We live now by polls. We are reading polls about elections that are a year way, and about polls on candidates who are not even candidates, and may never be. It might be a wise idea to have everybody who is interested get together every so often and stand in a line to circle the name of the person they would like to have as president of the United States or school board member, or head of the National Polling League. Just do it one time, and we would not need weekly polls.
We once thought the late humorist Art Buchwald lacerated polls forever when, during the Vietnam War, he commented on a poll among Americans on the subject of bombing Hanoi. Some people favored bombing Hanoi, some were against it, and some had no opinion. It was silly, Buchwald wrote, to ask Americans about bombing somebody else. Why not poll the people actually being bombed in Hanoi? So he did. The results were that 40 percent of the people in Hanoi enjoyed being bombed, 35 percent disliked being bombed and 25 percent had no opinion. Those numbers may be a bit off because Buchwald is gone and can’t be polled on the subject.
So it is with Christmas. On the eve of that international holiday (or holy day), some people object to an international holiday for just one religion, or rather one religion that has hundreds of sects, thanks to malcontents such as Martin Luther and Henry VIII. Others object to the people who object to Christmas, especially when they oppose religious symbols in public places, or insist on using the term “holiday tree.”
We haven’t seen this week’s poll on the subject, so we will make up our own numbers. One hundred percent of people are in favor of Christmas presents, if they are on the receiving end. Of those, 65 percent don’t mind them being called Christmas presents, 20 percent prefer holiday presents and 15 percent have no opinion.
With that, have a merry and sober Christmas holiday.
The recent revelation that the missing Coral Springs man, Robert Levinson, was on a CIA mission when he disappeared in Iran, comes as a surprise to everyone except those who knew him. His reputation at the FBI was that of an excellent agent with unusually valuable contacts. But he was also something of an adventurer. Insiders did not believe he was a private eye chasing cigarette change on an island off Iran.
Some people, however, may be surprised that Levinson was not working directly for the CIA, but rather a rogue group of analysts within the agency that had no authority to send him off doing whatever he was doing. Others would not be surprised at all. They would not even be surprised if the “rogue” story itself is bogus, to conceal involvement of those higher up in the agency. Several people involved were fired, so the CIA can say it canned those whack jobs, let the case rest.
If one wonders about the cynicism here, note that this comes close to the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination, which over the years has been increasingly linked to the CIA. Almost from the time the Warren Commission Report appeared, cynics suspected a government conspiracy, followed by a second conspiracy to cover it up. Among them was Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker. He, and others in Washington, had been shocked to learn that the CIA, in theory an intelligence gathering agency, had made itself an action arm of the government, facilitating the overthrow of governments, and causing people to be murdered. Without authority.
His position on a Senate intelligence committee gave him grounds for suspicion that Lee Harvey Oswald was a U.S. intelligence figure. In 1976 he hired Gaeton Fonzi, at the time a partner in Gold Coast magazine, to try to prove it. As we reported recently, Fonzi, working in Florida with the anti-Castro Cuban community, found a link between Oswald and a high-ranking CIA officer. The same CIA man, Fonzi learned, was also connected to assassinations of foreign political leaders, and the coup in Chile that resulted in thousands of deaths of political dissidents. He also worked with Fonzi’s main source in attempts to kill Castro, attempts which the CIA said at the time it knew nothing about.
Other researchers jumped on Fonzi’s discovery, and over the years, bolstered by gradually declassified documents, and testimony of witnesses long silent in fear, what once seemed unthinkable has become believable. If the CIA did not orchestrate a presidential murder, it did everything it could to cover it up, including lying repeatedly to Congress and its authorized investigators such as Fonzi. Would the CIA lie? Did it lie for years about Robert Levinson, until his distraught family forced the truth into the open?
The word “rogue” was used 40 years ago to describe the group, all CIA types whose names have been widely published (now that they are all dead), who were suspected in the JFK murder. John McCone, the man at the head of the CIA at the time, told Robert Kennedy himself that the CIA was not involved. The truth is he was appointed by the Kennedys to replace Allen Dulles, who the Kennedys distrusted, and McCone surely didn’t know. He would be the last to know. He was only the boss, and a boss the rogues could not trust. But not so Allen Dulles. He helped launch the CIA and ran it for eight years. He had to know what it was doing. He wound effectively running the Warren Commission and pinning the blame on an alleged lone nut, ignoring any evidence to the contrary. He thus protected the “rogue” element in his own agency. That’s just being loyal, covering for people who had no authority to murder a president.
