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24574: Hermantin (news) A Dream Dashed



leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>


Posted on Sun, Mar. 27, 2005



A Dream Dashed
Caribbean Marketplace's impending demolition is a symptom of throwaway society
BY BETH DUNLOP
bdunlop@herald.com

Charles Harrison Pawley's Caribbean Marketplace is a once-in-a-lifetime building. It tugs at our emotions, conjuring images of another place far away. It is a building that speaks of both place and displacement, of hopes and dreams. Once it was the centerpiece of all our aspirations for Little Haiti, the cornerstone of renewal.

To see it today is to see hope lost. A once-beautiful building, it is now forsaken, its brilliant paint faded and peeling. Plants grow from the gutters. Cables and wires dangle over water-damaged walls.

When it was completed in 1990, Caribbean Marketplace bedazzled the eye, painted in the sun-saturated hues of Haiti, its metal roof gleaming in the bright daylight. More, it was a symbol of Miami's commitment to the thousands of newly arrived Haitian immigrants who had settled, largely, in the historic neighborhood once known as Lemon City. Soon after it was finished, Caribbean Marketplace won a national honor award from the American Institute of Architects, the highest award a building can garner.

In its prime, it was a heart-stopping sight, both sophisticated and ingenuous. Pawley purposely left the finishes a bit rough to give the market a handmade quality, as if it really had been crafted by Caribbean hands. He chose to exaggerate the building's turrets and gables, which give it a distinctive folkloric roofline. Operationally it was also drawn from a pre-technological age with roll-up garage-door openings, easy-to-assemble market stalls and ceiling fans to keep the air moving. The trim was all gingerbread, so typical of its -- and the community's -- architectural roots.

Now, inexplicably, it is to be torn down.

Of course, the Marketplace has endured years of indignities, municipal mismanagement among them; over the years (Little Haiti has never been high on the radar screen at the City of Miami), the building was allowed to languish. And now -- though one study, which Pawley undertook without pay, shows a $3 million cost to repair and restore it, the city's plan is to tear it down and replace it with a much more expensive ($11 million) complex that would include a black box theater, a city ''NET'' office and more.

There is much to say about this -- about the ways in which cities, not just Miami -- misspend money, misapprehend local needs and local culture and abuse and ignore local resources. It is also a classic statement on a throwaway society. And all that aside, it is still, even in dereliction, a magnificent work of architecture that should be preserved for its aesthetic, historic (not because it's old but because it was momentous) and cultural importance. But first, some history:

Pawley designed the building for a competition held in 1984. It was a ''blind'' competition, with jurors drawn both from the world of architecture and the local community. Intriguingly, Pawley -- an almost lifelong Miamian from a family with deep roots here, not to mention a distinguished career in architecture -- was born in Haiti and had sustained a connection to the country and its arts over the years. His design derived much more from knowledge than nostalgia, an important point to make here. From start to finish, this was a labor of love.

Even before setting pencil to paper, Pawley traveled extensively in Haiti, studying vernacular architectural styles and building techniques and luxuriating in the vivid Caribbean color palette. The result was a proposal for a building that was at once bold and delicate, intricate and yet simple. The jury, selecting the competition winner, called it ''a grand vision'' for Little Haiti, which it was.

The original plan (based architecturally and conceptually on the famed Iron Market in Port-au-Prince) was for this market to cover two blocks with an array of shop stalls and activities at a cost of $1.5 million, but that was scaled back to the building's current configuration as a restoration of an old antiques shop. The project was done for $550,000, with government funds and money from the Local Initiative Service Corporation. It was built by the nonprofit Haitian Task Force, but eventually was taken over by the city. Opened with both fanfare and expectations, it never succeeded financially and ultimately it was closed.

In recent years, more attention has been paid to Little Haiti. In 2001, Miami voters approved a $225 million bond issue from which the city allocated $25 million for a new park for Little Haiti; the park plan, an ambitious one, involved assembling a total of 60 acres worth of land, including 112 business and 262 residences. The new ''cultural center'' building, which would be done by architect Bernard Zyscovich (it is not designed yet) would be funded with a portion of this bond money. Though Zyscovich -- whose body of work includes nearby Toussaint Louverture Elementary school -- was originally charged with incorporating the Caribbean Market into his new plan, he decided against doing so.

It is the wrong decision. It is wrong architecturally, urbanistically, historically, socially. The building has been determined to be structurally sound though it doesn't meet the stricter post-Andrew building codes. It's not a sleek-slick building, nor was it ever intended to be. It was aimed at being a market (and as such, an informal community center) and a tourist attraction (and as such, an economic magnet).

Oddly, back when it opened, the sociology and the economics of Miami were probably not right for such a venture. Little Haiti is showing small signs of its own renewal these days -- a new restaurant here and there, fresh paint -- but the steps forward are still incremental ones.

And with the resurgence of the city's Upper East Side and the region's growing urbanity, it seems much more likely that it could succeed: a market for tropical fruits and vegetables (not to mention prepared foods), a source of Caribbean arts and crafts and more. That would seem to be much more of a draw, and frankly much more of a life-giving force for Little Haiti, than the proposed theater would be. There are other facilities within Little Haiti (starting with Notre Dame d'Haiti Catholic Church, which is across the street, basically) and theaters (including the Joseph Caleb Center) in nearby neighborhoods. Mature cities in Europe and even in America rely on their churches (and other institutions) as shared space for the performing arts, which only makes sense.

A theater and ''state-of-the-art'' dance facility may indeed be top priorities in Little Haiti (I am not so presumptuous as to tell a community what it needs), but I would wonder about putting them at the top of the list. Performing arts complexes are, generally speaking, blank-walled and inward-turning buildings that do not necessarily contribute to the energy of the city on a daily basis, and aren't really part of a vibrant street life except possibly before and after performances. And even so, there must be alternative sites that could be found; Little Haiti is a needy neighborhood full of warehouses and empty lots. Why target the community's architectural centerpiece? The logic of it all eludes me.

But put logic aside, because ultimately, what's at stake has to do with emotion. The Caribbean Marketplace is a building with the capacity to make the heart sing and the spirit soar. The intangible is irreplaceable, the passion and zeal and sheer joyousness of this building. If it goes, we won't ever get that back. That's all we really ought to be thinking about here.