See this South Beach area? I figure we can buy it for a song. See? About three, four million, maybe five million, and we take it down and we build a Disneyland— pretty big blockbuster idea!
—FRANK SINATRA in A Hole in the Head, 1959 (filmed at the Cardozo Hotel)
It was five o'clock in the morning on a warm October night in 1988 and Gary Farmer, thirty-five, had just locked up his restaurant, The Strand, and decided to stroll up Collins Avenue on his way home, taking his time. He loved South Beach early in the morning, so quiet and still, hardly a soul on the street save for a hooker who had drifted over from Washington Avenue to smoke crack in a doorway. There was no moon that night, and all the buildings looked the color of bone. South Beach had an elegiac beauty to it, like a seaside village lost in time; it could have been 1988 or 1938. Almost nothing new had been built in forty years, and most of the buildings were peeling apart, layer by layer, time bombs of decay built of cement mixed with sand from the beach and salt water from the ocean. “It looked as if Disneyland had been left to rot,” Farmer said.
Lining lower Collins Avenue were scores of two-or three-story apartment buildings and hotels. Like snowflakes, no two were alike. They were an improbable combination of styles— Bauhaus modern, Mediterranean, tropical, Mayan— that had somehow been alchemized into what preservationists were calling “Art Deco,” but wasn't exactly. They were actually a little cheesy, but that didn't matter; that was part of the fun. What mattered was that all of them were a piece in time, fanciful works that were intended to bring pleasure to the eye. They shared a specific architectural vocabulary, a sense of speed, of aeroplane moderne, of ocean-liner mechanical. They had rounded corners that looked like the right angles had been worn smooth, and thin ledges above the windows called “eyebrows” that shielded the tropical sun. Porthole windows called “occuli” were popular and made some buildings look like they might set sail. Some of the buildings were topped with ziggurats and spires, and the Delano Hotel had an architectural headdress that looked like the tail end of Buck Rogers s rocket ship had sprouted feathers.
“South Beach was magic at night,” Farmer said. “Just beautiful. Peaceful. It was a neighborhood that had been built before everyone drove there in cars and when everything was walkable. The scale of the place was so small that the UPS delivery man might pull up next to you at a red light and recognize you and hand off your package. You could walk everywhere and recognize the faces of your neighbors on the street.”
But Farmer had a feeling that wouldn't last.
The cozy, dilapidated little neighborhood was about to be shaken awake from a 20-year nap. Everybody who lived there felt it. Over the last few years several of the old hotels along Ocean Drive had been bought up and renovated by developers, and new cafés and restaurants were beginning to attract customers from across the causeway who were brave enough to venture to South Beach. There was a nightclub called Club Nu on 21st Street named for the Egyptian god of the night that had wild go-go dancers and changed its interior every six weeks, and on weekends the Carlyle Hotel on Ocean Drive had live jazz and attracted high rollers from out of the neighborhood who arrived in stretch limousines with women who looked like gun molls. The Rolling Stones’ guitarist Ron Wood, an early fan of South Beach, had opened a music club named Woody s on 4th and Ocean, and on Lincoln Road, all but abandoned except by the homeless who slept in the doorways of the vacant shops, a new cooperative called the Florida Arts Center, with over forty studios, had opened and become the hub of a growing artists’ colony, with more artists and creative people moving to South Beach every week, attracted by good light and cheap rents.
