Wednesday February 20, 2008
Michael Lewis sounds a little disgusted with the whole Miami Circle thing. Turns out the circle is one of three, the other two of which are buried under Icon Brickell, and the one we have is going to be buried under all the financially plausible scenarios we have. So, he seems to say, what was the point of ever bothering?
Wednesday January 30, 2008
Of the four proposals for Miami Circle, only one would allow visitors to actually see anything — the other three involve re-burying the circle and creating “ghost-images” and replicas with educational materials. Boo, hiss. What’s more, the Let Us See It proposal is the most expensive, so least likely. We have until February 22nd to make public comments, which you can do at an online form. First you’ll need to look over the Special Resource Study (click on the bottom of the page to download a PDF). Update: Actually here is the better story, with links to graphical representations of the four proposals.
Wednesday January 16, 2008
Plans are taking shape for Miami Circle. Not sure why this project is happening on the scale of decades.
Thursday June 21, 2007
The seawall around Miami Circle is disintegrating. Not good. The article has links to two old Herald articles which track the history of what happened, and what was supposed to have happened, to the circle (which looked mighty strange next to each other in my RSS reader, causing a confused early version of this entry).
Thursday June 14, 2007
Miami Circle is going to be run by the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, and will probably be opened to the public at some point. It’s been nine years since the site was discovered — why did it take the state nine years to make this deal?
Thursday June 30, 2005
Miami Circle
Ladies and gentlemen, it has been seven long years since Miami Circle was uncovered. Coinciding with the original boom of the internet, the controversy around the site was something old experienced in a new way. Everybody got to freak out when a reputable archeologist dared to point out that there was a possibility that the site was a septic tank. The BBC made a documentary.
And then . . . nothing. Here we are, years later, and the site is just as it was then. What has Miami Circle done for us lately? Granted, it is a nice green patch of primo turf that the developers can’t touch; something tasty about that. But it sits there, behind two layers of chain-link, very very innanimate. Apparently there is no way to open it to the public — we would destroy the treasure.
Well, ok, one nice thing happened — the Circle’s influence is spreading. In addition to making its own site undevelopable, it is now effecting development on adjacent sites:
Circle acolytes are . . . pressing its developer, the Related Group of Florida, to make design changes to lessen the project’s impact on the 2,000-year-old circle, including moving a proposed 50-story waterfront tower that would loom over the site and partially block views of Biscayne Bay. Archaeologists believe the water views were important to the site’s builders, the extinct Tequesta Indians.
For now, the developers are at least paying lip service to said “acolytes,” but the real issue is the ultimate fate of the Circle. There are vague plans to open the site to the public, but if it hasn’t happened in all this time, when will it happen? We’re voting for never. For Bicentennial Park to sit useless and empty for decades was a tragedy; it’s a huge site with huge potential. Here’s a little site, with serious historical import. Maybe it deserves to sit in limbo, a monument to bureaucracy’s inability to confront its own past injustices.
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