Miami Beach community center a burning issue

Miami Beach’s City Commission this week is to touch on a flaming issue: the future of the South Shore Community Center, where the city’s Fire Station No. 1 now is to be placed. At the commission’s December meeting, discussion arose of an alternate location for the fire station.

Many are hoping to save the South Shore Community Center at 833 Sixth St. as an online petition, now with over 500 signatures, seeks to preserve the center.

“This is an extraordinarily important building architecturally and also to the history of Miami Beach, but more importantly it has years it could serve the community and it could be thriving again and help a neighborhood, which still is very mixed in terms of their people that are working in hospitality, waiters and maintenance,” said David McKinney, a retired architectural historian and museum administrator who lives six blocks from the South Shore Community Center.

“It’s a wonderful mix of a neighborhood,” he said, “but we won’t keep this mix if we don’t have the social services that the community center once had there, and so that’s why we need it here, and we need it to be thriving again.”

The center’s second floor was once used for career camps and was very active, said Mr. McKinney. Those who visited the center would find help to put résumés together, find job opportunities and improve their interviewing skills.

“Once the city who gave them a non-renewal, they had closed,” he said, “we lost that service to the whole city. To do that, you’d have to go to the City of Miami, which would be the closest one… Basically, what the city has done is made people vacate, keep the daycare because the historic preservation board and the commission made them promise that they would find a place for the daycare, and so they kept that.”

At the commission meeting in December, conditions of the current fire station were showcased. Additionally, the desired location of the community center was addressed as currently residents on the southeastern-most point of the city are outside of the optimum time of response for fire rescue services.

“It’s [the South Shore Community Center] in the center of what I would call our garden apartments and a working-class neighborhood,” said Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez. “A neighborhood where many people who work in hospitality live and the daycare center has a beautiful park with shade trees, surface parking lot. It takes up an entire block of South Beach. And it’s [an architect] Morris Lapidus building. We can never, ever replace this acre of land with a Morris Lapidus building on it ever again.”

“Right now in Tallahassee we’re facing the possible demise of several of our historic districts north of Ocean Drive, and those would all be Morris Lapidus buildings,” she said. “If those buildings get demolished, this Morris Lapidus building might be one of the only Lapidus buildings left on Miami Beach, certainly the only municipal Lapidus building.”

Rainbow Intergenerational Childcare, the daycare on the first floor, is to be placed in a trailer in Flamingo Park, said Commissioner Rosen Gonzalez, “which, by the way, is illegal because you’re not allowed to plop a building in the center of a park. Parks are green space, and when people see what’s happening there, they’re going to be upset about that, too. This has been an ongoing battle, and there are no solutions…. We can never replace this acre of land, and I keep explaining that to everybody. And when we needed to find a place to put the daycare, the administration has been trying for five years and they have been unable to find one city building, one place where they can relocate the daycare center.”

As the project moves forward, Flamingo Park Historic District’s character will be changed, said Mr. McKinney. “They’re not only important for Miami Beach but also for the nation, because of the importance of this neighborhood in terms of making 20th century buildings part of the historic preservation movement. That’s the hardest thing for me, those that I see picking up children and dropping them off is that they’re going to be further away from the bus lines…. Parents from there–it’s going to change their whole routine.”

Commissioner Rosen Gonzalez hopes to revive the South Shore Community Center.

“I would like to reopen the senior center that’s there,” she said. “I want the children and the seniors of the neighborhood to have access to the second-floor stage and auditorium, which we don’t have in the area. I also want all of the nonprofits who currently operate there to be able to continue to operate and I would like and I’m hoping… with this new commission, that they will agree with me that it’s worth saving.”