Exactly what kindled this revivification of South Beach was a lucky confluence of events. A group of preservationists had succeeded in creating an Art Deco historic district. In 1983 the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude surrounded eleven small islands in Bis-cayne Bay with 6.5 million square feet of pink polyurethane and brought worldwide photographic coverage to the metropolis, showing how beautiful Miami was, and for the first time in years the city got into the news for something other than being the murder capital of the United States. That same year the movie Scarface, directed by Brian De Palma and starring Al Pacino as Tony Montana, a ruthless Cuban cocaine dealer, virtually defined the Golden Age of Drug Dealing in Miami Beach and made the city seem scary yet exciting, like Casablanca in the 1940s. In September of 1984 the TV cops-and-drug dealers show Miami Vice premiered and became a national obsession, thrusting Miami Beach into the spotlight for four years and even sparking a fashion trend for men of unstructured sport jackets and pastel-colored T-shirts. About the time that Miami Vice debuted, the influential fashion photographer Bruce Weber introduced the fashion industry to Miami Beach, both by recommendation— he bought a house just north of Miami Beach— and through his prolific fashion layouts. Another piece of the puzzle fell in place in September of 1986, when fifty journalists were flown to Miami Beach from New York for a whirlwind weekend to promote a Miami/Vegas issue of Andy Warhol's Interview magazine, sending the city's hipster quotient soaring with media taste-makers.
But for many, the most significant harbinger of change was Gary Farmer's restaurant, The Strand, which opened at the end of November 1986. Like Les Deux Magots in Paris, Max's Kansas City in New York, and the Odeon in Tribeca— where Gary Farmer worked behind the bar in the 1980s— The Strand became the quintessential hangout of its time and place. How it was that The Strand managed to embody the promise of a new South Beach is hard to explain, except that its pull was so ineluctable that the cognoscenti would get off a plane from New York at Miami International and take a taxi directly to the restaurant with their luggage. “The Strand was the beginning of the end of the old world order,” Micky Wolfson Jr. remembered. “The Strand set the pace. It set the style. Big time”
Among the restaurant's financial backers were the artists Donald Sultan and April Gornick; Kay Bearman, a curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Lisa Phillips, an associate curator of the Whitney Museum; and New York cultural czar Henry Geldzahler. Most of all it had Gary Farmer himself, a charming and gracious host. Farmer and two partners had leased the shell of a defunct 12,000-square-foot kosher restaurant called The Famous, stripped the red and gold-flocked wallpaper and decades of linoleum on the floor, and transformed it into a low-key, open space, with roomy booths, mirrors, a glass-block bar, and comfortable beige sofas where patrons could sit and watch the array of people coming through the door: Lauren Hutton; Philip Glass; Paloma Picasso; Prince; Daryl Hannah and John F. Kennedy Jr.; and, as filler, all the gorgeous young model wannabes of South Beach. “When we started,” said Farmer, “we put a lot more emphasis on the waiters than we did on the food. We wanted people to be the focus. I wanted people in bathing suits next to people in tuxedos.”
At least a part of the attraction was that it was located in one of the most dangerous parts of town, the center of the crack-cocaine trade, and Farmer had to provide curbside valet service at The Strand and a secure parking lot because customers were afraid to park on the street and have their cars stolen— or the gas siphoned out. One night everyone in the dining room stood to watch as a drama played out on the street on the other side of the big glass windows— a drug dealers’ gang fight, with men stabbing each other to death right on the sidewalk like a Jerome Robbins dance from West Side Story.
“BARBARA, is that you?”
Gary Farmer had reached the corner of 12th and Collins and saw what he thought was a homeless woman sitting in the shadows on the front steps of the boarded-up Senator Hotel. It was a shell, about to be demolished, the windows smashed, the neon signs that spelled POOL and SENATOR ripped from the front of the building and smashed on the ground, waiting for the garbage dumpster.
When Farmer got closer he realized the woman sitting on the hotel's steps wasn't a bag lady at all; it was Barbara Baer Capitman.
She peered at him in the darkness and warbled, “Who is that?”
“It's Gary Farmer,” he answered, walking over to where she was sitting. She looked tired and a lot older than her sixty-eight years. A few months before, she had been hospitalized for pneumonia and she had never fully recovered. Her eyes had dark pouches under them, and her wavy gray hair didn't look like it had been recently combed. She was a big, ungainly woman, dressed in a shapeless peasant blouse with a large arts-and-crafts necklace of amber beads around her neck, a full skirt, and tennis sneakers. She was, as the journalist Tom Austin described her, “a glorious mess.” Next to her on the steps was a huge pocketbook, her “magic” pocketbook and handy “portable filing cabinet,” from which she seemingly could produce anything, from a slide show on an Art Deco building in Seattle to a portable typewriter.
