6 SHOWOFF PLACES IN THE CITY OF EXCESS
I once thought Las Vegas’ moto was the Dollar sign. I was wrong. When it comes to obscene opulence, nothing compares to Miami. In this Floridian town, spending cash IS a spectator sport. 25 years ago, a one-hit-wonder named Meja sang “It’s all ’bout the money.” In Miami, the description still holds true. Sustainability? Go to hell!
Now, let’s party!
In your face Gretta Thunberg!
If you like New York’s sophistication, Boston’s historical heritage, Los Angeles’ cultural scene, Chicago’s architecture, San Francisco’s urban life, and Washington’s distinct four-seasons weather, you’ll probably wish you were somewhere else. Let’s face it, Miami is as culturally heavy as a paperweight, sophisticated as a Tik-Tok clip, and has the urban life and vibe of a resort in Cancun. At least it got the weather sorted out (as long as you’re not planning to stay there in the midst of summer, which – you guessed it right – we did).
I came, I saw, I spent way too much dough, and I’m still no closer to understanding what makes this city such an attraction. But, if you’re not me (and let’s face it, more than seven billion people are not), the following recommendations will give you a taste of that sugar-saturated piece of shiny-pink bon-bon called Miami.
#1 Suit-wearing Bling! – Brickell
I’m driving down Brickell Avenue in a rented SUV towards Miami’s compact downtown district. I thought I’d made a good deal with the folks at Avis when I took the keys to a Ford Explorer. Now, however, I feel like a fish in a brothel, or was it a nun out of sea?
The kids at the back start yelling – “Lamborghini!”, “Ferrari!”, “Rolls Royce!”, “Ferrari!”, “Bentley!”, “Lamborghini!”, “McLaren!” None of them yell “Porsche”. They are as ubiquitous and anonymous as our lowly Ford. I park at the entrance to the hotel behind a Carbon-Black Bugatti Chiron. Next to it parked a Yellow Ferrari 488 Pista and an almost invisible Cayman GT4. The kids run to Instagram the Bugatti. I look for a paper bag to cover my face. I now know how driving a 1992 Mitsubishi Lancer to an Investment Bankers’ reunion meeting feels like.
Brickell is the financial center of Southern Florida, and not just of that. It is also where Latin American businesspeople come to do business with the US and with each other. This is where you can see suits rush from one office building to the next at 35 degrees centigrade and 85% humidity. Rest assured, in Miami, that’s pretty much the only place you would see suits of any kind.
Brickell is unique because it is about making money, not spending it. You know what? Let me correct that last sentence. Brickell is not JUST about spending money, but it can lighten a load off your pocket if you just let it. The district has numerous fine dining establishments complete with valet parking, extravagant décor, models so beautiful you’ll never have the nerve to look them in the eye, and menus so complex to understand you’ll feel as if you came from a remote herding village in Kirgizstan. Don’t believe the description? Go for dinner to Komodo fusion lounge bar and restaurant and find out for yourself. You can do even better than that.
Go one block south to visit the fine steakhouse of the young Turk (pun not intended) Nusr-Et. There you’ll be served a fine steak of your choice, even if your choice is a $2,000 gold-plated signature Tomahawk. Yes, two grand for a steak. We opted for the much less outrageously expensive pieces of beef (all genuinely excellent) and still came out with a bill that was hard to swallow. Nasr-Et Miami is so ostentatiously expensive, there’s a whole website dedicated to Nasr-Et’s “believe-it-or-not” dining bills.
But Brickell’s downtown area is not just about exotic cars and out-of-this-world restaurants. You can Bling on a Sunday morning too, as I found out myself sitting outside the Rosetta Bakery coffee shop. As I was gulping the last of my Cappuccino, a group of well-fit gents riding carbon-fiber street bikes stopped near me for some refreshments. I didn’t recognize their bike brands, but I did recognize their bike helmets (has to do with my profession. Check www.cardosystems.com). They were all POC and Kask – top bike helmet brands costing over $250 apiece. Something to think about next time you go to Decathlon.
#2 Bling! cruise – Millionaire Row
Miami sits on top of a natural lagune with the long strip of Miami Beach (more on that later) flanking the ocean-side and downtown Miami on the opposite land side. The gap between the two is dotted by numerous small islands connected by a string of bridges and overhangs. If you are serious, very serious, about spending money, you should call a real estate agent and have one of them as your home address. After all, Jacky Chan, Shakira, David & Vic Beckham, Al Capone, and a host of other rich celebrities did. Beverly Hills might have a tour bus doing the Hollywood Stars Home round. In Miami, they do the same with a speedboat.
Up yours, Southern California!!
All cruises set out from Bayside Marketplace. You can opt for a fast and thrilling ride with Thriller Miami Jetboats or opt for a more relaxed wafting down Millionaire’s Row with Island Queen Cruises. The cost for both is relatively acceptable. Just be sure to book places in advance. You’re not the only tourist.
