The Miami Herald
March 9, 2003
Section: New Homes
Edition: Final
Page: 1HN
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.
HISTORIC HOMES: Pat Stoker, a Spring Garden resident since '77, is proud of the tiny enclave near the Miami River. "We're caretakers for the new generation," she says. |
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."
A sign above the shady front porch of her restored 1939 cottage announces what Luft found in Spring Garden: "My Blue Heaven," it reads.
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.
Need a photographer? There's one down the block. Require a marine biologist? There are two in the neighborhood. An architect? Check.
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.
Now 89, Mulloy lives down the block from the home where he grew up.
 |
SIGNATURE HOME: The Hindu Temple, a restored home on the National Register of Historic Places, is often used today as a backdrop for photo shoots, movies and TV commercials. |
MAGICAL PULL
For those who knew about it, Spring Garden has long exerted a magical pull.
Charles Flowers, a civic activist and Spring Garden stalwart who grew up in adjoining Overtown, cut grass in the neighborhood as a youngster and dreamed of one day living there, an impossibility in the segregated Miami of the day. Instead he made good use of the Venetian-style bridge that spanned the Seybold Canal, a dock-lined waterway that bends through the neighborhood before emptying into the river.
"I would dive off the humpbacked bridge in my underwear and go swimming," Flowers recalled. "The water was clean then."
Spring Garden's homes are as diverse in style as their occupants.
The Spring Garden architectural walking tour on March 16 features 13 homes in a remarkable variety of design, from Art Deco to Arts and Crafts, Dutch Colonial to Mission and Pueblo Revival.
Why few homes in Spring Garden are alike can be explained by the neighborhood's quirky history.
Its founder was John Seybold, a bakery owner who in 1914 built a downtown landmark, the Seybold Building. He conceived of Spring Garden, named for a local spring that long ago disappeared, as a grand subdivision for the young city of Miami. Seminole Indians still came in dugout canoes to trade along that stretch of the river.
 |
'My Blue Heaven': Artist and cultural impresaria Mary Luft traded her digs in the vanishing Bohemian Coconut Grove of old for a restored 1939 cottage in Spring Garden. |
FOUND, FORGOTTEN
But only a relative handful of the original lots were built on before the 1926 hurricane and the subsequent Great Depression put an end to Seybold's dream.
Spring Garden was rediscovered, the first time, after World War II and was gradually filled in.
Then it was promptly forgotten again when the suburbs began to bloom.
By the time Luft arrived in 1988, buying a Spring Garden home was an act of faith.
Public services were nearly nonexistent, Luft recalls. Mail service and trash pickup were erratic, policing sporadic. Outsiders dumped trash on the streets, and the Seybold Canal was heavily polluted.
But being ignored was in some ways Spring Garden's salvation. Development bypassed it, and homes occupied in many cases by original residents or their children were long intact, maintained at least well enough to last.
"I liked it because I could tell it was old," said James Broton, president of the Spring Garden Civic Association, which led the drive for historic designation and successfully pushed for improved policing and other city services. 'Now crime is low and the streets clean. City officials have learned to heed Spring Garden residents, who zealously guard the neighborhood's integrity.
'A PIECE OF HISTORY'
"We're living in a piece of history," said Pat Stoker, a Spring Garden resident since 1977. "We recognize it, respect it. We're caretakers for the new generation."
Renovations are on the rise, and so are property values, thanks in part to historic designation, said Theodore Tiemeyer III, a Spring Garden resident and real estate agent.
A renovated, two-bedroom Key West style home set amid lush landscaping sold for $135,000 just five years ago. But Tiemeyer recently handled the sale of another two-bedroom house that went for $182,250. Asking price for a large, partially restored 1924 Craftsman style house is $550,000.
"A lot of things have changed," Tiemeyer said. "It seems like becoming a historic district was the right thing to do for this neighborhood."
From its inception, Spring Garden attracted the strong of character.
It was peopled in its earliest days by pioneers who moved to Miami from the Northeast and the Midwest at a time when the city was little more than a mosquito-bitten outpost on the edge of a vast wilderness.
Seybold widened the lower part of Wagner Creek into the navigable canal that bears his name and spanned it with the humpbacked bridge still used today. He added a turning basin at one end and there erected, as a promotional gimmick, the neighborhood's signature home, the Hindu Temple, modeled after a Hindu village that had been constructed on the site for a silent film, The Jungle Trail. Fittingly, the restored home, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, is today used often as a backdrop for photo shoots, movies and TV commercials.
Finally Seybold built a home for himself on the canal. It has not survived, apparently torn down in error long ago. The large carriage house that should have gone down instead remains. It is used as a home but is to be turned into a nature center.
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.
So did Truly Nolen, whose exterminating business still thrives.
And so did Luther Hodsdon, who built one of the few houses in Miami with a basement, where he kept alligators.
Neighborhood lore is rich with such tales, some true, some merely colorful. It is true that one house served for a time as a bordello, said Broton, Spring Garden's resident historian. But there is no evidence that a pink late-Deco house was built for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, as some maintain.
Long before Seybold came along, Wagner Creek was the site of some of the earliest settlements in what was to be Miami.
It was also the site of one of Miami's first tourist attractions - Alligator Joe's, run by Warren Frazee, a giant of a man who until 1910 made his living wrestling alligators on the point of land where the Seybold Canal meets the river.
It was on this six-acre spot that residents a few years ago stopped a planned high-rise and engineered public purchase of the land, now slated for a new city park.
Its residents have ensured that other things in Spring Garden stay the same. Like its penchant for the unusual.
One night not long ago, an emu escaped from a resident's menagerie of exotic animals. Broton helped chase down and trap the giant bird who, no surprise, proved to be rather . . . feisty.
Spring Garden's links to the historic and exotic might in fact inspire the theme for next year's neighborhood tour, Broton mused.
"This year it's architecture," Broton said. "Next year, alligator wrestling?"
He might have been joking. But Alligator Joe, wherever he is, might approve.
Copyright (c) 2003 The Miami Herald |