“You shouldn't be out here all by yourself at five in the morning,” Farmer said. “It's very dangerous.”
“But I have to be here,” Capitman answered in her odd, trilling voice. “I'm here for the hotel. When the sun comes up they're going to start tearing it down.”
Strange lady. Here she was sitting shivah on the steps of a deserted hotel looking like a homeless person, and yet the Miami Heraldhad named her one of the most influential women in South Florida, the “mother of Art Deco.” It was hard to explain the quiddity of Barbara Capitman without making her sound like a crank. A relative newcomer to the area, she managed to polarize the city and throw a wrench into the machinery that could have brought it into the twenty-first century. There were many respected real estate developers who believed that Barbara Baer Capitman and her meddling would end up killing Miami Beach. The city needed to grow and renew, not save the old buildings, symbols of the Beach's failure to keep up. If history was any judge, tourism on Miami Beach depended on the newness of hotels, not the oldness. Murray Gold, the executive director of the Miami Beach Resort Hotel Association, is famously quoted by local pundits: “No one in their right mind just walks around and looks at old buildings.”
Yet nearly ten years before, in 1979, Capitman and her coterie of supporters had managed to have 1,200 buildings in South Beach, just north of the area Stephen Muss wanted to rebuild, declared a National Historic District by the federal government. Her idea was to create an Art Deco section called “Old Miami Beach” that would be a living theme park, along the lines of Williamsburg, Virginia, or something that Disney would create. She envisioned that the employees of the district would wear period costumes from the 1930s and 1940s, and there would be big bands and swing music and dancing in the ballrooms, and the Art Deco cinema on Washington Avenue would show movies with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. “If you preserve the architecture and design of the Miami Beach Art Deco District, economic growth and welfare of the area will follow,” was her dogma. “This is going to be the center of the arts for all of Florida, and Ocean Drive is going to be lined with sidewalk cafés.”
But there was a catch.
Although the federal government recognized the district as historic,1* the city of Miami Beach was not bound to protect it. The federal designation had no local effect on whether or not a building could be torn down by its owner. It took the city three years to pass a toothless historic-preservation ordinance that required the owner's consent for a building to be declared protected— hardly a preservation law at all.
“You have to understand the context under which all of this was happening,” Micky Wolfson said. “The Art Deco preservationists came on the heels of the building moratorium and Stephen Muss's Redevelopment Agency fiasco, so the hardest thing for people to swallow was the idea of “My God! I can't do with my property what I want to do with my property?’ These poor people had so many times been promised— you know— the redevelopment plan promised them everything, and then all of a sudden nothing.”
It wasn't until January 1988 that Miami Beach city commissioners voted to give the city's Historic Preservation Board real power to stop the demolition of buildings in South Beach's National Historic District. But the law passed too late to save the Senator Hotel, which had already been slated for oblivion. At first glance at the Senator it was hard to understand what all the fuss was about. It was a rather dinky, three-story building built in 1939 with rounded corners and wraparound windows, a porch, and a tall spire at the corner. It was an average, second-rate retirement hotel for Social Security pensioners who could not afford an ocean-front hotel one block east on Ocean Drive. Some elderly tenants paid as little as $10 a week for a tiny room. Capitman thought it was one of the city's best examples of Art Deco hotels, part of some four hundred hotels, apartment buildings, and private homes designed by architect L. Murray Dixon, whose prodigious work dominated the city in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet nobody paid much attention to the Senator before Capitman declared it her Rubicon.