3# Artistic Bling! – Design District
It’s the same old story from so many other cities. A farming community on the edge of a growing town is being repurposed gradually by small industry and artisan workshops. The city continues to grow, and a few decades later, the once-rural community is now an undesirable city neighborhood. The industry and workshops have moved elsewhere, and the abandoned buildings fall into decay.
A few more decades pass before cash-poor bohemian artists rediscover the inner-city slum with its wide, empty lofts, low rent, and proximity to the city center. More artists come and open galleries, zany shops, and chic Cafes. It doesn’t take long before rich wannabees, looking for that “authentic” rustic vibe, start to flock to the area like moths to flames. Expensive fashion brands follow quickly, rent skyrockets, and the poor artists move elsewhere. All you are left with is an unbelievably expensive, well-manicured, squeaky-clean shopping district pretending to be an “authentic” bohemian, cool hangout. This, in a nutshell, is Miami’s design district.
It holds a branch of Flight Club sneakers where you can find a pair of Air Jordan’s for $700, which – believe it or not – is something of a bargain. The 10 blocks between North 38th street and 40th and North Miami Avenue and 2nd Avenue host dozens of haute-couture establishments for the seriously endowed who congregate there wearing their Bentleys, Rolls Royces, Ferraris, and Lambos.
Balenciaga, Celine, Christian Louboutin, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi, Giorgio Armani, Givenchy, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Miu Miu, Prada, Saint Laurent, Tom Ford, Louis Vuitton, Sephora, Marc Jacobs, Givenchy, Fendi, Hermes, Cartier, and Dior all call this place home. And if – for some obscure reason – you find these not enough to fill your endless appetite for Bling, the highest concentrations of jewelers in the world; Bulgari, Cartier, Harry Winston, IWC Schaffhausen, Jaeger LeCoultre, Tiffany & Co., Van Cleef, Arpels, and Vacheron Constantin will ensure your final departure from riches to rags is paved with top-end diamonds.
Just to prove Cynicism knows no boundaries, a small emblem on a designer shop window at the corner of 1st Avenue and 40th street reads “Miami Design District – more than shopping, an experience.” You gotta be joking! Then again, if spending money is the local spectator sport, then perhaps this Bling-centric place truly is an experience. Possibly more genuine of an experience than visiting the uninteresting Design Museum one block to the north. Go figure.
#4 Rustic Bling! – Wynwood
And when the Bohemians of Design District found themselves out of touch (and money) with the neighborhood they created, they relocated a few blocks south to the dilapidated area called Wynwood. A first glance might fool you into thinking this is one of those “the wrong side of the tracks” neighborhoods. A place where one should roll up the window and drive through without red lights.
But this is Miami, not Detroit. Wynwood, might look rundown but believe me, no self-respecting slum would ever allow three Lamborghini Urus to park peacefully on the same rundown block. The formerly tough industrial area is now home to young and chic restaurants, breweries, clothing stores, dance venues, among other contemporary reasonably-priced retail options. It should come as no surprise that the ‘hood is undergoing a rapid process of gentrification, so don’t expect that authentic vibe to last for long. Exotic wheels and zany shops aside, Wynwood’s real attraction is its buildings. More precisely, their murals.
Taking a rundown, former “no-men-zone,” and painting it over is no novelty. London has Brick Lane, my hometown Tel Aviv, has Florentine; I’ve ridden through and wrote about Downtown LA’s magnificent graffiti in this
blog a few years back. Wynwood does it, Miami-style, and does it well. What began as simple wall designs have evolved over the past 10 years to encompass hundreds of public works of art. Some of them are genuinely striking.
You can pay 10 Dollars at the Wynwood Walls Museum at 226 NW 26th street to watch a concentrated and sanitized selection, or just stroll the surrounding alley-ways and enjoy the same art free of charge. A good map available here will take you through the best of them. Too lazy to walk? A $39 golf cart tour will save you those extra calories and add a guide on top. No matter what type you choose, a Wynwood visit is a clear recommendation. Just watch out for the many Mercedes G-Wagons wandering around. They stop for nothing.
#5 South Bling! – Miami Beach
No visit to Miami is complete without a tour of the southern tip of Miami Beach, known as South Beach. This part of Miami is world-famous and the biggest draw for tourists from all over the US and beyond. It is, therefore, ironic that Miami Beach (and by association – South Beach) is not a part of Miami at all, but a different municipality. The locals, however, don’t care, and neither should you. South Beach is both artistic and trashy, agreeable and obscene-able, and always lively and fun. It has some of the best, uninterrupted, sandy-white beaches and the most diverse human scenery, this side of the Cuban Channel.
