Spring Garden is an old Miami neighborhood that most Miamians don't even know about. I moved there well over 20 years ago and stayed for several years. The neighborhood is located only a few minutes from downtown, where I worked at the time as a reporter (and "Junior Editor").
My first apartment there (I had two) was situated directly across Wagner Creek--literally a matter of yards--from this odd, historic house, now called the "Hindu Temple." I even had a rubber boat and once or twice paddled down the creek to the Miami River and back (the water was really nasty, and I tried not to let it splash on me).
Today I was there to visit a dear old friend (I'll call her "Lola"). Lola and I sat in her backyard and, over a few beers, talked and reminisced for hours. We also observed (among other fauna) a Painted Bunting and his mate--he drinking, and she feeding from one of the many bird feeders hanging in the trees. (Lola's an amateur birder now.) Lola's boyfriend (a more experienced birder) barbecued ribs and Italian sausage on the grill for dinner, while Lola had baked a special bundt cake for dessert. After dinner, she and I strolled through the neighborhood, with her filling me in on all the latest developments (and development--some bad). I left at around 9:30, after we had dessert. But I almost forgot to mention the appetizers: fresh smoked marlin spread, which Lola's boyfriend whipped up on the spot, and a really good salsa, by Paul Newman.
When I first met Lola, she and her husband were living in a rented house in Coconut Grove. Then when I moved to Spring Garden, I invited them to my new place. They immediately fell in love with the neighborhood. It wasn't long before they moved there and eventually bought an old house, and Lola--her husband passed away 13 years ago--has lived in the house now for 24 years. Lola also works downtown, 5-10 minutes away.
Here are some excerpts from a Miami Herald article about the annual historic walking tours of the neighborhood (this article is from 2003 but the tours continue today). As a matter of fact, there was a tour today just before I arrived.
HIDDEN HISTORY
ANDRES VIGLUCCI, aviglucci@herald.com
Nestled between Overtown and the Miami River, the bohemian enclave of Spring Garden celebrates its latest renaissance by preserving its past.
Spring Garden is one feisty neighborhood, has been from its birth 84 years ago at the edge of civilization, one step across the Miami city line into the blue-green wilds of the Everglades.
Otherwise, Spring Garden would not be what it is today: a lush riverside oasis. A living compendium of Miami architectural styles. A throwback to a Miami of old that has elsewhere all but disappeared. A neighborly place with a whiff of Bohemia where strollers - strollers! - stop to chat and news travels by dog walker. Otherwise, it might not even exist.
Before Coral Gables, before Miami Beach, came Spring Garden, one of Miami's original suburbs, preserved first because it was forgotten and lately because it has been rediscovered. Now its charms are legally protected by its status as one of a handful of designated historic neighborhoods in Miami.
Here historic preservation has been not the genteel endeavor it can be elsewhere, but a matter of survival.
Spring Garden has weathered hurricanes and floods, outlasted plans to obliterate it for a highway and plans to ram Metrorail right through its fragile heart.
Residents have in recent years fought off an intrusive high-rise, a prison for the criminally insane, and assorted and ill-conceived riverfront developments.
SENSE OF DISCOVERY
Wedged in between Overtown and the Miami River, this slip of a neighborhood - 174 homes in all - is not manicured, but thick with palms and oak and undergrowth, in a few spots unkempt, its comeback from years in limbo to some degree still a work in progress.
Few of the houses, even when gracious and distinctive, are fancy.
Yet nearly everyone who comes across it for the first time enjoys a sense of discovery, as if stumbling upon a marvel inexplicably overlooked.
Mary Luft, an artist and cultural impresaria, traded her digs in the vanishing Bohemian Coconut Grove of old for Spring Garden in 1988, around the time back-to-the-city pioneers began moving into its eminently cheap but gloriously atmospheric homes.
"I came over one day for a reception and said, 'Huh, I never knew this was here,' " Luft said. "It felt like the Grove used to be, when you had all kinds of people living next to each other. It feels like that old spirit." . . .
Her neighbors are lawyers, scientists, refugees from suburbia, many employed downtown or at the nearby hospitals, sharing the neighborhood with old-timers who have spent most of their lives in Spring Garden. Increasingly, too, there are families with children. . . .
Besides Luft, residents include City Commissioner Arthur Teele and former tennis champion Gardnar Mulloy, who won the doubles title at Wimbledon in 1957. Mulloy grew up in Spring Garden. He learned to play on the family's clay tennis court, which is overgrown but still there. . . . [Lola lives next door to Gardnar Mulloy.]
Frank B. Stoneman, an early editor of The Miami Herald, lived here in the 1920s with his daughter, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, godmother of Everglades National Park. . . .
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