In which South Beach Hoosier shows his sense of humor by mocking the hipper-than-thou whopurport to persuade us.A few weeks back, my Sunday New York Times contained, like probably most Sunday Times readers south of the Atlanta area, a new player among the usual glossy advertisements we've come to disregard.
[For whatever reason, I usually get the 8" X 11" foldout brochure for Trump Hollywood, which, with no building yet, at least offers an interesting looking sales office on the west side of A1A, he said with faint praise.
http://www.trumphollywood.com/selectok.php , see also:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/broward/sfl-zrichroomsbrow20mar20,0,4576455.story?coll=sfla-news-broward
This is that brochure that below a photo of Trump, "the short-fingered vulgarian," -a man I personally have reviled since I first read stories about him in the late-but-great Manhattan, Inc. magazine- says with breathless prose, and I don't exaggerate:
"If there is one man whose very name defines a superior level of sophistication, craftsmanship and lifestyle, it's Donald J. Trump. His passion for perfection in everything he puts his name to has placed him into a category of one..."
Shocker!
It's from our old friends(!) at The Related Group, and is one of their Signature Development
projects. Which I guess explains why there's a photo of Jorge Perez on the inside of the foldout, below the artists depiction of the property.
Do their immediate neighbors to the north on the beach at 2501 Ocean Drive, The Wave, realize what effect a 40-story building will have on their little swimming pool?
I think not, if the Related's The Beach Club project's effect on Hallandale Beach's North Beach is any example. "A vision of such magnitude could only be realized by one company..."
Do these guys really think this kind of faux prose works?]
Being a new player in the market to capture upscale consumer's attention and imagination, is, admittedly, not an easy task.
Inside the Times was a very well-designed if perhaps unintentionally humorous 5'x 7' brochure for a Buena Vista Hospitality Group developed Condo-hotel property in Orlando
www.bvhg.com, with Fortune International Development handling sales, called Vista Club. http://www.vistacluborlando.com/ And yes, there's a South Florida angle.
The brochure is written slightly tongue-in-cheek along the lines of a "field guide," like the popular Peterson's Guide to North American birds.
But this isn't just any bird they're trying to capture.
No, they're trying to capture a very particular and elite bird of a demographic, one that heretofore had kept their presence around the world mostly on the 'down low,' since to reveal their presence was to break what everyone knows is one of the cardinal rules of 'cool," i.e. you never draw un-necessary attention to yourself - except when YOU want to.
Yes, the geniuses at the Tampa-based Buena Vista Hospitality along with Fortune decided that what Orlando really needed -on top of their many other problems, what with moderate housing being an endangered species for their hospitality worker bees- was to capture for Orlando that small slice of the real estate demographic pie that South Floridians have long since become accustomed to, even while we revile them behind their backs for what they've done to the South Florida places we knew and loved, and have since seen changed to something we definitely don't like. (God knows there are hundreds of examples of that down here.)
It's my experience that this internal conversation tends to happen a lot while stuck in mindless traffic jams to and from South Beach while stuck behind bad drivers with luxury cars
sporting out-of-state license plates.
So who is this elusive target that the real estate powers that be believe is reading the Sunday New York Times?
"International Hipsters."
Judging by the brochure, I don't think South Beach needs to lose any sleep!
In case you don't know whether Fortune is responsible for selling some of the newer South Florida buildings you've come to like or appreciate after a bit of getting used to them, or the ones you really, really hated from Day One, their project history via the website informs us that: ...In addition, Fortune International is the developer’s choice for exclusive on-site sales, having represented some of South Florida’s most successful projects with thousands of sales to date. Fortune’s portfolio of high-end, luxury condominium projects include Jade Residences at Brickell Bay, The Bridgewater, Le Meridien Sunny Isles Beach, Jade Beach, Jade Ocean, The Ritz-Carlton Club and Residences South Beach, The Ivy, Mint, and Flamingo South Beach.
(Just for the record, the Vista Club is located west of I-4 and north of Downtown Disney.)
The interior designers of the property are Urbanica Group, which the Vista Club website
http://www.vistacluborlando.com/team.html describes thusly:
"Urbanica Group is a full service Design organization founded in 1998 and headquartered in South Beach, Florida.""This South Beach-based design firm has brought its cutting edge vision to some of South Florida’s most luxurious projects."
Well I'm all for South Beach-based designers spreading their wings and grabbing new territory.