Obliterated by a hurricane in 1926, South Beach was rebuilt with the popular design regime of the time. Today it hosts the largest concentration of Art Deco buildings in the US. That’s why it is also a UNESCO World Heritage site. It also has the largest concentration of Slingshots, more on that later.
Whether you stroll down Ocean Drive, wander along Lincoln Road, or sit down in one of the many open bars sipping red-frozen Margaritas, South Beach provides one of the most colorful and diverse people-watching action this side of the globe. There’s a day scene and a night scene complete with drunken college kids wasted in every corner. Perhaps it’s the alcohol, maybe it’s the Latina vibe, any way you look at it, what you see here you don’t see anywhere else.
These are days of #Me Too and Black Lives Matter, so describing the Bling you see in South Beach is a bit of the challenge. I’ll give it my best shot; I hope I don’t offend anyone. Let me start with this; I never considered myself easily offended or troubled by immodest fashion. That is until I got to this part of Miami.
I’m old enough to know not everyone wearing a bikini needs to look like a starved model. But observing a 200Kg lady wearing nothing but the tiniest bit of fabric, something too small to pass as a legit bathing suit of an 11-year-old, is one step too far even for this writer. There and then I realized there is something as “too much flesh”. I also couldn’t help noticing the extreme negative correlation between fat and cover. Yes, I have to say it – the fatter the lady, the smaller the cover. I would have said the phenomenon is entirely exclusive to one specific US population, but I think I said too much already. You’ll have to take my word for it; this Bling is a real eyesore. Then there are the Slingshots.
I covered Polaris’ unique – some would say weird – trike in this blog after I took it for a spin in the mountains of Santa Ana. Driving it along the Southern California coast attracted more attention and comments than any exotic, costing ten times as much. I have never seen this strange vehicle before or since that drive. “Some would call it an obscene phallic symbol on wheels,” I described the Slingshot. I shouldn’t have been surprised to find South Beach is full of them. Virtually all driven by the type of males looking for heavy-set women with very little clothing.
There. I said it.
#6 Swamp Bling! – The Everglades
If you feel Miami’s Bling is getting on your nerves, the guidebook will tell you to hit west towards the Everglades National Park. In need of some nature-relief, we heeded the call and boarded the interstate 45 out of town. The scenery started changing as soon as we passed Miami International Airport. Gone were the glitzy Lambos replaced by big pickup trucks – some equipped with floodlights and gun racks. We scanned the horizon looking for a giant billboard saying: “Welcome to Florida’s backwaters, home of the Rednecks”. Driving for an hour through a monotonous flat land, the only sign we saw was McDonald’s Drive-Thru.
By the time we parked at the Everglades Safari Park, we were already somewhat dazed and yawning. Stepping out into a steamy 36 degrees, 90-something percent humidity, sunny afternoon didn’t help either. Alas, we were there already and figured out watching a few Crocks’n’Snakes in the wild would be a welcome change to just watching them skinned as a fashion accessory on Designer Row. No bling here (unless, of course, one considers riding a massive airboat and marrying one’s cousin a fashion statement). Not fully Rednecks ourselves, we took on the first, skipped the second, and stood in queue sweating the bejesus out of ourselves. Fun.
An airboat, for those not living next to a giant, Aligator-infested marsh, is the redneck’s primary mode of wetland transport. Quite an ingenious one, I have to admit. Its strength lies in its sheer, no-nonsense simplicity. There’s no rudder, no keel, and no propellor. Actually, the last one is not entirely accurate. An airboat has, in fact, a HUGE propellor, but it’s an airplane one. It’s also placed on the wrong side of the water and tied to a massive, noisy, fuel-hungry V8 (like, duh! This is redneck country, remember?).
The whole thing looks like a piece of a WWII aircraft strapped onto a tub. But it works. Oh-boy, it works! Complete with a pilot, passengers, and quite a few earplugs, the thing literally flies over the bog like a wingless jet. Steered through a pair of air flaps located just behind the propellor, and the ride through the Everglades feels like drifting sideways on a bed of ice. Speaking of ice, it’s not getting any cooler, and we’re not seeing anything moving in the brush.
45 minutes later, we dismount the airboat understanding something the wildlife of this area realized ions ago – When it’s hot, go for a shady siesta and let the fools burn under the sun. We go back to our car, with that uneasy feeling we have just been “had” by the local tourist attraction and their neighboring wildlife. As we set the Aircon to “Max”, all I can think of is Noel Coward’s poem about Mad dogs and Englishmen.
#7 Getting away from the Bling!
Simple. Take your rental down beautiful route #1 (not to be confused with the majestic Pacific route #1, some 4,500Km to the west), all the way to its very end at Key West. There’s not much Bling on the way, just numerous lovely places to stop by and enjoy the Caribbean-like scenery, Izmargad-hued lagoons, and a small gem of a town at the very end of the United States.
On Key West, and the multiple attractions on the way there, in a future post.