At least in the Levinson case, people got fired. In the Kennedy case, they got promoted.
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| Woody Woodbury's Korean war aircraft |
It was the fall of 1970, and we were staying at the Galt Ocean Mile Hotel and looking for ways to enliven the magazine we had just bought. It was called Pictorial Life at the time. Some people still call it Pictorial. There was a very funny guy named Blackie Nelson working the Rum House at the hotel. After listening to him for about 60 straight nights, we got the bright idea that it might be fun to do a story on local entertainers, by enlivening what was a stodgy magazine at the time. It turned out there was a group called The Punchinellos working the beach, and somebody mentioned that we should check out Woody Woodbury, who was working next door to the Galt at the Beach Club. Woody was very funny. The story worked.
Forward 43 years. By now our magazine was long established as Gold Coast and Woody Woodbury was featured last month at the Fort Lauderdale Historical Society's Thanksgiving Dinner. He donated a piano to the society and sat down and played and joked to mark the occasion. He was as funny as ever. Woody was born in 1924. Do the math. It was fitting that a historic entertainer should work the room at the historic New River Inn - built in 1905. By then, Henry Flagler's FEC Railway had reached Fort Lauderdale.
Woody has been working regularly all those years and has made our pages a number of times, most memorably in 1999 when we did a piece called “Memories of War.” Among the adventures described was Woody’s time as a Marine Corps pilot in Korea. He actually joined up during the late stages of World War II but did not get overseas. But five years later came Korea. Woody was among hundreds of World War II vets who joined the reserve and were called to active duty, and this time he saw more action than he ever needed – about 106 missions (he’s not exactly sure) flying land-based Grumman F9F Panther jets on mostly low-level ground attack missions. Think of William Holden in "The Bridges at Toko-Ri."
The character Holden played resembled the history of one of Woodbury’s flying mates in Korea, baseball legend Ted Williams. Like Harry Brubaker (Holden’s character) Williams had an important career interrupted, and resented it, but did his duty nonetheless.
“I met Ted at El Toro during World War II, but I didn’t run with him as I did in Korea,” Woodbury said today. “We wound up going duck hunting in Korea. I was the gun bearer and drove the jeep."
Woodbury also drove a F9F Panther on the mission when Williams’ plane was hit and he brought it home, on fire, for a harrowing wheels up landing. Woodbury had parked his plane off the runway and was nearby when Williams finally skidded to a halt and was out of the smoking ship faster than he swung a bat.
The Williams conversation at dinner last month prompted Woodbury to drop off a copy of Ted Williams At War written a few years ago by Bill Nowlin. If it were Woodbury’s favorite reading at the time, no wonder. He’s mentioned about 6,000 times (actually only on 16 pages) and not without reason. His talent made him well known on a base that included, besides Ted Williams, John Glenn, New York Yankees player Jerry Coleman, LLoyd Merriman of Cincinnati Reds and other future Marine Corps notables.
“I played the piano all the time,” he recalls, “and they would ask me to do shows at the O Club. At night there’s nothing to do. We did parodies on Marine songs, like ‘I wanted wings until I got wings, and I don’t want wings anymore.’"
His reputation spread to the Air Force when it and the Marines shared a base. Air Force brass asked him do shows.
“I never got paid for those shows, but one day an Air Force colonel asked me if he could do anything for me. I said, 'you sure can. Let me fly an F-86 Sabre Jet.' So they checked me out in a Sabre Jet.”
It was an interesting, if somewhat perilous way to advance a great career.
On Sept. 21, 1979 a gunman in Miami fired four shots from a .45 caliber pistol at Antonio Veciana. He almost missed. Veciana’s only wound was from a richocheted fragment that struck him in the head without serious injury. The attack came at a time when Veciana, a former CIA operative and highly respected man in the Cuban anti-Castro community, was cooperating with a House committee that had reopened the investigation of the death of President Kennedy. In the process Veciania had identified his long-time CIA contact as a man he had seen in Dallas with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the murder of President Kennedy. It was dramatic stuff in Washington. Veciana’s revelation could destroy the Warren Commission’s depiction of Oswald as a lone nut.
Until Veciana told the Oswald connection story to Gaeton Fonzi, an investigator for the House committee who was working directly for Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker, he had never mentioned it except to his family. He had not even brought it up in many subsequent meetings with his CIA contact, hoping the contact would forget that Veciana ever saw him with Oswald. Veciana had two good reasons for silence. One was his personal safety. Anybody who would kill a president would not hesitate to do the same to anybody blowing the lid on government involvement in a presidential murder. But as important, in 1963 Veciana had already spent three years with deep involvement, beginning in Cuba, with very dangerous work - plots to kill Castro. It would not help his cause to be ensnared in the assassination investigation.
