Everything you wanted to know about Maurice Ferre but were afraid to ask. By Geniusofdespair

This is an oral history of the life of Florida U.S. Senate hopeful Maurice Ferre. I did cut some of it, but this is his recollection during an unrehearsed interview. I would say the guy is brilliant and we pretty much know more about him then any other candidate now:

Maurice Ferre Oral History - Conducted by Professor Gregory Bush - 30 November 1999

Maurice Ferre: I don’t believe in secrets. I first came to Florida during the war in 1943. My father and his family had owned a sugar property between Palm Beach and Vero Beach. I used to come here. During the war, my family was living in Puerto Rico, and every time the machinery would be put on a ship to be shipped to Puerto Rice some German U-boat would sink it. My dad decided that the only way we could ever finish this task was for him to move up to New York and work out of New York, which is what he did. Therefore, I used to come to see this sugar property that my family owned in 1943. I used to also come in 1948 and visit my cousins who lived here. One of my uncles, Al Roig, married to my father’s sister, had purchased a substantial amount of land in the Everglades--sugar land. He had also purchased some very significant properties in Miami. He bought a house in the 1940’s, and now it’s owned by Madonna [on] Brickell Avenue. -- Plenty more:

I used to come to Florida during the 40’s on a regular basis because of my family here.

My wife finished high school in ’53 or ’54, and in those days, in the early fifties, Brickell Avenue was like a status symbol. All these wealthy Puerto Rican families, bought these mansions on Brickell Avenue. I guess the first one was P. J. Serralles, who owned a big sugar [ranch] in Puerto Rico. In 1940, he came up and bought a house on Brickell Avenue.


My father bought Dr. Jackson’s home. Jackson of Jackson Memorial Hospital lived on Brickell Avenue in an old colonial house, straight out of World War I. My dad bought that house. My father-in-law bought the house next door [to] Santa Maria. Ultimately, I was able to convince Olympia York, who wanted to tear it down, not to tear it down. When Hugo Colombo bought the property, he--thank God--saved the house. That was a house built by the Deveaux family in the 1920’s. When Miami was in its boom stage, the Deveaux family, from Pittsburgh, [was] the owner of Deveaux paint.

I have fine memories. I remember when we started school and my grandfather, my dad used to stay in the Towers Hotel, which is now where the Hyatt Regency is. I used to walk to school too. We used to spend months there. Anyway, I got [back to] Florida back in the 40s.

I was born in ‘35 the first time I came to Florida was 1939. I was a young, four-year-old boy flying into Miami in a Yankee clipper that made stops in Haiti and Cuba. It was an amphibious Pan-American airplane, right before the war. I remember very clear, I was four-years-old, but I remember Brickell key. That’s all I remember at age four. At ages seven and eight, I remember a lot more. I remember the cousins of mine, and the house that they had on the bay. Then in 1952 my father bought the house on Brickell.

My mother was born in New York and grew up in New York and then went to Puerto Rico as a young girl and met and married my father. She was always in New York as young woman. She hardly spoke Spanish then. As a matter of fact, throughout her life she spoke Spanish with a New York accent. To her the center of the world was New York, and she lived to go back to New York.

My dad during this whole process bought an apartment in a place called Tudor City, which is right in front of where the United Nations is now. Of course the United Nations did not exist then. That was a very nice residential part of New York. I remember that very, very well. Believe it or not, I was off to prep schools when I was eight years old. Then I went back to Puerto Rico. I graduated in ’53, I went five years. I was in for five years, from ’48 to ’53.

I was accepted into the University of Pennsylvania, where I wanted to go to school. By that time, my father had bought Dr. Jackson’s house. [My mother] asked me to come [to] Miami and go to the University of Miami for a year. Then I would transfer up to Penn.

I was born in my culture. My mother was a total American--her perspective, and what she saw and even though she lived in Puerto Rico. Her lifestyle and the things that she valued were really very American. My father I remember very clearly. My father was a democrat and was very active.

Getting back to the Florida picture, I come to Miami on a full time basis in the summer of 1953. My dad insisted that I go to summer school as he always did. For me vacations were always studying, I studied all my life. My dad, he didn’t believe in vacations. He thought that they were just a waste of time and you needed to get down to the nitty-gritty.

