Sunday, August 24, 2014

"Miami Icons: Opa-locka City Hall, an Arabesque Dream in the Face of Urban Decay"

More on Opa-locka Florida – the city based on The Arabian Nights – from Miami New Times, apharisto ya Pedro -

"Miami Icons: Opa-locka City Hall, an Arabesque Dream in the Face of Urban Decay

picture by Karli Evans

 San Francisco has the Golden Gate Bridge. St. Louis has the Arch. Las Vegas has its retro welcome sign. It seems like every city has an iconic structure to represent itself to the rest of the world. Every city but Miami, that is. The Magic City is full of architectural gems, and maybe that's why no one building has come to define it. But that's left this town without a symbol of its own. In our Miami Icons series, we're aiming to fix that. Today, writer Abel Folgar argues that Opa-locka's City Hall is the perfect metaphor for Miami.

------------------------------------------

Founded in 1926 by aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss and fashioned by a bizarre penchant for the One Thousand and One Nights, Opa-locka is the largest architectural example of the Moorish Revival style in the west, with the city hall building being the flagship that arrows out to other structures in the city. The 1926 Great Miami Hurricane effectively destroyed South Florida, and the newly minted City of Opa-locka was not exempt. But a large majority of the buildings survived -- the mettle with which dreams are built."


No comments:

Post a Comment