When Veciana met Fonzi in early 1976, he had experienced a falling out with his CIA contact. Not initially knowing that Fonzi was investigating the assassination, he casually mentioned the Oswald sighting. He thought it might be helpful to his situation. Fonzi was stunned. It took some time for Fonzi to establish Veciana’s credibility – which he found impeccable – and to learn the real name of the CIA man who Veciana had known only as “Maurice Bishop.” The breakthrough came when Sen. Schweiker himself recognized a police sketch (above) made from Veciana’s recollection. He said it resembled David Atlee Phillips, a CIA man who had testified before his committee.
It is always hard to tell what anybody in the CIA does, but after checking Phillips’ CIA career against Veciana’s detailed narrative of their work together, Fonzi concluded that Maurice Bishop had to be David Atlee Phillips. By then Phillips was very big at the agency – the retired chief of western hemisphere operations.
Fonzi arranged for a surprise encounter between Veciana and Phillips at a Washington luncheon for retired CIA officers. Phillips, obviously shaken, not only denied knowing Veciana, but said he never ever heard his name. Fonzi knew that was inconceivable. Fonzi had learned that Phillips had worked with anti-Castro Cubans in Florida for 15 years. He would have to know the founder and leader of Alpha 66, one of the most active anti-Castro organizations. In fact, the CIA had helped start that organization.
Privately, Veciana told Fonzi the man he met that day was indeed Phillips. But he declined to go public with that statement, for basically the same reasons he had kept his secret for years. He still hoped to resume work with the CIA in efforts to overthrow Castro. The second reason, as he was soon to learn, was that he was running an enormous personal risk.
Gaeton Fonzi’s book, The Last Investigation, which first appeared in Gold Coast magazine as two long articles in 1980, told the story of Veciana (and likely Oswald’s) CIA handler. The CIA, of course, denied that it ever had an agent using the name Maurice Bishop. Other researchers have since found sources that confirmed that David Atlee Phillips used the name Maurice Bishop, and was likely part of a conspiracy to kill a president, and then pin the blame on a lone assassin. Yet Veciana over the last 35 years refused to publicly confirm the identification.
Until now. On Nov. 22, the 50th anniversary of the assassination, Veciana sent a message to Marie Fonzi, Gaeton Fonzi’s widow. It was short and as loud as the crack of a high-powered rifle.
History redeemed.
We were in the fifth grade, about 11 years old, and we wanted to start a baseball team. We called ourselves the Shamrocks because most of the guys were from Irish stock. Cooney, Ryan, Lunney, Duffy, McGill, Mahoney, Breslin, etc. One of our pitchers had a distinctly German name. We called him “Nazi.” The team existed for about five years, with some turnover in personnel, as some players moved away or gave up sports for girls. Eventually we had one black player. Freddy also happened to be our best.
To finance this enterprise, we went around our nearest shopping district and asked for contributions. We called on a few dozen merchants. Hardly anybody said no. Dr. Wasserman, a Jewish dentist who had many patients among our families, was helpful. Our biggest sponsor, oddly enough, was Buzz Coleman, a bar, so we put his name on our gray uniforms with green caps and trim. We had enough money left over to buy bats and catcher’s stuff. This team was organized, coached (if you call it that) and managed by kids. There were no adults involved.
The team captain, also the manager, was Miles Mahoney. He was our toughest guy, which is why he was captain. Catcher, of course. Most of his front teeth were gone, and his knees were a mess before he started high school. He once caught a game without a face mask. Another time he got upset at our pitcher for not obeying his signals. He walked out to the mound and punched him. Our league was not without petty violence, but it always boy vs. boy.
“Our parents never even came to the games,” recalled Tommy Boyo (his email name). “We didn’t want them there.”
It wasn’t as if we were unsupervised. The recreation center had a highly likable director and a few high school or college fellows helping out as umpires. But they pretty much let us run our own show.
We recall this ancient history to show how far the world has deteriorated since those days when a Lionel train was every lad’s Christmas dream. Today parents not only feel a moral obligation to attend games, but even grandparents are expected to bring folding chairs to every event, beginning about the time the kids learn to walk. The kids think you don’t like them otherwise.