But the hotel had a deeper, more emotional significance for Capitman. Her eldest son, Andrew, once owned it, and his wife, Margaret Doyle, had beautifully restored the exterior. It was one of several hotels Andrew Capitman bought in 1979 with a group of investors to show skeptics how the old hotels in South Beach could be affordably renovated, instead of being razed. Andrew took his entire savings of $50,000 and used it as a down payment to buy the run-down Cardozo Hotel at 1300 Ocean Drive for $800,000, and over the next two years he assembled sixty-eight limited partners in seven South Beach properties, including the Senator.
The Cardozo Hotel, called “a streamlined three-story modern gem” by Paul Goldberger in the New York Times, was the silent star of the 1959 Frank Capra movie A Hole in the Head, produced by and starring Frank Sinatra as the owner of a run-down hotel who can't make his mortgage payments and who has the prescient idea to turn the whole area into a Disneyland-like amusement park. Andrew Capitman renovated the Cardozo and opened it in December 1982, and for a brief time it became a seaside version of Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel, a curio cabinet with a Fellini-esque cast. “The combined effect of which,” said the Miami Herald, “has been the transformation of a spooky neighborhood filled with shady characters into a … spooky neighborhood filled with shady characters … ” The colorful assortment of habitués included the Chilean painter Enrique Castro-Cid, artist Woody Von Drasek, the writer John Rothschild, and two elderly women named Zelda and Elizabeth who shared a room to save money and dressed up every morning as if they were going to a party. The hotel's regulars also included the smiling Scull sisters, Haydee and Sahara, primitive artists from Cuba who designed and sewed their matching clothing, and Marie Zimmer, a destitute old woman who wore turbans and flamboyant thrift-shop gowns. Barbara Capitman encouraged Zimmer to inhabit one of the tables on the terrazzo porch and read palms and tell fortunes that always had a happy ending. After Zimmer died it was discovered that she had a yearly income of $100,000 in interest from more than fifty savings accounts in different banks and brokerages.
Alas, the price tag for bringing the seven hotels up to code was astronomical and the banks weren't giving mortgages because the area had been “ red-lined” as a slum. In 1984 Andrew Capitman was forced to sell his hotels to investors from Philadelphia called the Royale Group, who eventually decided that the Senator property could be put to better use as a parking garage.
Adding to Barbara's distress was that her best friend, Leonard Horowitz, had lived at the Senator for two years in the corner suite, filled with cartons and canvases and piles of fabrics. Leonard gave cocktail parties there for the members of the Miami Design Preservation League, and he and his friends had water fights in the pool and drifted around on floats looking up at the taller Art Deco buildings that surrounded them. It was Leonard who had painted the lovely mermaid bas-relief in the Senator's pool, and it was loyal Leonard who sat lonely vigils with her to save the hotel until he was too sick to stay any longer. Now Leonard was dead and so was the Senator.
When the Senator's demise was announced eighteen months before, Capitman declared the demolition the “most tragic, awful, crazy thing” that could happen. She went so far as to travel to Washington, D.C., to attend the National Trust for Historic Preservation conference, where she handed out hundreds of postcards with a photograph of the Senator to the surprised delegates, imploring them for intervention and help. A City Council meeting on the subject degenerated into “a shouting match fraught with frustration and fatigue,” the Miami Herald reported. There were demonstrations, protests, reprieves, and setbacks. The city offered the Royale Group a land swap in exchange for the Senator Hotel, or to put a referendum on the ballot to issue a $5 million bond to build other parking facilities for the area that would benefit the Royale Group's hotels. But it only prolonged the agony. Miami Beach mayor Alex Daoud described the Senator's saga as “crisis to crisis,” adding, “I feel like Custer at the Little Big Horn.” Eventually Mayor Daoud got sick of mediating between the two recalcitrant parties. “The Senator has achieved more prominence since it was targeted for demolition than it ever had during its heyday,” he said.
