccupied) house that replaced a cottage on the property behind us. The oak tree could not have been legally removed, especially with much of it on our property, and the swimming pool that goes with the big house would not have been built under the branches of an oak. The builder, by the way, cut down the old mango, which we guess was legal. We were just learning to like mangos.
So add one more voice in support of Brennan of The Tree. We may even run up to the joint where he is working to lend moral support.
At this point the lady of the house returns. She confirms that they are indeed working there, and the cops, who had not been the masters of charm up to that point, immediately become the nicest fellows in the world, apologizing to the workmen for the misunderstanding. They even put their guns away.
Now some people in these circumstances would call a lawyer, sue for false arrest or some other silly claim and maybe get some money, at our taxpayers' expense. But these workmen are not that type. But they do wonder what made the cops so hyper.
What made the cops so hyper is that sometimes in similar circumstances, the burglars are real, and armed, and sometimes a cop, wearing a bulletproof vest, takes a slug in the face. They are still looking for people who killed police around here in recent years.
And in Washington there are people who are bought by the National Rifle Association, which pays big money to people who represent it, and even bigger money to the politicians who obligingly oppose anything that has to do with interfering with commerce, meaning selling guns. They don’t want to keep assault rifles out of the hands of law-abiding people, and they say criminals will always get them, so what’s the point of laws that will be only be broken, and might result in the loss of a gun sale? You heard the hired gun for the NRA make that argument before Congress.
The cops, of course, heard this more clearly than anyone, and they know that any time they confront a suspect, they might be faced with a gun. And that gun might have more firepower than the combined lead of several cops. And the above mentioned workmen, after coming down from the high associated with having guns pointed at them, can appreciate the challenge facing police in such cases.
They will get over the scary event, but it doesn’t make their jobs more fun.
There are a lot of books written that nobody reads. There are a few that everybody reads. It is not always the best book that gets the readers. As often, it is the book that gets the best promotion – the one whose author appears on television shows, or better still, has his or her own TV show and can promote the book with shameless frequency. Thus Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly are pretty much doomed to best-sellers when they write books on John F. Kennedy.
However, if you don’t have your own TV show, it never hurts to have your own magazine. Thus, for the last year we have been promoting a book, off and on, on the history of regional magazines, such as this one. We had hoped that with sufficient mention, someday we would actually publish it.
That day is now. The book is a history of a remarkable time when a group of which we were lucky to be a part, invented what is basically a new media – the city/regional magazine. It happened in Philadelphia in the 1960s, or even the 1950s, if you want to pick a date when the present publisher joined his father in what was then a little-known business magazine. Many people think New York Magazine was the first of its kind, but it did not come along until the late 1960s.
There have been other regional magazines – Palm Beach Life, dates to 1906 and there are a few other magazines devoted to lifestyle or travel which go back years. But they were not city magazines as we know the form today. They did not, as Philadelphia did in the 1960s, put the city’s top newspaper investigative reporter in jail for extortion. They did not so embarrass his publisher to the extent that one of the most powerful men in American newspapering, Walter Annenberg, decided to sell to Knight Ridder (who then published The Miami Herald) and leave town.
And most significantly, they did not begin the challenge to the Warren Commission that has resulted – 50 years later – in the widespread acceptance that a conspiracy of U.S. government figures was behind the murder of a president. That story has long been close to home, for it followed Gaeton Fonzi to Florida when he was a partner in this magazine in the 1970s. He later worked five years as a federal investigator when the JFK probe was reopened. His conclusion was that if our CIA did not orchestrate President Kennedy’s murder, it certainly did its best to cover it up.
His book, The Last Investigation, originally appeared as two long pieces in our magazines. It influenced so many subsequent researchers that upon his death last August, The New York Timescited it as one of the most important among hundreds of books written about the assassination.
Fonzi and others wrote such powerful stories, over a 10-year period, gained national recognition and made Philadelphiaa powerful influence in its city. They also inspired people in other cities to imitate the success of Philadelphia. Today there are hundreds of local magazines, including our company’s six in Florida, which all do the kinds of things that began in Philadelphia. That’s all part of the book.
While it is mostly about that pioneering era in the north, it will hold some interest in places such as here, Boston, Texas, California, even Denver, where people formerly associated with Philadelphia magazine got their inspiration.
Not all traditions need be traditional. One that fits that rule is the traditional rebuttal speech after a presidential State of the Union address. Traditionally, it is delivered by a distinguished member of the party opposite from that of the president. It therefore ensures that the speaker will be a loser, so to speak.
