An Escape to Miami, Beautifully and Resilient!

It wasn’t the best time to visit Vizcaya, the former estate of turn-of-the-century industrialist James Deering, on Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Less than a month had passed since Hurricane Irma made landfall in South Florida. The seawater that inundated the Mediterranean Revival-style home’s lush gardens had left them ragged and browned. A battered, black jet ski sat beached, blocking a path. The cafe and the gift shop, both in the mansion’s “basement,” had taken on about 5 feet of water and were out of commission. The rococo ground-floor dining room was dim and muggy, despite the best efforts of an industrial dehumidifier humming in the corner. Some of the mansion’s bay-facing windows had burst open at the storm’s peak, a security guard told me, briefly letting hurricane-force wind and rain pelt the ornate décor.“It all looks pretty bad,” the guard told me, “but it could have been much worse. We were actually very lucky.”

It’s a peculiar notion of luck, but visitors and Miamians alike need only look to Houston, to Puerto Rico or down to the Florida Keys to understand how right he was. “This storm put the fear of God in me,” said architect Richard Heisenbottle, a resident of 41 years, who evacuated his family when Irma was predicted to hit the region as a Category 5 storm with 185 mph winds. Mr. Heisenbottle has overseen restoration work of many of South Florida’s most significant historical buildings, including Vizcaya. ”Despite the fact that we’re much more prepared than ever before,” he added, “and that we build buildings better than anywhere else in Florida, I believe that if a cat 5 windstorm hits us, all bets are off.”


Looking at South Florida through the proverbial eye of a hurricane, I learned, increases one’s appreciation of the area’s unique beauty, fragility and resilience. The day after going to Vizcaya, I paid a visit to the HistoryMiami Museum, where an exhibit marking the 25th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew—the last Category 5 storm to hit the area—starkly recalled a time when South Florida wasn’t so lucky.

Along with artifacts and a welter of screens playing contemporaneous news coverage, there was a replica of a small living room, lit by a single lamp and with the soundtrack of a storm piped in; you can sit on the sofa and have a shelter-in-place experience. Do so at the “beginning” of the storm, and the wind and rain sounds seem tame enough—my mother and I joked that we’d just come from worse weather outside. But as we toured the exhibit, the sounds from the room intensified. We returned and sat, listening to the crescendo of howling winds, groaning rafters and clattering shutters. Having grown up in Florida and endured Andrew, I relived the dread—will the roof hold? What will it look like outside when the winds die down?

After Irma landed her glancing blow on the region, I found myself searching Twitter and Instagram for reports on the place I worried about more than any other—Stiltsville. Its pastel-hued houses are the remnants of an offshore colony on stilts that developed on the shoals of Biscayne Bay, starting, most say, with a bait shack run in the 1930s by one “Crawfish” Eddie Walker. By 1959, more than two dozen buildings were perched above the flats. As Carl Hiaasen described it in his novel “Skin Tight,” “rich owners used them for weekend parties, and their kids got drunk on them in the summer. The rest of the time they served as fancy split-level toilets for seagulls and cormorants.” In 1965, Hurricane Betsy took nearly half of Stiltsville with her. Then Andrew took half of what remained.

The HistoryMiami Museum offers periodic boat tours of Stiltsville. The tour I took, led by historian Dr. Paul George, left from the marina at Bayside Marketplace in downtown Miami. With about 50 people—the majority locals—I boarded one of the motor yachts typically used for sunset cocktail cruises for the half-hour trip out to Stiltsville. As leaping porpoises trailed the boat, Dr. George, in a ball cap and Ray Bans, related the history of the area from Ponce De Leon to Richard Nixon and Bebe Rebozo.


Every home in Stiltsville had a colorful story: “This house here is where Teddy Kennedy had his bachelor party…” Many were actually private clubs, like the Bikini Club, the Calvert Club and the Quarterdeck Club, all long gone, though the Miami Springs Power Boat Club maintains an outpost. Irma rattled but didn’t wreck Stiltsville. Because these houses are now encompassed by Biscayne National Park, however, they can never be replaced. Each storm poses a mortal threat.