And so it comes to pass, or kick, or skate, that the Sun-Sentinel over the weekend had a major feature on the violence caused by adults at youth games. It gave some pretty bad examples of grown-ups going crazy – attacking officials, other parents, sometimes even the kids. An organizer of youth soccer leagues said the article was restrained.
“It happens all the time,” he said. “It’s much worse than they described.”
Now when we aren’t obsessed with solving presidential murders, the absurd over-emphasis on youth sports had been something of a career-long crusade. Our first full-time job was with a suburban Philadelphia paper. Having come out of the city, where Little League did not exist, we could not believe that suburban teams were not run as the Shamrocks, without parental involvement. To our amazement, the paper devoted almost as much space to Little League as it did to high school, and even college teams in the area.
We started at 6 a.m. (afternoon paper) and the first job was to collect all the reports from Little League press agents, which had been dropped off the night before. Our paper served much of a large county, with more than 40 municipalities, and some towns had two or three Little Leagues. As in any PR endeavor, the competence of the reports varied widely. Some were quite well done, with full names and correct spellings, and maybe even the scores correct. Others were a joke, barely recognizable as the English language. Naturally the best reports tended to get the most coverage, which led to letters to the editor claiming our paper was biased toward certain leagues and teams.
It got so bad that we soon began satirizing the whole mad system, suggesting that pregnant women with athletic spouses should have their potential offspring drafted by Little Leagues with territorial rights. But even then we don’t remember many, if any, incidents of parents clobbering each other with bats or threatening to emasculate umpires. But that probably happens today.
Fortunately, we soon were promoted up from the toy department, and a few years later went on to magazine work, where we specialize only in violence against presidents, and ponder constitutional law. We therefore propose an amendment prohibiting anyone older than 13 from showing up, or aiding or abetting in any way, youth sports. And that includes mothers, some of whom barely make the cut these days.
One of the disadvantages of living to a ripe, ripe old age is that when you die a lot of people don’t know it. Such is the case of Lucy Cooper, who died at almost age 96 in June. Lucy was a regular contributor to Gold Coast magazine for a number of years, but we just learned about her death a few weeks ago. Even if you don’t read obits, which we normally don’t, it is hard not to hear about the death of somebody who wrote for us and for both major South Florida newspapers.
But Lucy did not have a lot of family, at least not in Florida. Her husband had died years before, she had only one son, and therefore was deprived of the grandchildren and great grandchildren who sometimes bring a crowd to an old timer’s funeral. Lucy had suffered a stroke some years before and had been largely confined to her apartment. When you don’t get around, people don’t miss you.
Still, we should have known. The reason we didn’t was because she left the world in mid-June, at exactly the time we were enjoying an extended family gathering at the classy old resort of Cape May, N.J. We were staying at a spectacular home on the beach and enjoying it very much. We later learned that the Miami Herald, where Lucy was a restaurant critic for many years, gave her a nice sendoff. But in Cape May we were not checking the local papers online, so we did not get the word. By the time we returned to Florida a few weeks later, the few friends who knew Lucy well had stopped talking about her. It was months before somebody did.
It was when she was retiring from the Herald that Lucy began writing almost monthly for our magazines. She was more than just an enjoyer of food. She was an outstanding cook and she threw an annual brunch at her apartment for friends in which everything was home cooked. Although she took her work seriously, in 1982 she did a mugging pose for a Gold Coast cover (above). That issue turned out to be one of the more important in our company’s history. It featured the first installment of Gaeton Fonzi’s three-part series on the Ivy League drug runner, Ken Burnstine.
Although food was her specialty, Lucy also occasionally departed into other fields. She did a memorable piece on a trip she took, first to her native city of Altoona, Pa., and then on the New York. She compared lifestyles of Altoona, not known for much except the famous Horseshoe Curve on the old Pennsylvania Railroad, with New York, which is known for a lot of things. Considering the competition, Altoona got a good review.
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Maus & Hoffman family members
photographed at their old
Boca Raton store in 1998
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One of the most important of that large clan, his son Tom, died Saturday at 78 after a long illness. Maus & Hoffman executives don’t emphasize titles, but Tom, his older brother, Bill Jr., and younger brother, John, jointly ran the stores in Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. A sister, Jane Maus Hearne, managed the store in Naples for many years.
Tom Maus was just a boy when the family arrived in Fort Lauderdale, but he grew up in the family business, along the way attending schools that share his history. St. Anthony grade school and Central Catholic (now St. Thomas Aquinas High School) along with his wife, Judy. He and his two brothers went on to Notre Dame, which has a family of its own in South Florida, a large group of highly influential alumni.
