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1668-22 Economic, Development, & Real Estate 1943-1993 SUN JUN 28 1992 ED: FINAL SECTION: AMUSEMENTS PAGE: 11 LENGTH: 93 . 88" LONG ILLUST: map: Lincoln Road; photo: Tamara at her folk art gallery, LINCOLN ROAD then and now (5 ) , CathyLEFF (color) , )rris LAPIDUS, I .Stanley Levine (Judy DRUCKER) ; map: Lincoln _.oad Mall; photo: Nancy LIEBMAN, Denis RUSS, Jean-Francois LeJEUNE SOURCE: BETH DUNLOP Herald Architecture Writer DATELINE: MEMO: LINCOLN ROAD It stretches almost a mile, from the shore of Miami Beach to the bay. In 1914 , at its inception, Lincoln Road Mall was little more than two lanes of packed sand -- modest beginnings for its subsequent decades of glory and decline. Over the years the mall has tee ered from tawdry to glamorous and back. Now, Lincoln Road faces yet another turning point. It' s at both extremes at once, spectacular and shabby, funky and frayed, an urban puzzle with all the troubles of any city street or park and all the allure as well. The mall is caught in a vise, between the dreams of those con ent to patch it up and let it evolve and the aspirations of those who would drastically change it -- even let cars back in. There' s a lot to gain and a lot to lose. Walk the mall -- six blocks of its 10 have been open only to pedestri ns since 1962 -- and its problems and pleasures unfold before you. Look past the - ' uminum facades tacked slapdash over stucco, hiding remarkable, once-lavish _ldings. Look past the center of the mall, a jumble of dullness and kitsch with plants and trees, fountains and shel ers competing for space -- visual confusion, at best. Families go to the mall to eat sup er outdoors. Teenagers roll along the pavement on skateboards or skates, modes of transportation that are technically illegal but rarely enforced as such. Senior citizens browse in the nation' s most popular Woolworth' s. Young and old, rich and poor, all find their way to Lin oln Road. The street is home to a burgeon ng colony of artists, dancers and musicians. In renovated theaters there, the Miami City Ballet and the New World Symphony practice and perform. A loose federation of 85 artists make up the South Florida Art Center; they work in studios converted from deserted shops. The center operates two of its own galleries, along with the open artists ' studios, and it is joined by half a dozen others showing art that ranges from 19th Century paintings to contemporary found objects. Now, the future begins in earnest. Next month the city of Miami Beach will seek a consultant to chart the mall ' s course, to decide, among other issues, whether it will remain a pedestrian mall or welcome automobile traffic again. In the interim, the city is spending $26, 000 to clean up and repair the mall, using paint and preventive maintenance to cover its flaws. In early fall the Miami Beach Commission will vote on whether to include Lincoln Road in its Art Deco Historic District. Already, the road falls in the square-mile section of the city listed on the National Register of Historic Places . The new designation, being contested by a handful of Lincoln Road property owners, would protect the Mediterranean and Art Deco buildings along mall, preserve the generally low scale of the street and ensure that any 1i w or renovated buildings would be compatible with the old. It takes five out of seven commissioners to approve it. Last March the Miami Beach Development Corp. convened a two-day session with three members of the International Downtown Executives Association, a AO 11111=11 Washington-based trade organization, to seek consensus on Lincoln Road' s future. That session resulted in a brief report with an ambitious title: "Lincoln Road: Center of a World-Class City. " The first step was the 4n rmation of a task force and coordinating council; just last week city icials began holding small "focus group" meetings to develop the wording on cs request for consultants ' proposals. Wide disparity The range of opinions over Lincoln Road' s destiny is as wide as the road itself . One member of the task force would make Lincoln Road into an urban tropical garden filled with avant- garde public art; another would try to attract a Wal-Mart. Some property owners aim to create another shopping street and argue vociferously that auto traffic is necessary to lure a Gap or Banana Republic. But ask Ellie Stein, an artist who opened her studio on Lincoln Road in 1985 and has witnessed the mall ' s slow rebirth. Ask Tamara Hendershot, who moved her folk art gallery, Vanity Novelty Gardens, over from Washington Avenue to soak up the mall ' s offbeat ambience. Ask Merle Weiss, whose secondhand clothing store, Merle ' s Closet, just opened next to the Lazy Lizard restaurant and across from another cafe, Key East. They' ll say, in unison: Keep the cars out. "People love to walk there and meander and go from place to place, " Stein said. "Lincoln Road has so much, naturally. It ' s one of the few places you can walk. " Stein and her fellow artists sometimes host impromptu picnics on the mall at dusk. "Just before sunset, it ' s always cool. The breezes flow, and the sky . . . You can see the deep blues of the sky over the ocean go into the peachy colors of the sunset. " The mall has spaces that allow for that kind of spontaneity. It ' s not unusual to see Richard Pross, who owns the Toy Station, out on the mall, -nonstrating a new toy to a youthful buyer; to see artist Jens Diercks trying a sculpture in front of his studio; to see artist Dina Knapp changing her inventive window displays in Books & Books. Architecture and art Lincoln Road has character and individuality, which is more than can be said for many places to walk and shop in America. Miami Beach has always been an original city, a town where dreams and invention hold sway, and if there ' s no precedent for what' s envisioned for this mall, so be it. Lincoln Road is a work of architecture and of art, and any plan for it ought to honor that. There are layers of fantasy and history to be cherished on the road that Carl Fisher built, with its sequence of buildings from the 1920s and ' 30s and its modern layer of buildings that Morris Lapidus erected in the ' 60s. In the 1920s, Lincoln Road was Miami ' s most illustrious shopping street, palm-lined and elegant. The stores were posh -- Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller, Peck & Peck, De Pinna, Milgrim' s, Frances Brewster, Greenleaf & Crosby, I. Miller -- and catered to the carriage trade. There were five movie theaters -- the Lincoln, the Beach, the Colony, the Carib and the Flamingo -- showing all the best films. "My father, " said impresario Judy Drucker, who grew up just five blocks away, "would have never dreamed of going to Lincoln Road without a shirt and tie on. " The beauty of many of the buildings has endured -- the Spanish Colonial Community Church, the Mediterranean revival Van Dyke building, the Art Deco Sterling and Barnett buildings. And where the architecture doesn't shine, where details and ornaments have been hidden behind aluminum panels or even destroyed, the scale and rhythm of the buildings still have the power to ".arm. Famed architect In the late 1950s, when the street began to slip, architect Lapidus was in the full flush of fame for his designs of the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc hotels. He was commissioned to turn Lincoln Road into one of the country' s first pedestrian-only, open-air malls, from Alton Road to Washington Avenue. OEM Lapidus designed a jazzy centerpiece, with bold black-and-white striped paving, fountains and planters and shelters in an assortment of offbeat geometrical shapes: pie-wedges and trapezoids and zigzags among them. or But Lapidus ' capricious creations now share the stage with ;tallations plopped piecemeal onto the mall over the last 30 years, with regard to neither aesthetics nor pragmatism. Most of the fountains don't work now, and the planters are so thick with assorted foliage that the east-west vista is blocked. From block to block, there' s no continuity or theme. Before the onslaught of schlock, you could stand on the mall and see the beach to the east and the municipal golf course to the north. "You could sit in your dentist ' s office in the Lincoln Theater building and look out and see people playing golf, " said Jean Paul, whose husband ran the Greenleaf & Crosby jewelers on Lincoln Road for many years. But in the mid-1970s, the city completed a vast parking garage along the north side of the mall. That allowed one block, where Euclid Avenue would have cut through, to be closed and two avenues, Pennsylvania and Drexel, to be reduced to little more than alleys. The result: disorientation, always a danger in a public place. The ' 70s were cruel to Lincoln Road. Miami Beach' s population got older and poorer, and the fine shops moved to Bal Harbour or Palm Beach or closed. Shoe stores, electronics outlets, luggage and souvenir shops moved in. By the early 1980s, the mall was punctuated with empty storefronts, a bleak portrait of a once-grand street turned sleazy. Artists ' brigade Then came the artists. A group led by Ellie Schneiderman formed the South Florida Art Center and began to rent the vacant buildings. Bright- painted canvases and ceramics and sculpture began to fill the picture windows on the street. "Some spaces simply looked bombed out, " remembers artist Stein. "Before I moved in, I 1 czdered what had happened. It was just so desolated. " Almost simultaneously, the Colony Theater reopened, a renovation project by the Miami Beach Development Corp. Edward Villella joined the visual artists, setting up the offices and rehearsal studios for the brand new Miami City Ballet on the mall, near Jefferson Avenue. Ted Arison bought the Lincoln Theatre to convert it to offices and a concert hall for the New World Symphony, the fledgling national youth training