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mh LAWRENCE TAYLOR, LONGTIME SOUTH BEACH HOTEL OWNER 12/25/1993
TH MIAMI HERALD
Copyright/1'c) 1993, The Miami Herald
DATE: Saturday, December 25, 1993 EDITION: FINAL
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: 4B LENGTH: 44 lines
ILLUSTRATION: photo: Lawrence ylor (n)
SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: MANNY GARCIA Herald Staff Writer
MEMO: DEATHS
LAWRENCE TAYLOR, LONGTIME SOUTH BEACH HOTEL OWNER
Lawrence Taylor, owner of the Nemo Hotel on Miami Beach, died early Friday
of heart failure, his daughter said. He was 79.
Taylor died at Miami Heart Institute, daughter Shirley Demsey said.
For 33 years, Taylor owned the Nemo, a 100-room, Spanish- style building
with arched entryways at 116 Collins Ave.
Through the years, Taylor and his hotel were at the center of South
Beach's change from a blighted neighborhood into an international tourist
attraction.
During the 1970s, he rented rooms to retirees on fixed incomes. In 1980,
he was one of several hotel owners caught in the middle of a dispute between
the federal government and Miami Beach over who would pay the hotel bills for
hundreds of Mariel refugees who flocked into South Florida.
"I don't know how these people are going to survive, " said Taylor, who
refused to evict the refugees.
"He was very community and civic oriented, " Demsey said.
Taylor also was vice chairman of Miami Beach's Minimum Housing Standards
Board, although he blamed the city's failures at redevelopment for the
neighborhood's decay.
In October, Taylor sold the Nemo.
"He was happy to see the area redeveloped, " his daughter said of the Art
Deco movement.
Born in New York, Taylor moved to Miami Beach after World War II. He had
fallen in love with the area during an earlier visit and decided to make it
his home. Gertrude, his wife of 59 years and a former beauty queen, joined
him.
Taylor was also president of several political organizations, including
the Biscayne Democratic Club and Dade Better Government League. He also was a
member of civic and religious organizations, including Temple Emanu-El.
Besides his wife and daughter,. Taylor is survived by sons Tony and Lloyd,
eight grandchildren, two great grandchildren and other relatives.
Services begin at 1 p.m. Sunday at Rubin-Zilbert Funeral Chapel, 1701
Alton Rd. Burial will follow at Mount Nebo Memorial Garden Cemetery in Miami.
KEYWORDS: OBITUARY
TAG: 9303270485
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mh RENEWAL RUINS BLOCK, THEN LOCKS SOME RESIDENTS IN 08/29/1982
THE MIAMI HERALD
Copyright (c) 1982, The Miami Herald
DATE: Sunday, August 29, 1982 EDITION: FINAL
SECTION: SPECIAL PAGE: 7M LENGTH: 148 lines
ILLUSTRATION: bw: Nemo Hotel
SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: MICHAEL KRANISH Herald Staff Writer
MEMO: SOUTH BEACH: WHERE DREAMS DIE - Special Section
RENEWAL RUINS BLOCK, THEN LOCKS SOME RESIDENTS IN
Venetian-style lanterns and neon signs announce Picciolo's Italian
restaurant, lighting up one of the dreariest and deadliest blocks on South
Beach. Inside, black-tied waiters
serve a few families in gondola-style booths.
When South Beach redevelopment was planned in 1976, Sam Picciolo thought
it was a dream come true: He was serving 1,000 customers a night, business was
great, and now his 750-seat landmark would be preserved, canals built around
it to create a minature Venice. Customers would arrive on gondolas.
'Today, Sicilian-born Picciolo says, redevelopment has taken away his
business, his neighborhood, and now wants his home.
"I never, I swear, I never wanted to sell the business, " said Picciolo,
sitting behind the 36-year-old restaurant in his immaculate white-and-blue
wood-frame house. "If it weren't for redevelopment, I would never have had to
sell."
Picciolo's block on South Beach, between First and Second Street on
Collins Avenue, has indisputably died because of redevelopment.
Here is the tally: An abandoned bar and restaurant, a vandalized park, a
closed fruit stand, an apartment house that has the cheapest rent in Miami
Beach, and a hotel that produced more police calls than any other in the
city.
In the midst of all this is Picciolo's and the Concord Co- op, a
condominium where 26 Jews and Italians have lived for years. Now most want to
leave, but no one will buy on this block.Pills sold on street
Next to Picciolo's valet parking lot, Black Ozzie arrives at 3 p.m. every
day, peddling dilaudids to somebody outside the sloppy 1921-era Beachview
Apartments, where rooms are as cheap as $475 a year. Half the tenants are
Russian and Polish Jews; half are young Cubans and Americans. Precisely at 5
p.m., an addict comes back from a clinic with methadone, and his friends wait
on a long bench like vultures. A prostitute wails.
On the .portheast corner of Picciolo's block is the Tropicana Bar, closed
by the city after a drug bust, fights and a liquor- license violation. A Cuban
reopened it but found that the main customers, Mariel refugees, stopped coming
when the government stopped mailing out $119 monthly assistance checks.
Next door is an old grocery store, its outdoor fresh-fruit stand empty and
rotting. Three signs have been posted in order on a now-broken window:
"Welcome to our store."
"For Rent. "
"For Sale." ,
On the northwest corner is a children's park, littered with jungle gyms,
swing sets and a few coil-spring horsey seats that have peeled their paint
and lost their spring., The park, called Friendship Corner No. 1, has been
fenced in and is closed at 6 p.m. , but kids break in after dark anyway, in the
style of the South Bronx.
