City gave away park to get rid of problem
February 21, 1986
This weekend thousands of Grand Prix fans will pay big-ticket prices to visit a park that already belongs to them, sit in bleachers they already own, and watch a road race that their tax dollars have subsidized.
You've heard of Live Aid and Farm Aid; this is Ralph Aid.
Ralph Sanchez is a terrific promoter, a magician when it comes to raising money. For instance, after the inaugural Grand Prix got rained under three years ago, state legislators agreed to help Ralph out of the hole by buying the bleachers for $500,000.
Our generosity didn't stop there. This year Tallahassee kicked in another half-million bucks to Ralph's races, while the county agreed to pony up $350,000 to cover any deficits. And the city of Miami—well, the city not only put up $250,000 for the new racetrack, but loaned Sanchez the same amount, interest free, to pay his share.
If all businessmen had pals like these, we could board up the bankruptcy courts.
The new Grand Prix course snakes through 35 acres once known as Bicentennial Park. It's not a park anymore, of course, it's an asphalt racetrack with two baseball diamonds stuck between the curves. How it got that way is an interesting story.
The Grand Prix got shoved out of south Bayfront Park because some big developer needs the land for fancy restaurants and macrame shops. The city of Miami felt so crummy that it agreed to "compensate" Sanchez by paying him $350,000 and annihilating a suitable stretch of Bicentennial Park to augment the race course.
All this happened very fast and very quietly—the paving, especially. If only the Department of Transportation crews could work so quickly.
When folks started asking about why the city paved the park—a public park purchased with bond money—everybody stuttered a little until they came up with one of the craftiest excuses I've ever heard: Basically, they said, we did it to get rid of the winos.
To hear Grand Prix boosters tell it, the winos of Bicentennial Park are the urban equivalent of the Viet Cong. Apparently the only thing to dislodge them is a Porsche bearing down at 140 miles per hour.
In defense of plowing the park, supporters recited all the nasty things that have happened there since it opened in 1977. Rapes, murders, muggings, assorted corpses. No wonder hardly anybody goes there.
Some cities would've taken a slightly different approach to these problems. Some cities might have opened shelters to get the winos off the streets. Maybe put more cops in the park, installed brighter lights, improved the parking, added tennis and racquetball courts. Bulldozed that stupid San Juan Hill of a berm that blocks the bay from the boulevard.
Other cities might have done more to save the park, but what Miami did was to give up, and give it away.
It's true that for two whole weekends the Grand Prix draws thousands of fans to downtown Miami, which is swell if you happen to own a hotel or parking garage. It's also true that the TV coverage gives the city lots of valuable exposure, providing the sun is out.
And it's true that one of the prime missions of the Grand Prix is to make some bucks for Ralph Sanchez. Nothing wrong with that.
But carving up the park?
I guess the city commissioners couldn't help themselves. They saw this luscious hunk of bayfront not making money, just sitting there being a park, and they couldn't stand it. The shakes set in, then drooling; an uncontrollable urge to bulldoze. Apparently shrubbery was not the kind of green that Bicentennial Park was meant to sprout.
The giveaway occurred so swiftly that critics have questioned its legality. The city's staff says everything is proper because the racetrack technically is a "park amenity."
A country mile of four-lane blacktop—some amenity. What does that make the Palmetto Expressway, a national shrine?