This Month in Biscayne Times

After nearly 13 years of bringing cutting-edge multicultural contemporary dance productions to North Miami, the Peter London Global Dance Company is unsure whether it will be able to go on. It isn’t just a result of regular old “show biz,” either. Artistic director and founder Peter London is used to that. This is something different. “It’s typical in small companies for the leaders to take on mor...

Primary elections are upon us on August 20th and mail-in voting has started. This guide is intended to help you make sense of things. In January, Biscayne Times raised the curtain on 2024 with the headline: “Welcome to a High-Stakes Election Year.”  That puts things mildly in this unprecedented year when Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt, and President Biden exited the race to make wa...

Miami Shores' interim planning and zoning director, Joseph Corradino, says the village is in the middle of a six-month long overhaul of the residential zoning code. Property owners looking to build a house in Miami Shores Village have a new set of regulations to follow now that council members have taken steps to curb big homes... Thanks for listening! For more local news visit BiscayneTimes....

“If an institution has not made it after 10 years, it shouldn’t be around anymore,” said auto dealership magnate and art collector Norman Braman in a 2014 interview with The New York Times. Ten years later, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami (ICA) is still standing. More than that, it’s thriving. After receiving a reported 1 million visitors and organizing 94 exhibitions, this museum of conte...

What was thought to be a victory for the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in a monthslong digital billboard debate has since turned into something quite different. Rather, the real battle has only just begun. In a recent reversal by the Miami City Commission at its May 23 meeting, the body voted to completely repeal an ordinance that allowed 1,800...

The LGBTQ+ community has become Florida’s political battleground over the past two years. In 2022, Gov. Ron DeSantis waged a heavily publicized war against drag queens performing in Wynwood. Last year, he signed a slew of anti-LGBTQ+ bills from the Florida Legislature. Most recently, the governor expressed a clear intent to challenge federal protections for transgender students against sex-based d...

The Upper East Side’s most beloved neighborhood restaurant is moving, expanding into a new, larger space. Will this tiny, hidden gem – our go-to spot for comfort food – lose its charm? Before we answer that, let’s take a look back at its origin story... Thanks for listening! For more local news visit BiscayneTimes.com .

Belle Meade is at a turning point in its long-winding history, but as is the case with most evolutions, it’s being preceded by a war. There are two camps developing in the Upper East Side neighborhood: those who want to preserve the eclectic character of the community, and those who want to preserve their rights as property owners to remodel and rebuild as they wish. Surely, there is some overlap...

City of Miami commissioners voted 3-2 April 25 to ban future construction of oversized, digital billboards in the municipality. But to be clear, residents will still stumble upon these very structures during their downtown walks or drives. The vote puts the city one step closer to rescinding an ordinance passed in 2023 that allows 100-foot LED billboards spanning 1,800 square feet, which allowed t...

Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava announced a $2.5 billion bond proposal at her State of the County address Jan. 24, 2023. A little more than two months after Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava floated a $2.5 billion general obligation bond (GOB) referendum during her State of the County address to pay for a series of expansive projects, she’s had a change of heart. The mayor...

The best thing about baseball is the legends that build up around the game. There’s always a story, and it always has a whiff of the unreal, whether it’s Yogi Berra’s leaps in logic, Dock Ellis’ psychedelic-fueled no-hitter, Bo Jackson’s left-handed homer or the Curse of the Billy Goat on the Cubs (the bad vibes only being broken by a goat-eating contest at Chicago’s Taco in a Bag restaurant). Foo...

The Miami City Commission has voted unanimously to approve increased height limits in the MiMo Biscayne Boulevard Historic District under certain conditions. The final language adopted last month through the approved ordinance allows 20 feet of additional height for a project on a one-acre lot or larger, if that project includes a public benefit by a public agency “including but not limited to pub...

Arch Creek Park is in trouble – dirty trouble – and local activists are organizing once again to save a historic landmark in North Miami they began fighting for more than 40 years ago. In 1972, environmental lawyer Maureen Harwitz read in a newspaper that Chrysler Automobile Corporation sought to convert historic Arch Creek Park into a used auto lot. She knew she had to get involved to stop those...