Across the street is Friendship Corner No. 2, which had so many Italian
patrons 20 years ago that the city replaced the shuffleboard courts with bocce
lanes, an Italian bowling game. Now there are only a few Italians, who still
play bocce daily. The promise was broken
"I was 100 per cent for redevelopment, " says one bitter Italian, who wears
'a
rumpled pants, a striped shirt and an old fedora. "I trusted them. I thought I
would get a new place. Now my landlord kicked me out -- he's renting to four
refugees in my old place -- and you should see the hole in the wall I have
now. I can't live anywhere else."
j Picciolo's restaurant is in the middle of the block. To the south is the
Nemo Hotel, a Spanish-style 100-room building with Romanesque pillars and an
open courtyard of dead and dying trees.
For $50 a week, a Nemo patron gets an eight-foot by 10-foot room with
peeling walls, broken floor and a ratty bed. The hallways reek of urine. The
Nemo, consistently cited for hundreds of housing violations, is owned by
Lawrence Taylor, vice chairman of the city's Minimum Housing Standards Board.
"Minimum housing is just that: minimum housing," explains Taylor. "You
can't expect me to spend a lot of money to fix this up when it's supposed to
have been torn down for nine years for redevelopment." His is the lament of
nearly every landlord in the redevelopment area, including the founding
member of the Miami Beach Redevelopment Agency, David Klevens, who owns the
nearby Biscayne-Collins Hotel, and has been sued by the city to fix housing
violations.
In the Nemo's sparesly furnished lobby, where the Redevelopment Agency
once had its headquarters, is a Chamber of Commerce poster of a beautiful
blonde wearing a swimsuit and holding a monocle to her eye.
"Suddenly, Miami Beach is Very, Very International." the poster declares.
Mixed clientele
The rooms now are filled with refugees, aimless and poor Americans and an
assortment of Miamians spending the weekend on the Beach. Outside, young men
and women drink beer and watch the occasional traffic on Collins Avenue. At 2
a.m., the junkies and young prostitutes walk by, eliciting only catcalls.
The Nemo, a block from the police station, provoked 216 police calls
between July 19, 1981 and June 14, 1982, almost twice as many as any other
address in Miami Beach. It is infamous among the officers for its stabbings,
robberies and shootings. When asked about South Beach, the first thing police
usually mention is The Nemo.
"That place is the worst on South Beach, " says Sgt. Thomas Hunker, a
10-year veteran.
Across from the southern side of The Nemo is the Four Freedoms, a Jewish
nursing home, where the tenants stay inside, singing songs like Hava Nagila
and playing cards. But, mostly, they stay in bed.
The tenants of the Nemo sit directly across from the Concord Co-op, 101
Collins Ave. , an attractive two-story building built in 1959 by Aaron •
Goldman. He found that New York Jews were yearning for an East Side in the sun
but didn't want the unstable rents of an Ocean Drive hotel or apartment.
So Goldman built the forerunner of a condominium: a tenant- owned
apartment house called a co-op, similar to co-ops built by Jewish and
socialist unions in New York City tp break the landlord monopolies. Most of
those who bought at the Concord were owning their American Dream home for the
first time: At 65. No one goes out at night
Today, a half-dozen elderly tenants crouch outside the Concord in little
chairs, staring at the tenants of The Nemo, who lie on concrete benches. The
Concord tenants never leave their building after dark; they just sit.
"This was a beautiful street when I bought here 15 years ago, " said Wolf
Ascknazy, 78. "Now, it's no good, very dangerous. I moved here from New York
to get away from the robbers. Here, it was beautiful, especially for Jewish
people. Now look at it. "
When World War II hit Poland, Ascknazy was forced onto a train to a Nazi
camp at a place called Bromberg. His family was killed. He stayed at Bromberg
for eight years. Then he came to New York, worked different jobs, vacationed
on Miami Beach, loved it, and bought a little place at the Concord Co-op.
{
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•
"Now it is worse than being in the Nazi camps, because I can't leave, "
Ascknazy says.
Other tenants mutter agreement: Sadie Mundelo, an Italian- born woman who
left her Miami home 12 years ago for the tranquility of South Beach, locks her
door at nightfall. David Finklestein, 82, fled Tsar Nicholas II's pogroms in
1909. He started work for 13 cents an hour in a Jersey City tailor shop, was a
tailor all his life, and moved to the "very beautiful block" in 1965. He would
leave if only he could. Twenty-two are trapped
But the 22 tenants -- four have died since redevelopment was planned in
1976 -- cannot leave. Like 1,300 other elderly who own condominiums in the
redevelopment area, the residents at the Concord cannot get a buyer at a fair
price for a building that is supposed to be torn down, that is now surrounded
by cheap hotels and crime.
Now Sam Picciolo, who advocated redevelopment so fervently, is on the side
of the Concord residents.
The 1, 000 nightly customers dropped to just 50 by 1980. Nothing could be
sadder to Picciolo than a virtually empty four- room restaurant, each table
set'with a red tablecloth, four cloth napkins and four wine glasses.
So he sold his property at one-third the market value to his former chef,
Alfredo Santisi, who prays nightly that redevelopment will rescue the
business. Already, he has reduced the kitchen staff from 52 to 17.
As Picciolo's serves the early bird special into the night, the Concord
residents lock their doors. The tenants of the Beachview and Nemo begin to
take control of the street.
"People are afraid to come down to our restaurant, " laments Santisi, the
Picciolo's part owner."In 10 years, this block has changed 100 per cent. The
neighborhood was splendid. Now you don't want to go out."
And Sam Picciolo is having trouble getting to sleep.
"If I knew then what I know today, I would never have supported
redevelopment," he says. "As a businessman, it looked great to me, but look
what it's done to this block."
KEYWORDS: MB HOUSING ELDERLY
TAG: 8201220393
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