orchestra. Restaurants followed; some closed quickly but some endured, and others joined them. Books & Books of Coral Gables opened a Beach store in the Sterling Building, and other independent shopkeepers followed to join the handful of merchants (among them Moseley' s, Stuart ' s Stride Rite and Gray & Son Jewelers) who had weathered even the toughest years. In the last year, the pace has quickened. As Ocean Drive filled with tourists and clogged with traffic, the appeal of Lincoln Road grew. "It ' s happening slower than Ocean Drive, which makes it better, with more feeling, " said folk art gallery owner Hendershot. "On Ocean Drive, there ' s no emotional depth. It ' s all facade. Here, there ' s depth. " "Local people would rather come to Lincoln Road, " lawyer Howard Gross said at a focus group meeting last week. And so, on open gallery nights, the curious join the collectors. A recent outdoor party and art auction at the South Florida Art Center drew 300 people, lingering, talking, dancing. On any given weeknight, families dine at one of the mall ' s many outdoor cafes, listening to live folk music or taped swing while their children frolic on ovals of grass. A long-term vision for Lincoln Road is needed, and the time for it is J. Spec ' s, the Florida-based music-video empire, is putting an outlet into a renovated building at Lincoln and Washington. Mark Soyka and Jeffrey Dispensieri, owners of the smash-hit News Cafe on Ocean Drive, have bought the Van Dyke Building and plan to open a ground-floor cafe. A French market is slated for Lincoln and Pennsylvania. A branch of a Soho antiques and MOM AMMONIUM collectibles dealer is moving next to the Toy Station. Art dealer Erwin Stern is opening a design center in a series of storefronts he owns. A plan of prosperity The essential step now is to come up with a plan to connect the ill- Tined blocks of Lincoln Road itself, to allow the street to prosper but rotect it from exploitation or overbuilding. It ' s important to connect Lincoln Road to the rest of Miami Beach, to the Art Deco District to the east, to the Convention Center and the Jackie Gleason Theater to the north. An element of that connection ought to be public transportation, maybe trams. Intersections could be augmented, treated as separate and important traffic plazas, widened to allow for drop-off lanes and transit waiting areas. Walkers must be made more comfortable, too. Many buildings have no awnings, and the tiny ones in place offer little protection. Where there is shade, there are no seats; where there are seats, there' s no shade. The foliage, ugly and haphazard, is of little help; why not bring back the rows of royal palms that lined the sidewalks for four decades? All this would attract more people at night, as would more special events. Now, the South Florida Art Center has regular openings and occasional street parties, the Colony and the Lincoln draw nighttime crowds, and next year the Convention and Visitors Bureau will stage seven outdoor cultural festivals, another potential boost. The city' s proscription against bicyclists and roller skaters and, just as absurdly, street performers, ought to be lifted. Art as unifying element Lincoln Road is the ideal place for the kind of public art and architecture projects the county is trying at the Miami International Airport; art could become the distinguishing and unifying element of the public space. On Thursday Carlos Alves, a South Florida Art Center ceramic artist, got -mission to tile a fountain outside his studio in the 1000 block with the J_p of local high school art students. There ' s no reason why there can't be more of this as Lincoln Road evolves, turning each block into a prize, artistically individual yet architecturally unified. A bird' s eye view, from the rooftop of a corner building, suggests that Lincoln Road is really more a sequence of linked squares than a street or a mall, and once that idea gels, the rest can follow. Into the equation must come architecture and a healthy respect for history. A facade-restoration program might recall the road' s former architectural splendor and would certainly make it more appealing. The signs, sounds and lighting of the mall need to be attended to as well. There might be an argument to open up the westernmost and easternmost ends of the mall to cars, but the rest of Lincoln Road, between Drexel and Lenox, doesn' t need traffic. Symbolically speaking, Lincoln Road could be to Miami -- and to the country -- what the Piazza San Marco is to Venice but with fewer pigeons. It could be an urban space where people would gather, linger. It could be a showplace of public art and urban landscape, where the traditional and the avant-garde coexist. The impulse in America is to copy -- another Cocowalk, another Bayside -- but the challenge is to keep Lincoln Road a truly original place. We 've got the real thing now; let ' s not succumb to the ersatz . ADDED TERMS: END OF DOCUMENT.