Heat promised a bayfront park, but space still parking lot

Parcel B, the 4-acre piece of bayfront property behind AmericanAirlines Arena, has just been dubbed Dan Paul Plaza. But it’s still not a park, despite promises made 25 years ago.

After 25 years, MiamiDade County commissioners finally took some action on a rare chunk of undeveloped downtown bayfront known as “Parcel B.”

The Miami Heat trumpeted a promise to create a lushly landscaped park with a soccer field on the county-owned land during its 1996 campaign to win voter approval for AmericanAirlines Arena on Biscayne Bay.

But coveted, abused Parcel B, hidden behind the arena, has remained a parking lot that affords beautiful waterfront views to cars, limos, TV trucks and tractor trailers during Heat games and arena

events. It is still padlocked behind a fence most of the time. It still has a patch of grass and a wide expanse of asphalt where you could land a small plane.

No, commissioners didn’t decide to convert the four-acre site into a park. They just gave Parcel B a new name — a name that only angers advocates who have fought to get the NBA franchise and county to follow through on the plan for a public park.

The property was christened Dan Paul Plaza during a brief ceremony last month. Outgoing Commissioner Audrey Edmondson unveiled two signs adorned with the county’s blue and green logo and the name of the late Miami attorney — a prominent civic leader and champion of public access to bayfront land.

The plaza designation amounts to cruel irony, said Grace Solares, former Urban Environment

League president.

“Dan Paul must be rolling over in his grave,” she said. “This is not only an insult to him but to the taxpayers who voted to build that arena based on a pledge that they would get a downtown park. It’s a mockery. I find it offensive.”

Paul opposed building the tax-subsidized arena on county land in 1996 when the team ran an aggressive campaign encouraging voters to support a plan that would enable the Heat to move out of 8-year-old Miami Arena a few blocks west and into a new waterfront palace with more luxury seating and a favorable lease with the county. A Parcel B public park, advertised with gorgeous renderings of soccer games, frolicking kids and passing sailboats under sunny skies, was the carrot of the deal.

During demonstrations over the years at Parcel B, protesters have waved

“Dan Paul Park” signs and wrote “Dan Paul Park” in chalk on the pavement.

“What is a so-called plaza anyway?” Solares said. “They’re just going to leave it as a vacant pigpen. An absolute waste of what could be wonderful. The abuses of the people’s land never end.”

The new signs do represent something rare in the history of Parcel B — an actual decision to do something. Otherwise, there has been a lot of talk about the prime piece of real estate but no action.

The county, which entertained ideas to build a parking garage, a Cuban exile history museum and a condominium tower on Parcel B, and which added pavement in 2015 to accommodate an E Prix electric car racing event that flopped, has no new plans for what it calls “a public green space” that is not managed by the parks department.

Though frustrated by the hollow renaming, park proponents aren’t giving up.

NEW MAYORAL SUPPORT?

New Mayor Daniella Levine Cava has long supported making the site into a real park. Now that she’s in charge, they’re hoping she can do it, perhaps by dusting off and enhancing a 2017 county blueprint that showed a large half-moon-shaped lawn, an oval track, a dog run and shade trees that was shelved due to lack of funds after the first phase was installed, a row of palm trees and five benches along the waterfront.

“Especially now, public parks and open spaces are an essential part of our health as we encourage the public to enjoy time safely outdoors during the pandemic,” Levine Cava said in response to questions from the Herald. “I want to honor our commitment to the community to make Parcel B a truly accessible, safe public space, and will work with all stakeholders to move that goal forward.”

Levine Cava, then-Commissioner Xavier Suarez and Edmondson attended a 2015 demonstration and spoke in favor of “assuring that my constituency gets what they want, and what they want is for Parcel B to be a park,” Edmondson said. But they were always in the minority on commission votes about what to do with Parcel B, including votes to charge the Heat heavily discounted rental fees far below market value for the prime real estate.

The Heat, which has opposed plans to alter Parcel B, issued a statement when the Herald asked what the team — owned by Micky Arison, the billionaire chairman of Carnival Corporation — envisions for the future of the site. Logistically, it is a business asset for the team, which rents the lot from the county, and uses it for parking and as a staging area.

When the circus came to town, elephants were housed there.

“Parcel B is the property of Miami-Dade County,” the Heat said. “We have been engaged with the county and other interested parties about that space many times throughout the years and have always strived to be a good partner and neighbor.”

Former county mayor Alex Penelas, who initially opposed AmericanAirlines Arena before throwing his support to the Heat’s referendum campaign, said he is disappointed that Parcel B has wound up a nebulous plaza.