A friendly and gracious man, he was active for years in the Colee Hammock Homeowners Association and served on the board of the old Southeast Bank. His six children followed in his footsteps. His son Tom Jr. works in the original Fort Lauderdale store. A son Joseph is an attorney and former mayor of Oakland Park. His daughter Catherine is a prosecutor for the state attorney and president of the Victoria Park Civic Association. Son George is a bond salesman. Two other daughters, Mary and Susan, are married and live outside the area. All went to the same local schools as their father and grandchildren are following the same path.
Almost to the hour of his death Saturday, his grandson Joseph (Joey) Maus, was helping St. Thomas Aquinas win its first state cross-country championship.
“He made Papa proud,” Tom Maus Jr. said today.
There will be a visitation Wednesday at Fred Hunter's Funeral Homes in downtown Fort Lauderdale from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., with a prayer service at 6:30 p.m. The funeral mass will be private, with a life celebration announced at a later date.
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| Dan Christensen, founder of Broward Bulldog |
Illustrating the importance of Broward Bulldog is a piece in today’s Miami Herald. It is the kind of story that the Herald, with its depleted staff, would not do on its own. This one, written by Dan Christensen himself, describes ties between Gov. Rick Scott and former (and convicted) sheriff Ken Jenne. It is a relationship Scott has tried to keep quiet. But let’s not ruin the plot – check out today’s Herald or Broward Bulldog. But it shows the respect a major news organization has for Broward Bulldog and its handful of writers.
Broward Bulldog has had a busy few weeks, with a number of pieces picked up by newspapers. One of the more interesting pieces was a story on how former U.S. Rep. Peter Deutsch, who lives in Israel, has organized Ben Gamla Charter Schools in South Florida. If the facts in this piece are accurate, and Christensen said today that no one has challenged them or any grounds except the predictable charge of anti-Semitism, the schools are basically private schools with a religious orientation, disguised as public schools receiving taxpayer support.
The Hollywood school, for instance, has 85 percent Jewish students and offers studies in the Hebrew language and culture. Nothing religious, except after hours or off campus. Some may call this gaming the system, but a more enlightened view could be that Deutsch has done private schools with religious orientation a great favor.
As Christensen said today, how can a system that permits Ben Gamla Charter Schools to take state money, not do the same for other religious schools, notably the many old Catholic schools that are struggling in inner-city locations and have a difficult time getting a voucher system approved in legislatures that insist on separation of church and state.
Of course, this might take some logistical fine-tuning. Gamla was a Jewish fortress on the Golan Heights, where brave people fought off the Romans. Nothing religious about that, just good history. So a school such as St. Anthony would have to change its name to Padua or Assisi, or maybe Rock of Cashel Charter in deference to all the Irish priests who have labored there. It would need language studies in Irish, Italian, Polish, French and Spanish. Make sure the kids know the history of such words as glom, Notre Dame, amigo, pizza, etc. Along with the cultures of those countries, which all include a deep history in the Roman religion. But that’s just culture. No religious stuff in the schools, not even a Hail Mary pass. Leave such trivia off campus, maybe in the gym, or in the church next door.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
The debate on gambling in Florida goes on. Weekend papers reported big money flowing to the legislature, both from existing gambling entities who don’t want competition, as well as those anxious to get in on the game.
Gambling is one habit we never acquired, unless you count five bucks on the pre-game line of Notre Dame football, and an occasional beer bet on the old college basketball team. But we have seen gambling close up, in the mid-80s in Atlantic City, and Florida might do well to study what happened there. When approved in 1976 gambling was touted as the savior of a once stylish resort. It hasn’t worked out that way, and that was evident even back in 1985 when we did some magazine work in Atlantic City. There had been some impressive redevelopment at the north end of the city, but much of the place was a dump. A few blocks off the glitzy casino crowded boardwalk, the shopping streets were shabby. The casinos, for the most part, did not want customers leaving their premises. They cared less about the town they were supposed to save.
The casinos were thriving. The city wasn’t. People got good paying jobs, which paid their way out of the old town. They moved to expanding communities across the bay or up and down the coast. The professional class largely abandoned the place, at least for residential purposes. There were unintended consequences, such as people quitting teaching jobs for better paying work in the casinos. And old Philadelphia neighborhood bars lost business as regulars traveled 60 miles on weekends to gamble. Atlantic City retail stores, which expected a boom, saw the opposite as people left the city.