The purpose, of course, is the American sense of fairness. If you give a president an hour to hurl propaganda, it only seems right that a propagandist from the other side gets a few minutes to say the guy you just heard is full of propaganda. The other purpose is to hold the audience looking in on the State of the Union for another 20 minutes or so, in which the networks might sell some more advertising. Now as traditions go, this one is not very old. It doesn't compare, for instance, with the recent decision of the U.S. Army to go back to the traditional two-tone blue uniforms the Yankees wore in the Civil War.
The problem, as most people sense when they switch the channel immediately after the president gives his or her friends a good photo op, is that the rebutallist will have had virtually no time to prepare remarks because he or she has no idea what the president was going to say. This is the reason that the president, if a good sport, will get down on his knees and crawl out of the room, hugging and kissing every dude or dudess who wants to get on camera with him. This gives the rebuttalist a few more seconds to make sure he doesn’t rebut something the president did not say. Clearly, that is a challenge, and the rebuttal must be prepared in advance, pretty much guessing that a tiger won’t change its stripes. Or a zebra for that matter.
So we had, just last week, our own Sen. Marco Rubio trying to put down President Obama on various points, even if he did not know what points the president made, and even – as some have noted – if he agrees with some of the points that he is by tradition compelled to disagree with. A candid speaker might begin:
“Good evening, my fellow Americans. I don’t know what the other fellow just said but believe me, he’s out to lunch…”
Now Marco Rubio did not have a good night, what with the water thing and all, which only made him look sillier than he makes himself look when he rewrites his family history and tries to poor mouth his current status when everybody knows that anybody who wins an important office in Florida quickly becomes upper-middle class without doing anything actionable. It just goes with the territory.
That said, the evening did not make Rubio seem presidential, and it might even do him a favor by stopping the talk about him running for the big job in four years. The bigger favor, however, would be taking the whole notion of the rebuttal speech and throwing it in the traditional wastebasket.
Prediction: Tonight, in his State of the Union address, the president will call for national unity, especially among the estimated 11 to 12 million illegal immigrants, a number which is probably only marginally higher than the number of illegal big snakes in the Everglades.
2nd Prediction: Congress will at last come to a consensus and find a path for people illegally in this country to become legal. This will probably not happen tonight, partly because Senator Marco Rubio, in his rebuttal speech, will be forced to disagree with the president, even if he agrees with everything he hears. And how do you do a rebuttal, right after a speech you don’t know anything about?
3rd Prediction: In the interest of sportsmanship, President Obama, or one of his PR guys, will have slipped Rubio a confidential copy of the president’s address – including suggested rebuttal points. One of those points will not be suggesting that Rubio and other Republicans stop using party credit cards, funded by campaign contributions, to live on, which is sending one of their boys to jail as we speak.
4th Prediction: Within a few months, there will be an agreement among the parties to find a path for 12 million or so illegal immigrants to become legal. Which will do absolutely nothing but encourage all their relatives, a number probably under 100 million, to get here as fast as they can to take advantage of this victory. As long as they can do this, people will come for a better life, same as all our ancestors did in ages past. The only difference is that our ancestors – or at least this writer’s – came here legally (partly because illegal immigration had not yet been invented) and the first thing they did was go up the hill at Fredericksburg, waving their Irish flags, and got slaughtered.
5th Prediction: When this crisis is resolved, there will be a reaction. Thoughtful people will get rid of the notion that any baby born in this country is an American citizen, even though a pregnant woman came here for exactly that purpose. This will lead to similar uprisings in Europe where the same thing is happening. Nations will be so upset that civil wars may break out.
6th Prediction: Some political nut will propose that we all go back a few hundred years and re-enact the colonial era, when advanced societies took over primitive ones and tried to teach the natives how to live, a failed concept that resulted in people emigrating to the societies they overthrew.
7th Prediction: This is the lucky seven. None of these predictions will come true, and we will just kick the can down the road for another thousand years.
Chuck Malkus’ book is out. The Ultimate Ponzi by the long-time Fort Lauderdale public relations man summarizes the Scott Rothstein story. I have not read it, or at least not much of it, but I did look at the pictures. Malkus was kind enough to send me an inscribed copy, but I did not know why until Jack Drury, also a long-time Fort Lauderdale public relations man, called with the intelligence that I am in it.
Sure enough, I am quoted from a column that appeared at the time of Rothstein’s arrest in 2009. It deals with Rothstein’s crashing a reception in Washington, D.C. It was after the swearing in of George LeMieux, for his brief term as Florida’s U.S. senator. Nobody had invited Rothstein. LeMieux and people around him were suspicious of Rothstein’s flashy style and flaunting of new wealth. But Rothstein came anyway. It was the kind of event he needed to be part of, to show people how important and politically connected he was.