In August 1988, days before the demolition was scheduled to begin, Mayor Daoud made a dramatic appearance at a Miami Design Preservation League rally at The Strand restaurant, where he announced that the demolition had been rescheduled and the Senator had yet another reprieve until September 7. Capitman was not appeased. “We can't keep being poised on the edge of disaster,” she told the Miami Herald. One morning not long after that meeting, graffiti appeared on the facade of the Senator with the words SAVE ME and the warning DEMOLITION IS FOREVER. It was under those words that Capitman was sitting on the October night that Gary Farmer found her, all appeals exhausted, the building she had fought so hard to save condemned to destruction at first light.
Farmer asked Capitman, “Why isn't anybody else here with you?”
“Because nobody else cares,” Capitman said. “Somebody has to sit here.”
Farmer knew better; it wasn't that nobody else cared, it was that nobody else cared as much as she did. Several of her colleagues had sat vigil with her, but she had worn out her friends and supporters, and pushed them away with her stubbornness.
“You go home, Gary,” she warbled, shooing him away. “I'm okay here by myself.” But Farmer said he would not leave her. “It's too dangerous for you to be sitting here alone,” he insisted, and he stayed and talked with her until dawn and the street slowly came to life with people and cars. Farmer kissed Barbara good-bye on the cheek and went home to sleep.
An hour or two later, when the demolition crew and the TV cameras arrived along with a small crowd of people, Capitman produced from her bottomless pocketbook a black graduation gown that she occasionally wore to represent the “robes of justice” and put it on over her clothes. She held up a picture of the Senator Hotel as it had once looked in its glory days and tried to make a speech to the gathering crowd, but there was too much noise for her to be heard, and soon a Miami Beach uniformed policeman removed her from the property and led her off, unrepentant. She told supporters she was too upset to watch the actual demolition and left for home. When the 361/2-ton backhoe began to tear into the walls of the hotel, people watching cried in one another's arms. Months after the rubble was carted away and the earth flattened, it turned out that the Royale Group couldn't afford to build a parking garage. Instead, asphalt was poured, creating an ugly parking lot with spaces for forty-four cars— which is what it remains to this very day.
The day after the police removed Barbara Capitman from the Senator's front porch, she had severe chest pains in her apartment and an ambulance took her to St. Francis Hospital. While she was waiting for the ambulance to arrive, she telephoned the hospital's director of public relations.
“This is Barbara Capitman,” she told him, “and I'm checking in. You better tell the press.”
MIAMI HERALD
October 14, 1988
Art Deco preservationist Barbara Capitman was in stable condition Thursday night at St. Francis Hospital in Miami Beach after she complained of chest pains earlier in the afternoon. Capitman, who has a history of heart trouble, had been locked in a struggle to save the historic Senator Hotel from the wrecking ball.
On Wednesday the Royale Group, which owns the Senator, began to raze the Art Deco–style hotel at 1201 Collins Avenue to make room for a parking garage. The demolition will take eight days to complete.
“It's been enormously stressful,” she said. “My phone is ringing all the time with people calling me and weeping and telling me how they feel.”
FOR MOST of Barbara's life it had been about her husband, and that had been okay. Before Will Capitman, nobody thought she'd ever get married. She was shy around men and went through a year of psychotherapy— an unheard-of thing to do in the 1940s— to figure out why she couldn't fall in love. She was twenty-eight years old when they met, two years older than Will. They were introduced in New York City in 1948 at a May Day party given by friends in the Young Communist League, both supporters of the third-party candidate Henry Wallace, who had been smeared in the press as being a “pinko.” On their first date they went to City Island and walked along the water and looked at the Manhattan skyline. Two months later they were married by a justice of the peace and took their wedding picture in a photo machine at Woolworth's. “I'd barely kissed him before we were married,” she said.
