Fool's Paradise: Players, Poseurs, and the Culture of Excess in South Beach by Steven Gaines

Author:Steven Gaines [Gaines, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Social Science, sociology, Urban, Biography & Autobiography, Historical
ISBN: 9780307452214
Google: Bw8rSSPg298C
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2009-01-27T00:23:53.613523+00:00

IRONICALLY, THE success of Barbara Capitman's dream rendered her obsolete. The fruits of her labors were everywhere. Property values were soaring and tourism was beginning to return. Although some significant buildings had been lost, for the most part the Art Deco district had survived intact and would be protected permanently. At the same time, smart businessmen saw a real estate boomtown coming and started buying up the neighborhood wholesale. The Miami Design Preservation League needed to redefine its goals to stay relevant. Barbara's everlasting credo was “Never Compromise,” but the younger members of the league wanted to be more conciliatory with developers and city commissioners, not adversarial, and Barbara didn't like it. Barbara wanted to focus on senior housing, and to stop South Beach from becoming so trendy, and to stop the condominium towers that she feared would loom over the beaches from the tip of Miami northward. According to Andrew Capitman, “People wanted the MDPL to roll over, and my mother had absolutely nothing to fucking lose. My mother said, “I'm old, I'm poor, I'm famous, and I did it because I was true. Why should I roll over?’”

Barbara Capitman became increasingly implacable about issues. The way she saw it, a person was either with her 100 percent or he was a traitor. If anyone disagreed with her, she would snap, “Dry up and blow away,” and that's exactly what many of her supporters eventually did. She couldn't make up her mind whether she wanted to be on the board of the MDPL or a paid executive director. The league began to grow broke. “A lot of people who started the movement with her dropped out,” said community activist Nancy Lieb-man, who met her in 1979. “She would use people and then step on them and move right on. She would walk out on meetings, frequently, if people disagreed with her. She hated me because I took the lead role.”

By the time the Senator was demolished, Liebman had emerged as the standard-bearer of the MDPL. She became the executive director in 1988 and served until 1991. Liebman was the polar opposite of Barbara, practical and diplomatic. She was a former elementary school teacher and the wife of a successful doctor. She and her husband also, not coincidentally, had invested in the Car-dozo Hotel, in which they had lost $35,000 of their own money.

“Barbara would go to the City Commission meetings and be nasty,” Liebman recalled. “She showed the commissioners no respect. She was strident and refused to compromise. By not listening to other people, she negated her ability to get anything done.” The MDPL needed to distance itself from Barbara to keep its credibility. Noted her friend and league cofounder Michael Kinerk, “Barbara fomented being thrown out of the league, which was trying to pull itself out of insolvency.”

When Barbara was told that she could not act in the name of the MDPL without consulting with the other members of the board of directors, she was irate and decided to challenge their legitimacy.

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