The Vista Club press info is at http://www.vistacluborlando.com/pressroom.html, but I've scanned the brochure that was in the Times that day for you here so that you can laugh and make your own jokes, especially if you have any friends or family living in the Orlando area.
And if you see any unruly International Hipsters over the next few weeks: along the beach, perhaps pulling into the parking space you were about to roll into, or making a pest of themself along Lincoln Road by talking loudly at one of the great al fresco restaurants there so that you can hear them from 100 feet away, or of course, at the Malls, telling sales clerks that their merchandise is nice, "but not as good as -Buenos Aires, Milan, Florence, Paris, et al," tell them to head north to Orlando, where they'll be much better appreciated.
Clever marketing or un-intended humor, you decide.
Having looked at this brochure any number of times, my favorite page is the one marked "Migration Patterns," where it suddenly seems that Orlando is where all the International Hipsters are migrating to.
Let 'em. 
The South Florida I Grew Up In
Excerpts from Joan Didion's Miami, 1987,
Simon & Schuster:
In the continuing opera still called, even by Cubans who have now lived the largest part of their lives in this country,
el exilo, the exile, meetings at private homes in
Miami Beach are seen to have consequences. The actions of individuals are seen to affect events directly. Revolutions and counter-revolutions are framed in the private sector, and the state security apparatus exists exclusively to be enlisted by one or another private player. That this particular political style, indigenous to the Caribbean and to Central America, has now been naturalized in the United States is one reason why, on the flat coastal swamps of
South Florida, where the palmettos once blew over the detritus of a dozen failed booms and the hotels were boarded up six months a year, there has evolved since the early New Year's morning in 1959 when
Fulgencio Batista flew for the last time out of Havana a settlement of considerable interest, not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital: long on rumor, short on memory, overbuilt on the chimera of runaway money and referring not to New York or Boston or Los Angeles or Atlanta but to Caracas and Mexico, to Havana and to Bogota and to Paris and Madrid. Of American cities
Miami has since 1959 connected only to Washington, which is the peculiarity of both places, and increasingly the warp...
"The general wildness, the eternal labyrinths of waters and marshes, interlocked and apparently neverending; the whole surrounded by interminable swamps... Here I am then in the
Floridas, thought I,"
John James Audobon wrote to the editor of
The Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science during the course of an 1831 foray in the territory then still called the
Floridas. The place came first, and to touch down there is to begin to understand why at least six administations now have found
South Florida so fecund a colony. I never passed through security for a flight to
Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly.
At the gate for such flights the preferred language was already Spanish. Delays were explained by weather in Panama. The very names of the scheduled destinations suggested a world in which many evangelical inclinations had historically been accomodated, many yearnings toward empire indulged...
In this mood Miami seemed not a city at all but a tale, a romance of the tropics, a kind of waking dream in which any possibility could and would be accomodated...
Hallandale Beach Blog
http://www.hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/
Hallandale Beach Blog is where I try to inject or otherwise superimpose a degree of accountability, transparency and much-needed insight onto local Broward County government and public policy issues, which I feel is sorely lacking in local media now, despite all the technological advances that have taken place since I grew-up in South Florida in the 1970's. On this blog, I concentrate my energy, enthusiasm, anger, disdain and laser-like attention primarily on the coastal cities of Aventura, Hollywood and Hallandale Beach.
IF you lived in this part of South Florida, you'd ALREADY be in stultifying traffic, be paying higher-than-necessary taxes, and be continually musing about the chronic lack of any real accountability or transparency among not only elected govt. officials, but also of City, County and State employees as well. Collectively, with a few rare exceptions, they couldn't be farther from the sort of strong results-oriented, work-ethic mentality that citizens here deserve and are paying for.
This is particularly true in the town I live in, the City of Hallandale Beach, just north of Aventura and south of Hollywood. There, the Perfect Storm of years of apathy, incompetency and cronyism are all too readily apparent. Sadly for its residents, Hallandale Beach is where even the easily-solved or entirely predictable quality-of-life problems are left to fester for YEARS on end, because of myopia, lack of common sense and the unsatisfactory management and coordination of resources and personnel.
It's a city with tremendous potential because of its terrific location and weather, yet its citizens have become numb to its outrages and screw-ups after years of the worst kind of chronic mismanagement and lack of foresight. On a daily basis, they wake up and see the same old problems again that have never being adequately resolved by the city in a logical and responsible fashion. Instead the city government either closes their eyes and hopes you'll forget the problem, or kicks them -once again- further down the road.