Barbara was an only child of strict German Jewish parents— her father was an importer of children's sweaters and her mother a painter and sculptor. She attended New York University, where she received a bachelor's degree in English. Will was a strapping guy from Brooklyn who enjoyed the outdoors and camping and kayaking, alien activities to her. He had been a UPI correspondent who'd covered the Japanese war trials, and Barbara supported him while he went to New York University School of Law. When Will graduated in 1951, the character committee failed him for having been a member of the Young Communist League and barred him from becoming an attorney. For years he made a living teaching business and marketing at Harvard and Yale, and at the University of Pittsburgh, where they lived while Barbara went to Carnegie Mellon to get a master's in art history. They had two sons, Andrew, in 1949, and John, in 1954.
In New York they opened a marketing research business, which Barbara subsidized by doing public relations for industrial design groups. Together they published two dozen books and pamphlets about social issues under Will's name, including in 1973 a well-received précis about the social responsibility of corporations called Panic in the Boardroom: New Social Realities Shake Old Corporate Structures. Later that year Will got a job offer— a tenured position at Florida International University School of Business.
Barbara and Will packed their belongings and moved to a small rented house in the artists’ colony of Coconut Grove, in Miami. They had little interest in moribund Miami Beach, but Will was fascinated by what he called the “reminiscent lifestyle” and one day drove Barbara to Ocean Drive to see the Plym outh Hotel. “Why are you showing me that ugly old thing?” she demanded. Barbara remembered Ocean Drive from when she went there at the age of twenty-two to see her father, whose sweater manufacturing business had failed, and who was recuperating from an illness in Miami Beach because his doctor prescribed that he “stick his feet in the sand.”
For Barbara and Will Capitman the shores of Miami did not have such a salubrious effect. They had barely unpacked in Coconut Grove when Barbara was diagnosed with viral myocarditis, a progressive viral infection of the heart. She was bedridden for her first two years in her new home, during which time Will took care of her until she regained her strength. In the summer of 1975 the family rented a vacation cottage in Maine to get out of the tropical heat, and while there Will unexpectedly fell ill. His diagnosis was shocking— pancreatic cancer, and there was little time to prepare; he died in a Boston hospital just two weeks after being diagnosed, on July 28, 1975, at the age of fifty-four.
So much had happened to Barbara so quickly and unrelentingly— the move to Miami, her getting sick, Will's dying, then suddenly her being left alone in a city where she was practically a stranger— that her voice changed from the trauma. She began to speak in a high-pitched, fluttering whine that became the trademark of her plight. For the rest of her life people would make fun of her unusual voice and mimic her. But sometimes people would listen too.
After Will's funeral, Barbara's two sons, Andrew, then twenty-five and starting out in the banking business, and John, twenty, a senior at Yale, went with her to Martha's Vineyard, where a friend loaned them a small cabin, isolated on the beach with no electricity, only oil lamps and a woodstove. “We huddled together in our sadness,” Andrew said. “And we talked a lot about the future.” He and John told Barbara that she'd never have to worry about money, or feel the need to support herself, because together the boys would take care of her. She would be free to do anything she felt good about doing. And they weren't talking about a cruise to Martinique. “The idea,” said Andrew, “was that she wanted to do some social good.”
In the fall of 1975 Barbara returned to Miami alone and moved from Coconut Grove to a new apartment at 1198 Venetian Causeway in Miami Beach. At first she floundered. She started something called the Sea Institute, whose mission was to prevent the construction of high-rise apartment towers along the beaches from Miami to Key West, but the Sea Institute idea didn't last long before it petered out. She was stumped, more than a little restless, searching for something to do, something of significance, and somebody to do it with.
And that's when she met thirty-year-old Leonard Horowitz.
IN 1975 Leonard Horowitz was a doorman at Seacoast Towers V, one of the complex of luxury condominium buildings on Collins Avenue that were built in the 1960s by the Muss family.