There is only one thing wrong with Malkus’ account, but it is hardly his fault. He said I wrote the piece. My name was on it, but I never said I was at the party, and the description of what happened was actually given to me, word for word, by Mark McCormick, who is no relation to me except my son. Mark dabbles in Republican politics, or at least did at the time, and was friendly with LeMieux and those supporting him. He was an eyewitnesses to Rothstein’s appearance that day. He was aware, of course, as were many on the fringe of politics, that Rothstein was a deeply suspicious figure. Mark had an instinct that something was going to blow up.
He was hardly alone. Rothstein had made our list of “50 Most Powerful” people about six months earlier. In truth, we were wary of including him on that select list. Most of those on it have never been indicted. And I never had heard his name until shortly before our survey of power. But when I heard it, I heard it all over the place. Lawyers, financial people, anyone following politics, were all asking the same question: where was this guy, who nobody even knew a few years before, suddenly getting all this money? Most of Rothstein’s legal associates have claimed they had no idea that anything was wrong at his firm. Yet outside the firm, anyone with an IQ marginally higher than your average fire hydrant, sensed that something had to be wrong. People like George LeMieux were giving him wide berth.
There was speculation that that he was running drugs, big time, or into an extremely lucrative pornography empire. At that point the only people suspecting a Ponzi scheme were those who would emerge as victims. And that did not take long. What has taken longer has been the effort to “clawback” as much money as possible.
If there is any good that has come out of this situation, it has been an economic stimulus for the legal profession. With more than 100 victims and so many organizations – including many non-profits forced to return gifts made by Rothstein – there has been a blizzard of legal activity. There are something like 60 cases in federal court, and hearings at the bankruptcy court are jammed with lawyers, sometimes nobody but lawyers, all of them making five bills an hour minimum. And they are getting money back, mostly from banks Rothstein used to establish his credibility.
Attorney William Scherer got there early, almost from the day the deal broke. To date he has recovered up to $220 million for his clients, and still has three active lawsuits.
The most recent victim of private attorneys and federal prosecutors has been Rothstein’s wife (maybe?) Kim. She is not in Malkus’ book, except about 1,000 times, with photos on every other page with her absurdly fixed smile. She just got nailed for trying to hide some ill-gotten jewelry. It wasn’t much, only about $1 million worth. Pocket change, by Scott Rothstein’s standards. But it might be enough to pay a few legal fees.
The fatal crash of a Tri-Rail train into a car last week reminds us, as if we needed reminding, of the dangers of all the grade crossings on South Florida’s railroads. As we have noted before, this is a subject of particular importance as Florida East Coast Railway plans to initiate, on its own dime, passenger service between Miami and Orlando.
Through no fault of its own, the CSX line, which Tri-Rail uses, is much safer than the FEC. Most of the South Florida grade crossings were eliminated on the CSX when I-95 was built. Still it has had some terrible accidents on the relatively few which remain. That includes the inferno at Cypress Creek years back when a fuel truck was stuck in traffic, and the courageous driver died trying to get his vehicle out of the way of an Amtrak train.
The FEC has hundreds of crossings. In Fort Lauderdale alone there are at least 10 in a span of a few miles. With plans to run a fast passenger service on an hourly basis beginning two years from now, one can only grimly guess at the lurking dangers. These passenger trains will be in addition to the freight already using those tracks, and if Amtrak and Tri-Rail decide to move trains to the FEC, it will become a very busy rail line. The latter move makes total sense, for the trains would then serve the busy downtowns along the way. Both Tri-Rail and Amtrak are too far from business districts to realize their potential.
A move east to the FEC makes sense in every way but safety. To do the job properly those trains will have to go a lot faster through urban areas than the lumbering freights, which despite only moving at around 35 miles an hour, already have their share of accidents. One can only imagine the frustration of drivers being constantly stopped by crossing gates as all the new trains roll by. The temptation for cars to beat the train, which causes accidents now, will be much greater. And the outcry from those living near those crossings over the blaring horns of engines can only intensify.
One can hardly blame the railroads for this situation. The iron rails were there before the roads crossing them. But unlike most northern cities, which either elevated or lowered railroads more than a century ago, Florida just let crossing after crossing be constructed at grade level. In fact we can think of only a few bridges over the FEC all the way from Miami to Fort Pierce.
The FEC needs to be rebuilt, eliminating at least some crossings to permit trains to have sections of a few miles where they can get up to speed. That is expensive, especially in the downtowns where businesses would be most affected. It is safe to say the FEC knows this better than anybody, and probably knows it can’t go it alone.
Safe to say, but extremely unsafe to do nothing. There is a price of progress, but it should not be in human lives.
