Did you ever think of buildings, As a living thing. Standing way up in the sky. Looking up at birds upon the wing. Looking down at life go flowing by.
—FROM “BUILDINGS,” A POEM BY BARBARA BAER CAPITMAN, AGE TWELVE
Leonard Ho rowitz was a sweethear t,” M icky W olfso n re mem-Lbered. “ He was strivin g, energetic, and diligen t, and ve ry much influenced by Barbara, who would direct him.”
Wherever Barbara went, Leonard was close behind. They were an odd sight, Barbara in her frowsy clothes, Leonard in his hand-me-downs; Barbara buttonholing people on the street to tell them about Art Deco preservation, Leonard spouting sexual come-ons to passing gay men like he had Tourette's syndrome. “They were like something out of Alice in Wonderland,” said author and actor David Leddick. “They were such unusual people. They weren't exactly idiots savants, but they approached it. Both of them had a genius for what they did, and they were absolutely in the right place at the right time.”
The members of the Miami Design Preservation League became “like a family to me,” Leonard told the Miami Herald. “It's a way of life. Everyone in the league takes care of everyone else.”
Eventually he and Barbara lived in the same building at 1211 Pennsylvania Avenue, designed by one of Leonard's favorite Art Deco architects, Henry Hohauser. Barbara lived in the top-floor apartment, crammed with books, framed photographs, mementos of her life and career, and pieces of her artist mother's ceramics and sculpture. A kidney-shaped desk served as Art Deco command central. Barbara was distracted and absentminded and Leonard watched out for her. One day Leonard discovered her ironing a blouse on top of her television, melting the plastic casement, and on another occasion Andrew Capitman got a call from Leonard saying that Barbara's apartment had been robbed, but all the thieves got were checkbooks, no cash. It turned out that Barbara never carried money around with her— none at all— and paid for everything by check, even if it was only a dollar.
It was from 1211 Pennsylvania Avenue that in June 1981 Barbara and Leonard set out on their 10,000-mile journey across the United States in a little Chevette to visit historic districts around the country. Barbara was going to write thirteen dispatches from the road for the Miami News titled “Travels with Barbara: 10,000 Miles in Search of Art Deco.” Barbara called it “a modern-day expedition of discovery that for Art Deco people at least ranks with Lewis and Clark.” There was a bon voyage party for them at the Cardozo Hotel and “everyone was laughing at the “odd couple,’” Barbara remembered, “the thirty-five-year-old designer and the sixty-one-year-old writer.” Only hours after they left, Leonard said to Barbara, “Now it's your turn to drive,” and within fifteen minutes of taking the wheel she'd driven into a ditch.
It was during that 1981 trip that Leonard first saw painted terra-cotta ornaments on buildings in Tulsa and Kansas City that made the architectural details pop. Leonard realized that one of the aesthetic problems with the Art Deco district was that it was colorless and drab; the buildings were painted white or gray or tan and the lines and details disappeared into the general dullness of the buildings. South Beach needed color, but not just any colors; it needed a color scheme that would suit it. The moment when Leonard created the palette for South Beach was like the moment in the movie The Wizard of Oz when everything goes from black-and-white to color.
The folklore is that Leonard invented the colors sitting in a lawn chair on Ocean Drive, staring at the heliotropic sea and sky, smoking joints and watching the soft colors playing in the changing light: peppermint, magenta, seashell rose, peach, pale lilac, mint, powder blue, powder pink, and a touch of tangerine.
His breakthrough assignment was Friedman's Bakery on Washington Avenue, an elegant, one-story Art Deco building with clean lines and a stack of octagonal architectural shapes above the main entrance. Leonard had the building painted like creamy cake icing: pistachio mint, powder pink, and baby blue, turning the whole structure into a giant confection, like an outsize Claes Oldenburg sculpture. Friedman's Bakery struck a chord with the design world the same way the “painted lady” houses of San Francisco had started a trend ten years before, and in 1982 Friedman's Bakery made the cover of Progressive Architecture magazine. Almost overnight Leonard Horowitz gained a national reputation as the designer who invented the color scheme of the new South Beach. Painting the buildings pastel colors would turn out to be the last missing piece of the puzzle that would help catapult the resort into a phenomenon. Leonard Horowitz literally put the icing on the cake.