Now, more than 30 years later, things haven’t changed much. Poverty is still high, unemployment is very high, despite all those casino jobs. But those jobs have declined in recent years. The city still has crime problems, including gangs, and political corruption over the years is about as bad as it gets – even by New Jersey standards. What money casinos did produce seemed to find its way to deals for political favorites.
It wasn’t exactly a coincidence that wise guy wars broke out in what was once described as Philadelphia’s “nicest family.” We saw firsthand the influence of organized crime. A business associate owned a laundry, which looked like a good business with all the new hotel rooms. The only problem was he did not keep the business, not after people showed up and told him he was going to sell, whether he wanted to or not. He sold.
Oddly enough, the Philly mob tried to spread to South Florida at the same time. In a classic takedown, a combination of local agencies and New Jersey State Police brought down one of the most violent mob units of that era, mostly through surveillance in the Fort Lauderdale area. In fact, Fort Lauderdale investigators went undercover in Atlantic City.
“We all carried two guns. We had to,” says Doug Haas, a retired Fort Lauderdale police captain who headed the group. “When you got a block away from the casinos, you could get killed. The place was terrible.”
Another unintended consequence was the appearance of competition, as neighboring states allowed casinos. They wanted people to keep their addictions close to home. All of that compromised the promise of gambling in Atlantic City. And the magazine we did some stuff for? Well, it could not have been done better. The owner gambled that what worked in nearby Philadelphia would do the same in Atlantic City. Indeed, the editor who built Philadelphia magazine was a consultant, and he had some of the best young talent in the business. One went on to Esquire; others have made their mark. The problem was that a magazine geared to the casino boom, with copies in all the rooms, had no place to send those readers.
The magazine went bust.
The recent announcement of the cooperation between the Florida East Coast Railway, Tri-Rail and CSX to maximize efficiency for both freight and passenger trains on South Florida’s two railroads invariably leads to speculation about who is going to make money on this unusual, and very welcome, deal. We don’t speak of passenger service. Usually nobody makes money transporting people on trains. Indeed, it seems extraordinary that the FEC is willing to fund its All Aboard Florida train from Miami to Orlando. For decades railroads with passenger service have been shifting the costs to government in the form of authorities.
FEC obviously sees something most transportation observers (also known as foamers) don’t, and it probably has to do with real estate. A company that got out of passenger service in the 1960s – just when the need was developing – is now under a different ownership and has done a 180 on passenger service. It not only is sponsoring its own fast train between prime Florida markets, but it is now willing to let Tri-Rail shift some trains to its rails, a move that will at last make that service truly useful. Amtrak is also considering bringing its long distance trains down the same tracks. This could become one very busy railroad. With that in mind, part of the cooperative concept is to switch the FEC’s slow-moving freights to the western CSX tracks, where they won’t stop traffic at so many grade crossings.
The FEC has large property holdings along its tracks, all the way from Jacksonville to Miami. It has already announced a major development on its extensive yards in downtown Miami. The return of passengers will undoubtedly enhance values elsewhere on its route.
Which brings up the question of real estate around its proposed stations in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. There is no question that development will be stimulated. Madison Square Garden is built above the underground Penn Station in Manhattan. Philadelphia’s Penn Center has 11 office towers in a four-square block area above an underground station. Fort Lauderdale already has seen a barrage of new residential construction south of Federal Highway, but not quite close enough to be an easy walk to the new station. But there is considerable empty or low-use land that will be near the station. Somebody is going to make make serious money.
There was a recent study released in Pennsylvania showing that suburban home values along the numerous commuter lines of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), are considerably higher in neighborhoods close to stations, especially those stations with large parking lots. A home convenient to that excellent commuter system is more than $30,000 higher than a comparable home farther away. Caveat: The study was in SEPTA’s self interest. It is trying to get more state support for a system that is basically serving Philadelphia and its suburbs.
This is not quite comparable to what South Florida can expect in the foreseeable future. Philadelphia’s system is remarkable, with commuters going both ways. City dwellers now commute to suburban corporate parks near outlying stations. However, it could be a similar situation when Tri-Rail builds new commuter stations along the FEC, especially when the service is extended north to Jupiter, and perhaps even into Martin County where there is open land along the tracks. A visionary could even predict a statewide system of pretty fast trains linking all the towns that were born more than a century ago when Henry Flagler brought the iron horse to Florida.
It’s enough to make foamers out of developers.