Another Stiltsville that Irma toyed with—the Stiltsville Fish Bar—is chefs Jeff McInnis and Janine Booth’s newly opened restaurant in Miami Beach’s Sunset Harbor neighborhood, which had its initial opening delayed by the storm. It was hardly the only restaurant the storm touched. For chef Niven Patel—who grows many of the ingredients for the Indian food at two locations of his restaurant Ghee Indian Kitchen—Irma was “a blessing in disguise,” taking down 15 giant nonindigenous ornamental trees on his farm which will now be replaced with coconut palms.

Perhaps the only good thing to say about hurricanes is that they seem to take the invasive species first, as further evidenced by Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park, at the tip of Key Biscayne, one of the few places arguably made better by Hurricane Andrew. The forests of native mangrove and gumbo limbo trees through which the trails wend weren’t always there; much of the 442 acres that make up the park had been clear-cut for development in the 1950s and subsequently colonized by invasive Australian pines. When Hurricane Andrew leveled the landscape once again, the state took the opportunity to restore native flora. (Some of the fauna is still invasive, though—be on the lookout for giant iguanas.)

At the park’s south end stands the Cape Florida Lighthouse, and the point from which in 1821 some 300 escaped slaves bartered for passage to Andros Island in the Bahamas. The park also affords a distant land-based view of the houses of Stiltsville.

Driving back to the mainland, I stopped at the Miami Marine Stadium on Virginia Key. It’s a wonder of tropical brutalism, a poured concrete grandstand that juts out over a basin, where speedboats raced like chariots, and concerts were held, with a floating barge serving as a stage. (Jimmy Buffett’s 1986 concert video was filmed here, with fans in the stands, boats, inner tubes and the water itself.)


Though the stadium has been closed to the public since Hurricane Andrew battered it, street artists have infiltrated and turned the seats, the massive trusses, and even the 320-feet-wide cantilevered roof into a concrete canvas. The city recently announced a long overdue plan to rehabilitate the stadium, overseen by Mr. Heisenbottle. For now, the best ways to see the grandstands without trespassing are from a boat tour with HistoryMiami (the next one—“Icons of the Bay: Stiltsville, Cape Florida Lighthouse & the Miami Marine Stadium”—runs Nov. 26), or from temporary docks erected during the Miami International Boat Show in February.

Now that hurricane season has given way to tourist season, and Vizcaya is getting back to its old self, it’s easy to act like nothing has changed. The biggest change Irma wrought is pervasive but invisible; a sense that the next truly devastating storm after this one is not a question of “if” but “when.” But for the moment I did my best to take the advice of a temporary installation piece by the artist Amanda Keeley in the Vizcaya’s logia. Words crafted in yellow neon quote the Roman poet Horace: “Put serious things aside” and “Take the gifts of this hour.”

THE LOWDOWN // Rediscovering Miami’s Natural Side
Staying There Only a helicopter offers better views of Miami at night than Sugar, the 40th-floor rooftop bar of the East hotel in Brickell, just south of downtown. The hotel’s 352 rooms, all with balconies and floor-to-ceiling windows, are sleekly styled with similarly compelling views (from $499 a night, east-miami.com). If you find Miami unthinkable without the beach, consider the Miami Beach Edition, set on 3.5 oceanfront acres with 294 rooms, including 28 bungalows, and an entertainment complex that includes an ice-skating rink (from $296 a night, editionhotels.com/miami-beach).

Eating There South Florida’s tropical climate is ideal for growing much of the Indian produce used at both Ghee Indian Kitchens, like taro leaf, plucked from chef Niven Patel’s farm (gheemiami.com). Locally caught fish, displayed in two ice-filled claw foot tubs by the bar, takes pride of place at the Stiltsville Fish Bar (1787 Purdy Avenue, Miami Beach,stiltsvillefishbar.com).

(https://www.wsj.com/articles/an-escape-to-miami-beautifully-resilient-after-hurricane-irma-1510671517)