I used to ask myself, and not at all rhetorically, "Where are all the enterprising young reporters who want to show through their own hard work and enterprise, what REAL investigative reporting can produce?"
Hearing no response, I decided to start a blog that could do some of these things, taking the p.o.v. of a reasonable-but-skeptical person seeing the situation for the first time.
Someone who wanted questions answered in a honest and forthright fashion that citizens have the right to expect.
Of cheerleaders past and present
Given South Florida's unique version of the melting pot -con salsa- demographics and mindset, these women in the photo above are surely what most South Floridians would consider attractive women. But for this observer, who's spent hours & hours at IU cheerleader tryouts and who has known dozens of cheerleaders -and wannabes- in North Miami Beach, Bloomington, Evanston and Washington, D.C., the whole time I was watching these members of the Dolphins' squad perform, I couldn't help but compare them and their routines to those of some IU friends of mine who ALWAYS showed true Hoosier spirit & enthusiasm.
Sitting at my table right near the stage and still later, while watching the long lines of Dolphin fans of all ages waiting to snap photos of themselves with the cheerleaders, I couldn't help but think about those friends who always left me and other Hoosier fans feeling positive & optimistic.
Was there anyone I saw in Davie who possessed these valuable intangibles: the dancing precision of IU Red Stepper -and Captain- Gail Amster, my talented and spirited Phi Beta Kappa pal from Deerfield (IL), who always sat next to me in our Telecom. classes as we took turns entertaining the other; the ebullient spirit & energy of two Hoosier cheerleaders -and captains- from Bloomington, Wendy (Mulholland) Moyle & Sara Cox; the hypnotic, Midwestern, girl-next-door sexiness of Hoosier cheerleader Julie Bymaster, from Brownsburg; or, the adorable Southern girl-next-door appeal of former Hoosier Pom squader Jennifer Grimes, of Louisville, always such a clear distraction while sitting underneath the basket?
Nope, not that I could see. But then they were VERY tough acts to follow!!!
And that's not to mention my talented & spirited friends like Denise Andrews of Portage, Jody Kosanovich of Hammond & Linda Ahlbrand of Chesterton, all of whom were dynamic cheerleaders -and captains- at very large Hoosier high schools that were always in the championship mix, with Denise's team winning the Ind. football championship her senior year when she was captain -just like in a movie. That Denise, Jody & Linda all lived on the same dorm floor, just three stories above me at Briscoe Quad our freshman year, was one of the greatest coincidences -and strokes of luck for me!- that I could've ever hoped for.
You could hardly ask for better ambassadors of IU than THESE very smart, sweet and talented women. In a future SBH post, I'll tell the story of one of the greatest Hoosiers I ever met, the aforementioned Wendy Mulholland, the Bloomington-born captain and emotional heart of the great early '80's IU cheerleading squads, and the daughter of Jack Mulholland, IU's former longtime Treasurer. The acorn doesn't fall far from a tree built on a foundation of integrity & community service!
(After he retired, Mr. Mulholland was the first executive director of the Community Foundation of Bloomington and Monroe County. I used to joke with Wendy that her dad's name was the one that was permanently affixed to the bottom of my work-study checks for years, while I worked at the Dept. of Political Science's Library, first, at the Student Building in the old part of campus, and then later, after it was refurbished, in magnificent Woodburn Hall, my favorite building on campus.)
In that future post, I'll share some reflections on Wendy's great strength of character and personality; my intentions of returning to Bloomington a few weeks before Fall '82 classes started, so I could help Wendy train and work-out to rehab her knee, so she'd feel confident in trying-out for the squad again, following a bad knee injury that'd left her physically-unable to try-out for the squad the previous spring, a big disappointment to those of us who cared about both Wendy and the team; my incredulity at, quite literally, running into Wendy while walking down a sidewalk one afternoon a few years later in Evanston, IL, when we were astonished to discover we were both living there, with me trying to hook on with a Windy City advertising agency, and Wendy then-attending Kellogg (KGSM) at Northwestern, right when the WSJ had named Kellogg the #1 Business School in the country.
I'll also share a story about Wendy performing a true act of kindness towards me in 1982, when I was having a real emergency, and she went above-and-beyond what I had any logical reason to expect. Yet, Wendy, along with her very helpful dad, Jack, came through for me when I was in a very bad time crunch. I've never forgotten Wendy's kindness towards me, and her true Hoosier spirit.
There's NOTHING I wouldn't do for Wendy Mulholland.
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