Leonard didn't make very much money holding open the doors for rich people at Seacoast Towers, and he wasn't a very good doorman anyway, he would happily admit. It was just a temporary way to make ends meet until he got a real job in design, or he sold one of his canvases. So instead of being formal with the residents and visitors like the other doormen, he was just himself— goofy, flamboyant, inappropriately chummy, and sometimes a little annoying. Most of all, he was demonstrative and loud; when Leonard sneezed, he made such a great production of it that people out by the pool could hear, and his sneeze was nowhere near as attention-getting as his high-pitched, staccato laugh. Years later, when Leonard was called “an outrageous faggot” in an article about him in an architectural magazine, one of his friends asked if he was angry, and Leonard said incredulously, “But I am an outrageous faggot.”
He had full lips, big ears, a receding hairline, and never much success in love. His hobby was collecting business cards. His clothes were bought in thrift shops, redolent with turpentine and paints from his oil paintings, none of which he ever sold, yet which he continued to paint, undaunted. He didn't care much about fashion, but he did have a great sense of style. He sometimes wore rhinestone shoe buckles strung together as a necklace or clipped to the lapel of his jacket. He lived alone in a grungy apartment near the Venetian Causeway and pedaled to work every day on an orange bicycle.
There were days at Seacoast Towers when he hardly seemed to notice people walking by. Sometimes he was just stoned on pot, but there were also days when he was meditating. Even as people came in and out of the building and he was directing visitors to the elevators and ringing upstairs, he was on another plane, dimension, experiencing, picturing … color … in his mind. Solid color. Transparent color. The colors of South Beach, at sunset and sunrise. He saw tones that were subtle, soft, pinks and blues, the tropical air so moist that the colors had no edges; they seeped into one another so it seemed as if the ether itself was a watercolor wash. Sometimes Leonard would pick a section of sky— no horizon or sea for reference, just a rectangle of clouds and reflections— and make it his color field. Or at dawn, after a night trawling for sex in Lummus Park, he would smoke a joint and sit on the low stone wall facing Ocean Drive and study the pale beige hotels that seemed just like a canvas waiting to be colored in. “He was a very highly evolved spirit trapped in that body,” one of his close friends, Jane Dee Gross, explained, “hooked into the gods of color and vibratory intimacy.”
According to Leonard, one day he was adrift in his ruminations when BANG! he went down on the marble floor of the lobby and cracked his head. “All of a sudden I was on my back,” he explained, “and all of these people are gathered around me like I'm unconscious, but I'm really flying around, astral-projecting.” Leonard astral-projected himself into a liability lawsuit and received a small insurance settlement, which he used to open a furniture showroom in the Design District, which soon went kaput.
Leonard was brought up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, and spent the summers living in the staff quarters of the Concord Hotel in Monticello, New York, where his father then ran a nightclub, according to Leonard, that served Chinese food and featured female impersonators. His parents divorced when he was seventeen years old, and he moved to Miami Beach with his mother and attended Beach High. At his father's behest he studied business at Morris Harvey College in West Virginia, but Leonard hated business and he returned to Brooklyn, where his father then owned an auto dealership in Sheepshead Bay. His father wanted Leonard and his older brother to take over the auto dealership, but Leonard's brother had already crushed his father's hopes when he showed up at the car dealership dressed as a woman. When Leonard told his dad that he'd rather be an interior decorator than work at the car dealership and, by the way, he was gay, he was banished from his father's house. Later he and a partner opened a modular wedge furniture company in New York, but it went bankrupt, and that's about the time Leonard moved back to Miami and became a doorman at Seacoast Towers.
He met Barbara Capitman at a cocktail party for one of the interior-design trades. She was fifty-six at the time and the southern editor of a small industrial design magazine, The Designer, and a press member of the American Society of Interior Design, credentials that she used mostly to network. Capitman was never the least bit fazed by Leonard's homosexuality. She had befriended many gay men over the years while writing and publicizing interior design. According to her son Andrew, “My mother was always comfortable with gay people, and from a very early time she had a strategy that she would use her warm relationship with the gay community to promote the idea of an Art Deco district.” Although Leonard was something of a buffoon, he was available to be her packhorse, and she enlisted him. The oddness of their situations and ages made no difference to them. They became stalwart pals, bickering, complaining, bitching behind each other's back, yet fiercely loyal. “He adored her,” remembered preservationist Nancy Liebman, “he was her puppy and he put up with all of it.”
