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"Miami Today" — Michael Lewis's column — March 29, 2012
We deface our skyline and label it aesthetic 'enhancement'
By Michael Lewis
Miami's iconic Gusman building, named this month one of Florida's top 100 buildings,
faces in inglorious advertising cover-up by the very nonprofit foundation just formed to
preserve it.
Other Miami public buildings are threatened with the same burial under advertising
billboards, euphemistically termed wall murals.
And the area downtown where the wall murals are allowed to encroach has just been
give a county okay to expand, bringing still more structures into the zone permitting the
massive advertising incursions.
This growing advertising blight might be okay in Times Square in New York, which
lives by neon.
But in Miami, whose image is palms rather than a gritty urban core, the expansion of
multi -story advertising harms not only the environment in which we all choose to live but
the cityscape we present to visitors from around the globe.
Bluntly, nobody visits Miami to see how much we are like the cities they're vacationing
from. Nobody buys a condo here to be in Cleveland or Pittsburgh. And nobody invests
in a business here to have it surrounded by urban advertising blight.
So as government opens its doors wider and wider to multi -story wall commercials, it
closes them a bit to visitors, investment and jobs.
The pittance that Miami's city government gets from wall billboard licensing can't
begin to make up for our long -run losses in image and positioning around the world.
Back to the Gusman: The Florida Chapter of the American Institute of Architects just
named Flagler Street's Olympia Theatre at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts
to its list of Florida's 100 best buildings. It's in the running to be chosen first in balloting
now ongoing.
Meanwhile, a trust created last year and given control of the Gusman on Oct. 1 wants
to finance preservation of the building by, incredibly, wrapping it in an illuminated wall
advertising billboard multiple stories tall. That's how we preserve one of the state's top
buildings — hide and distort its facade.
That comes just as county Mayor Carlos Gimenez is helping to lead a charge to
preserve and upgrade the look of Flagler Street downtown to make it the city's prime
business hub. We're working at cross-purposes.
More of the same could be on the way. The cash -strapped city is proposing wrapping
all its properties that can hold 1,000 people for events in wall signs as well to raise
money to keep the venues running.
It's analogous to a doctor cutting out a patient's heart to keep him going. It can't work.
Submitted Into the pubfle
record In connection with
item F. 6
Priscilla A. Thompson
r City Clerk
Miami Today — March 29, 2012
Fortunately, that proposal was deferred in January and hasn't yet been put back on a
commission agenda. But it's lurking out there, like an enemy in the dark waiting to attack
when our defenses are lowest.
The county this month made that attack easier. It expanded the urban zone in which
the city can have the massive billboards, with sponsor Bruno Barreiro saying the city
would be "aesthetically enhanced by the addition of mural sign locations."
While the legislation held the number of wall billboard signs downtown at 45, it made it
easier to shift some to now -virgin locations that can be raped in the name of aesthetic
enhancement.
That will be useful for the sign interests as the Miami Herald building is razed next
year at the hands of new owner Genting, which plans a casino resort where it now
stands. The building that will fall has two massive murals — the maximum allowed on a
structure — that soon can deface two new locations.
Naturally, opening more sites to the massive billboards is good for the owners of
buildings who will turn their walls into advertising media. It will be good for the sign
companies. It will be good for the elected friends of both.
But it will further disfigure our skyline — the storefront of Miami as a marketplace
bringing in global residents to our new housing, visitors to our hotels and job -creating
investment to our economy.
By accepting a few dollars from billboards, we're slowly crowding out the reasons
people visit, live and invest here.
The billboards might show massive images but they're extremely shortsighted.
To read the entire issue of Miami Today online, subscribe to e -Miami Today, an exact digital
replica of the printed edition.
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