Twisted Spinster

Lost in Miami… trust me, that is something you don’t want to be. Unfortunately, it often happens – the latest victim of my hometown’s automotive labyrith is kewl warblogger Matt Welch’s wife, Emmanuelle, who is a reporter. She apparently was on assignment in Hellmouth on the Bay, and had a rather dreadful time trying to avoid the many traps the natives have set up to divert guileless visitors into our more “interesting” (code word for crime-riddled) neighborhoods. Miami is a casebook study on how building interstate highways causes crime. All of the neighborhoods lining either side of I-95 are mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Now, you would think that it would be easy to find one’s way around the place. After all, Miami’s streets are laid out on a grid formation. Streets (and roads, drives and lanes and some other designations I forget) run more or less east-west. Avenues, courts, and… heck, I only moved away five years ago – anyway, they run north-south. The numbers start, at 1, right in the middle of Miami’s fistlike little downtown, which is bisected by a street that runs all the way to the swamp, aka “the Everglades” – the non-numbered Flagler Street. The “central” street that runs north to south and bisects the downtown area that way is the imaginatively-named Miami Avenue. North of Flagler Street, it’s called “North Miami Avenue.” South of Flagler Street, it’s called “South Miami Avenue.” And likewise, East of Miami Avenue, Flagler is East Flagler, and west of that road, it’s West Flagler. North Miami Avenue goes on and on into the north, and eventually becomes State Road 441, which if you manage to stay on it long enough, gets you out of Miami.

Still awake? There’s more! Like I said, the numbers start, after these non-numbered (or “zero") central streets, at number 1. The four quarters of the bisections of the streets are the south-east, south-west, north-east, and north-west sections. South-east is very small, mostly the downtown area, which abuts on Biscayne Bay; Miami on a map resembles a large, vaguely rectangular cookie with a very large bite taken out of the bottom right corner. The other three quadrants (I like using that word ‘cos it makes me think of Star Trek) are very large, especially to the south and west. The numbers continue as far as they are able – into the 300s in the south-west area. Or probably more since I’ve moved. Anyway, this is to show that yes, it is indeed possible for one to be at the corner of NW 87th Avenue and NW 87 Street. All you have to do is know how to count, and know east to west, and it’s easy, right?

Well yeah, sure, and monkeys could fly out of my butt – the problem with a system that simple is the slightest thing could fuck it up, and boy does it get fucked up. I haven’t even mentioned the little cities and townlets that make up the Greater Miami area that have their own system of street numbering, or worse, give their streets names and number the buildings by some arcane system that no one without a degree in Differential Equations can understand. For example, I grew up near, and went to high school in, the hoity-toity old-rich (for Miami) city of Coral Gables. This place had been built up by some rich dude with a jones for Spain, and everything was tiled, mortised, and fake-battlemented-walled to the max – and the streets all have names like “Sevilla,” they curve all over the goddamn where, and they don’t even put the street names on street signs – too gauche and crass for the Cultured Folk within – they put them on little white stones at street level. I learned a few basic routes around this part of the county, and never went in there without a map.

Then there is Hialeah. It has its own street-numbering system. It also has many roads with the Miami street numbers also on the street signs. If you happen to find yourself in Hialeah, you may as well give up, pull over, rent an apartment, and plan to stay, because you aren’t getting out of there.

I won’t get into Miami Beach because I have forgotten how to describe sheer lunacy. I will observe that it being actually impossible to park anywhere on the island (Miami Beach is an island across the Intracoastal Waterway), no one actually can settle down there. That’s how they planned it, I think.

I learned to drive in Miami. I’ll never be afraid to drive anywhere, now. When people in Orlando, where I live now, tell me that driving here is “bad,” I just laugh and laugh and laugh until they go away, looking over their shoulders at me in dread. I have driven in Los Angeles. I observed the curious fact that people there actually used their turn signals to signal turns, instead of leaving them on “left turn” forever, possibly to signal “I am a septuagenarian who refuses to get cataract surgery because I can see just fine what the hell did just I hit?” or simply breaking off that annoying little stick and throwing it out the window because that clicking noise is driving them crazy. When I put my turn signal on in Miami I often got people beeping at me irately, because like they care, bee-yotch, where I am going, or swooping around me at about fifty miles an hour because you know that having to slow for someone ahead of you to turn means you have one second more to be on the roads in Miami and all things considered that’s something you don’t want.