Conservationists have been trying to incentivize environmental preservation for more than a century in Florida. If history has made one thing clear, however, it’s that it’s not an easy feat. Indeed, not everyone sees – or cares about – nature’s intrinsic value, focusing rather on how it extrinsically serves our needs. Even then, amid high-rises, office spaces and condominiums, it’s difficult to gr...

 The city of North Miami Beach’s special mayoral race is in high gear. Now that the qualifying period has officially closed, residents have one month to weigh out potential candidates before the Dec. 5 election. Although pickings are slim in quantity, residents may find that both names on the ballot hold some weight. Evan Scott Piper and Paule Villard, both former commissioners with decades of com...

As flames spread through Miami-Dade’s massive North Dade Landfill trash incinerator earlier this year in February, destroying the heart of the county’s waste-management system while spreading chemicals through the air , residents could smell, taste and see the results of decades of failed leadership. For years, successive mayors and commissions punted on finding long-term solutions to the county’s...

The city of Miami has big plans for Edgewater’s Margaret Pace Park, and it’s asking the community what it thinks. District 2 Commissioner Sabina Covo and Chris Evans, the city’s parks and recreation director, came together Aug. 10, 2023, to unveil the park’s master plan at the park itself. Located on approximately eight acres of waterfront land along Biscayne Boulevard, it’s slated for a multiphas...

“It will be blue for the Miami sky and for the sea, but also blue for the frames of Emtiti,” said Stéphane Denève enthusiastically, making a gesture around his face. Emtiti. Is that … something Egyptian? “No, no,” he laughed. “M.T.T. You know, Michael Tilson Thomas! He wears those blue glasses!” Denève was discussing some of the themes he plans to explore in his first season leading the New World...

With Miami’s hotel revenue soaring to 24% higher than pre-pandemic levels last year, networking coalition Commercial Real Estate Women Miami (CREW) gathered some of the industry’s top women leaders last month to home in on what’s working for the city’s tourism business – and what’s not. Moderated by Mabelle Perez, director of hotels and hospitality for commercial mortgage lender Berkadia , CREWs “...

The town of Surfside will have a special election Nov. 7, 2023, that could change future elections in the municipality. Residents will vote on five charter amendments, one that would extend the terms of both the mayor and commissioners from two to four years and another that would require a mayoral candidate to receive a majority vote before being elected. If approved, those changes would affect t...

There will come a time, perhaps in the next two years as planned, when Inter Miami will move into its beautiful new soccer stadium at Miami Freedom Park near Miami International Airport. Until then, Fort Lauderdale civic officials want the world to know their city is the current home of Lionel Messi – not Miami. What good is having a living legend in your community if you can’t use his presence to...

The job of the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau may be to attract tourism business to Miami-Dade County, but it’s well aware that fine dining isn’t just for tourists. So when the snowbirds start to fly north that’s our cue to enjoy three-course specialty menus at restaurants all around town, because Miami Spice is back. If you haven’t started sampling all of the great deals this annu...

Poor water quality in Biscayne Bay and its effects on underwater sea animals have been hot topics since the 2020 fish kill, which made headlines statewide and has occurred again every year since. Lesser known, however, are the impacts such conditions have on those found higher up, both in the food chain and in the ecosystem itself. Resting on tree canopies rather than tidal waves, our winged frien...

The Gibson Room , as we realized, is never what you expect it to be. It’s better. Let the incurious and their patient Prestons insist on sorting experiences into narrow, limited categories. For the Biscayne Tippler, the gates to paradise open in the unlikeliest places as long as you have eyes to see them... Thanks for listening! For more local news visit BiscayneTimes.com .

It’s a tale as old as time, with several chapters unfolding in recent months in the Biscayne Times. February 2023’s “$46 Million Condo Shock” cover story and “Palm Bay’s Triple Trouble” in March have collectively told the story of three Palm Bay condominium buildings that have become battlegrounds over high repair costs or disagreements in management choices. We now bring you “Condo Wars,” with an...