“There was no “eureka’ moment about saving the Art Deco buildings,” said John Capitman, Barbara's younger son. She had been making extra money running focus groups for a water-purifying company, Brita Filters, and spent a lot of time driving around South Beach, interviewing the residents. The indignity of the lot of the elderly Jews irked her. One June day in 1976 Leonard and Barbara and John, who had just graduated from Yale, were driving around in her car, looking at all the old buildings and the even older tenants when Barbara said to Leonard, “Look at all these old people. I wonder how we can save them?” and Leonard answered, “Forget about the people, how can we save these buildings?”2*
“THE PEOPLE who lived in Miami Beach had nothing to do with its revival,” said David Leddick, a writer and performer who was Barbara's friend. “They were uneducated, unsophisticated, provincial people, they could not see what it could become.”
Micky Wolfson agreed. “All the modern reinvention of Miami Beach was due to outsiders, people who saw from afar the potential. The locals were too resigned.”
The Miami Design Preservation League— they called it “Miami” because they wanted to be more inclusive— held its first public meeting on December 1, 1976. Barbara and Leonard, who had taped signs to bulletin boards and store windows, were stunned when four hundred people showed up, a mixture of curious retirees and young people interested in art and design. This was the first time she spoke publicly about Art Deco. She was too shy to look at her audience, and her lack of grooming and her unusual quavering voice were distracting, but after a few minutes her compelling conviction took over and she spoke articulately and with passion about creating an Art Deco district. What was moments before peculiar became charming. She showed slides (with some slides upside-down and backward) and told her audience, “It's a miracle that all this is lying dormant and the fabric is still intact. It's fortunate that it can all be brought back.”
Barbara organized with precision. She gathered teams of volunteers to canvass the proposed Art Deco neighborhood and compile an inventory. She had Carl Weinhardt Jr., the director of the 1917 former Deering estate, known as Villa Vizcaya, now a state trust and museum, unofficially declare the buildings in the district “Art Deco.” She badgered the City of Miami Beach Planning Department to give the MDPL a $10,000 grant to develop a plan, and she wrote individual letters to senators, state senators, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the Florida House of Representatives extolling the virtues of the buildings. When it came time to submit the formal nomination for the state register, Barbara was so determined that she took the twenty-page document to Tallahassee herself. “People would run when they saw her coming,” said her friend and supporter Jane Gross. “She was a combination of Eleanor Roosevelt and a bag lady. She was always in your face. She got right in your face, she talked close up but with her eyes down, almost shyly, but she was anything but shy. If she got a hold of you there would be no end to it.”
Barbara deftly assembled a coterie of supporters that bordered on a cult, mostly gay men and senior citizens. She carried gold stars in her magic pocketbook, and if she liked you she gave you a printed commendation and pasted a star on it. Her cause was taken up by a lonely wealthy widow, Edith Siegal, who drove a black Rolls-Royce and chauffered Barbara around the city and to her appointments, lending Barbara a certain cachet.
In three years Barbara managed to have over half of South Beach declared the only federally protected historic district of twentieth-century buildings in the United States, and the largest concentration of so-called Art Deco architecture in the world. “She fought tooth and nail to convince the authorities and the townspeople,” said Wolfson. “It was a great triumph of public relations, marketing, and salesmanship. Barbara was the new Carl Fisher.”
1* The buildings were on average forty-five years old and they didn't qualify for protection, according to federal guidelines for historic buildings, so an exception was made.
2* Although this sweet story has become part of the preservationists’ dogma, John Capitman doesn't remember this exact exchange, but like everyone else, he thinks it's a good story.