“The intention was to make it a park, and the voters definitely can say they were misled if it turns into something other than a park,” he said. “But the flip side is that it hasn’t been developed. At least there’s no condo standing there. Those of us who want parks and public spaces and who want places like the Indian Circle preserved have not had the full vision realized. But at the appropriate time I’m hopeful we’ll get the resources to fulfill the prom

ise for Parcel B.”

GROWING NEED FOR PARKS

As the downtown Miami residential population grows, the need for park space grows, too, said Peter Ehrlich, president of the Urban Environment League. Miami ranked

64th in the Trust for Public Land’s 2020 ParkScore Index rating park access and quality in 100 large U.S. cities. A 2019 report by Geotab ranked Miami 14th out of 15 major U.S. cities in green space per capita.

“A plaza means it’s going to remain a concrete hardscape,” he said. “The Heat does not want anyone there except their customers and their trucks, and our government leaders give the Heat whatever they want, including a one-sided rent deal for another sports team owned by a billionaire. The citizens have been conned, and with Dan Paul Plaza they’re conned again.”

The only component usable by the public — if you know where Parcel B is and if it is open — is one section of the baywalk. But plans to connect its northern edge to the FEC boat slip walkway and Maurice Ferre Park and to connect its southern edge under the PortMiami bridge to Bayside Marketplace and Bayfront Park and onward to the Miami River have never been completed.

One of Paul’s favorite causes was construction of a continuous bayfront pathway extending along the coast from south MiamiDade to north MiamiDade. Ambitious but possible, he said, and it would be transformative for Miami so that everyone, not just the wealthy, would have access to Miami’s defining asset. He invoked examples like Sydney, Chicago and New York, where opening up waterfront land with walkways, bikeways and parks has been a priority. Today Miami’s baywalk exists in sequences, broken up by gaps, private lots, public properties or upscale housing enclaves.

“If Miami thought it could get more on the tax roll, it would construct a whorehouse in Bayfront Park,” the quotable Paul once said.

PARCEL B: A PAWN

Parcel B (the arena is on Parcel A) has been racked by controversy and used as a pawn since 1996, when the plan to build a basketball arena on waterfront land that was supposed to be part of redesigned Bicentennial Park faced resistance from voters.

In fact, “the arena project appeared to be doomed,” said Mike Murphy, then a political consultant working for the Heat. So the team began touting a Parcel B park and soccer field to woo skeptical white voters and win the referendum vote, Murphy wrote in a 2004 Sports Business Journal article under the headline “Successful strategies for pitching an arena project to voters.”

“In Dade County, Cuban-Americans saw the arena as a symbol of pride and local achievement. African-Americans saw an economic project bringing new jobs and had pride in the local NBA team,” Murphy wrote. “White voters were most excited about a new family-friendly park on Miami’s waterfront, including soccer fields and a new arena which would bring in concerts and other entertainment events.

“Recasting the arena as a waterfront park and arena was to be key to our campaign.”

The team featured

Coach Pat Riley and players in a barnstorming bus tour, and Riley appeared in “political-campaign-style TV ads to deliver our message that Miami was a world-class city that deserved a world-class waterfront park and arena,” Murphy wrote. “In five weeks, we were able to shift the referendum debate from a question of building a sports arena for a millionaire owner and his millionaire players to one of securing Miami’s reputation as a first-tier American city.”

Opponents of building sports arenas on public land typically “will not have the resources to wage a traditional campaign with television ads and the other tactics we used in the Miami Heat campaign. This is a big advantage that owners should fully exploit,” Murphy wrote of the Heat’s $3.5 million blitz that included direct-mail fliers and phone calls.

A ‘RUSE’ TO ERODE PUBLIC LANDS

“That’s how they won the vote, with that sales job, and no one has ever really had the guts to challenge the Heat since because all our politicians are dazzled by sports teams and their owners,” said Gregory Bush, a former University of Miami history professor, environmental activist and author of “White Sand, Black Beach: Civil Rights, Public Space and Miami’s Virginia Key.” “It was absurd from the outset to put an indoor arena on Biscayne Bay.”

Bush called Parcel B “representative of all the ruses that have eroded public land in Miami.”

“Now we’ve got the current effort to turn Melreese golf course into a soccer stadium that’s really a mega mall-office-hotel project by a private developer,” he said.

Bush is not optimistic that Parcel B will ever be anything other than a parking lot. He recalled attempted land grabs at adjacent Maurice Ferre Park, formerly Museum Park, where the Marlins and David Beckham’s pro soccer team sought to build stadiums and where Commissioner Joe Carollo proposed filling in the FEC boat slip and building a restaurant, marina and boatyard complex.

“I became so cynical and burned out fighting for the public interest in Miami that I moved to Maine,” said Bush, who now enjoys an abundance of green and bayfront space in Blue Hill, Maine. “But I’m keeping an eye on Parcel B.”