Commissions came flying in. He was so busy he hired eleven employees and opened offices on Lincoln Road. He painted the Park Central Hotel white and mauve with moldings of green, and he had the Carlyle Hotel painted buff and green on the inside and mauve on the outside. He chose the palette for a mansion on Star Island, and Stephen Muss asked his former doorman to select the colors for the Poodle Lounge at the Fontainebleau Hotel for him, which were pink and black. Leonard chose the colors and fabrics in the 1980s renovation of the Victor Hotel on Ocean Drive, and he created Art Deco interiors for the Water Club in Washington, D.C. When the city of Miami Beach put together a budget for the revitalization of Washington Avenue, Leonard practically repainted the whole street. Perhaps his smallest yet his most pleasing triumph was that he was commissioned by the TV show Miami Vice to choose the colors for the food carts on the beach that appeared in the opening credits of each episode.
“I feel vindicated,” he said. “They called me crazy.”
Leonard began to enjoy himself. He was no longer just Barbara Capitman's lapdog. The rent was paid and he treated himself to a trip on the Concorde to Paris with a return trip on the ocean liner QE II. He had a sometimes boyfriend he'd met at a gay bathhouse in Coral Gables.
In 1985 he began to have strange fevers and night sweats, and he tested positive for HIV. “I just ignored the whole thing,” he said. “I didn't have sex anymore. I was feeling fine. I had thrush once in a while, and I developed insomnia, but I wasn't sick.” In August 1987 he was hospitalized for pneumocystis pneumonia, and later Guillain-Barré syndrome, which paralyzed him from the waist down. “One day I was driving my car and the pedals got harder and harder to push,” he said, “and then I couldn't walk.” No matter how sick he felt, he insisted on going out to events, even in a wheelchair. He desperately wanted to go to Jane Dee and Saul Gross's wedding because he had introduced them. “Listen, I don't want to give things up,” he told the Miami Herald. “I'm not going to stop everything just because I have AIDS. There's really no reason for living if you can't go out to restaurants and see people. Why bother?”
In the end the Miami Design Preservation League did act like a family, just as Leonard had said, and they raised money and helped plan his care. Tony Goldman, the owner of the Park Central Hotel, paid the rent on Leonard's apartment, and the MDPL paid for a full-time live-in attendant, his phone bills, even the dentist. Members took turns keeping him company or shopping for him at Lundy's Market, which pledged $50 a week free food. But he wasn't very hungry, or amusing company, and slowly people stopped coming to visit him.
He was so lonely that when he got a wrong number on the telephone he kept the caller on the line. In his last interview a reporter from the Herald found him in a hospital bed in his apartment, hugging a teddy bear. “I'm looking for somebody I can just hug or something,” he explained. “You know, you just need that. Just somebody to love and hug. That's all we were really looking for in the first place. It wasn't all the sex and everything. We just wanted to find someone to be with, like everyone else.”
At the very end one of Leonard's Medicaid caretakers, a woman whose own son had died of AIDS, took Leonard into her home and saw him through. He died on May 5, 1988, at age forty-three. The Miami Heraldsaid, “He draped the city like a rainbow.” There was a standing-room-only memorial service at a Unitarian Church on Biscayne Boulevard, and when Barbara Capitman tried to speak she broke down in tears. He didn't leave much behind, but he left his sometimes boyfriend a ring. He was cremated, and a group of his friends took his ashes out on a motorboat and slowly went up and down the length of Ocean Drive, the buildings alive with all the wonderful colors that Leonard had painted them, and they threw his ashes into the ocean opposite the Park Central Hotel.
In 1989, 11th Street between Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue was renamed Leonard Horowitz Place in his honor. Tens of millions of tourists have walked beneath the street sign bearing his name, but hardly a soul knows who he was or what his legacy is.
IRONICALLY, THE success of Barbara Capitman's dream rendered her obsolete. The fruits of her labors were everywhere. Property values were soaring and tourism was beginning to return. Although some significant buildings had been lost, for the most part the Art Deco district had survived intact and would be protected permanently. At the same time, smart businessmen saw a real estate boomtown coming and started buying up the neighborhood wholesale. The Miami Design Preservation League needed to redefine its goals to stay relevant. Barbara's everlasting credo was “Never Compromise,” but the younger members of the league wanted to be more conciliatory with developers and city commissioners, not adversarial, and Barbara didn't like it. Barbara wanted to focus on senior housing, and to stop South Beach from becoming so trendy, and to stop the condominium towers that she feared would loom over the beaches from the tip of Miami northward. According to Andrew Capitman, “People wanted the MDPL to roll over, and my mother had absolutely nothing to fucking lose. My mother said, “I'm old, I'm poor, I'm famous, and I did it because I was true. Why should I roll over?’”
Barbara Capitman became increasingly implacable about issues. The way she saw it, a person was either with her 100 percent or he was a traitor. If anyone disagreed with her, she would snap, “Dry up and blow away,” and that's exactly what many of her supporters eventually did. She couldn't make up her mind whether she wanted to be on the board of the MDPL or a paid executive director. The league began to grow broke. “A lot of people who started the movement with her dropped out,” said community activist Nancy Lieb-man, who met her in 1979. “She would use people and then step on them and move right on. She would walk out on meetings, frequently, if people disagreed with her. She hated me because I took the lead role.”
By the time the Senator was demolished, Liebman had emerged as the standard-bearer of the MDPL. She became the executive director in 1988 and served until 1991. Liebman was the polar opposite of Barbara, practical and diplomatic. She was a former elementary school teacher and the wife of a successful doctor. She and her husband also, not coincidentally, had invested in the Car-dozo Hotel, in which they had lost $35,000 of their own money.
“Barbara would go to the City Commission meetings and be nasty,” Liebman recalled. “She showed the commissioners no respect. She was strident and refused to compromise. By not listening to other people, she negated her ability to get anything done.” The MDPL needed to distance itself from Barbara to keep its credibility. Noted her friend and league cofounder Michael Kinerk, “Barbara fomented being thrown out of the league, which was trying to pull itself out of insolvency.”
When Barbara was told that she could not act in the name of the MDPL without consulting with the other members of the board of directors, she was irate and decided to challenge their legitimacy. “She called a big powwow,” Liebman said. “It was a showdown.” Barbara sent out a flyer announcing a meeting in a courtyard of a building on Lincoln Road, where she made a speech announcing that she was dissolving the MDPL and that she was starting a new, national group called the Art Deco Societies of America, and that everyone was invited to follow her on her new quest. But hardly anyone was interested, and anyway, she had no authority to dissolve the Miami Design Preservation League. She might have created it, but she didn't own it. “Dissolving the MDPL would have been a catastrophe. So she quit,” said Liebman.
The last time Gary Farmer saw Barbara was when she came into The Strand one night, very disturbed. “They threw me out of the league and they won't let me come to meetings anymore,” she told him. She said that she had decided to focus instead on saving Opa Locka, a small city in northwest Miami-Dade, developed in the 1920s by aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss with an Arabian Nights theme. “They need me there,” she told Farmer.
But she didn't save Opa Locka and they didn't need her. That project fizzled before it hardly started. By the end of the 1980s she was nearly broke. “I'm so desperately poor now,” Capitman told the Herald, probably not without some guile, “I'm a little old lady in tennis shoes.” She began to write letters to various people she had fallen out with over the years, trying to resolve issues. She had been in bad health and had had several hospitalizations over the years for pneumonia and diabetes. She fell ill for a final time in March 1990, when MDPL member Dennis Wilhelm called her in the hospital to talk about a story in the newspaper that day noting all the progress the Art Deco district had made and how it had saved South Beach. Wilhelm said to her, “How about those headlines?”
She said, “If you think that's something, wait until you see tomorrow's headlines.”
She was right. The front-page headline of the Herald the next day was FIRST LADY OF ART DECO BARBARA CAPITMAN DIES. Capit-man died on March 29, 1990, a month short of her seventieth birthday. There was a press feeding frenzy for a week. She was lionized in every local newspaper and TV newscast, and even received an obituary in Time magazine.
When her family and friends went to her apartment, they found notes under every object, very systematically placed, explaining what the object was and what it meant to her.
Nancy Liebman and the Miami Design Preservation League asked the city commissioners to name a street after Barbara, and in January 1991, one block south of Leonard Horowitz Place, the street from Ocean Drive to Washington Avenue was renamed Barbara Capitman Way.
In 1991 Gary Farmer sold The Strand to new owners. For him its appeal had evaporated in the hurricane-strength winds of change. South Beach was on the cusp of its future self by 1991. “Gentrification was taking place,” Farmer said, “and at The Strand what was once a room full of artists was now a room full of models and hookers.”