I have one sister. My mother then died in 1960. My father remarried, and from the two marriages after that I have five brothers and sisters. In 1953 when I got to Miami, my focus was just the University of Miami. My whole life was going to school. The University of Miami and I had great fun. It was a wonderful place. Miami was an interesting community. I lived at home. I lived on Brickell Avenue and it took me fifteen minutes to drive.

I had friends in Cuba and I’d stay in their homes. Those were just unbelievable years.

[Cuba’s] countryside, the parties, the outings in people’s farms, horses, the nightlife, the trucks, the whole ambiance. Cuba in 1955, 56, 57, was unbelievable. I had never seen a place like that island ever—anywhere--not Buenos Aires, not Rio, not Paris, not London.

In those years, Havana was absolutely pure [pleasure]. My father was a member of the Havana Yacht Club. That was for business reasons, and during all this time, my father’s business interests had grown beyond Puerto Rico and Florida. It had grown to Cuba. He owned 50 percent of a major cement plant in Santiago, Cuba. I used to go with my dad to Santiago, which is wonderful. It was a wonderful time.

I studied architecture. I had been admitted to University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture, and I wanted to be an architect. Miami did not have an architecture curriculum, so I got into architectural engineering, which is what they had in those days. As it turned out, I eventually didn’t go to Pennsylvania. [I] stayed in Miami and went to architecture school. I was not a good student. I was a mediocre student, but then I got serious. I got into finance.

When I graduated from the University of Miami, I started with one of my professors who worked for a company. I started building houses. I didn’t like it. It was not what I wanted to do. By that time, my family’s company is in Miami. I graduated in ’58. By 1959, I was already married.

I met my wife here in Miami; she was my next door neighbor. Her father, as I said, owns Santa Maria. My father bought the Jackson Homestead on Brickell, and we were neighbors. I met her when I was 18 and she was 17. We got married when I was 20 and she was 19 in Venezuela.

In 1958, I graduated, and my mother--I’ll never forget--she pulled me off to the side one day and said, “We have to have a serious talk.” She said, “Your father needs your help. I think you ought to work with your dad for a while.” I wanted to go finish my architectural degree and then go work with some good architectural school, get a real architectural degree, which is a five-year degree. I think I needed to do two years and I then would have an architectural degree or I could do a Masters in architecture.

I continued my father’s tradition of making all my kids study every summer. All my children, when we had economic wherewithal every summer they went to a different camp, different summer school.

My wife’s father was one of South Florida’s great architects. [He] studied at the Ecole des Beaux Artes and worked at the Corbusier for several years. His father was a Frenchman and was inducted into the French army and had to serve two years in the army then came back to Venezuela. His father was an architect and his father before him was an architect. So you have three generations of architects. My wife broke with this tradition and so she’s a highly skilled artist, great in colors and decoration and gardening and her [inclination] toward the arts is really very impressive.

Anyway, getting back to Miami issues, because otherwise we’re going to be here forever.

I started working with my father. Then I went to the University of Miami. I took a Master’s degree in finance. My father was a graduate of BU in 1924, and my uncle, all three of them, went to Boston and were graduates of MIT. My whole family was very Boston oriented and educated in MIT. My dad, when he came to Miami things were going very well, he had become a very successful entrepreneur industrialist and financier. [He] had decided that he wanted to go back and get a Masters degree at the University of Miami, so he got a Masters degree at the University of Miami.

I decided that I was going to get a Masters degree in finance, so I then became a good student for some strange reason. I was married. But all of a sudden from being a bad student, I was a straight A student in graduate school.

I started the process of integrating myself into business. By the 1960’s, some of these companies were beginning to have problems. I ended up almost by default taking over the presidency of a cement company here.

There were six in the Ferre family in that generation, and Luis was the second. My father was the oldest, Luis was the second. Luis had the founder of the Republican Party in Puerto Rico and had run for governor in the Puerto Rican Republican party since 1952 on--every four years, ‘52, ‘56, ‘60, ‘64, and in ’68 he won. I was involved with all those later campaigns.

I’d spend two, three months campaigning with him, working with him. I almost moved back to Puerto Rico to become involved in this whole movement except that I could never except this Republican view of life. In [these] days, the Republican party and my uncle was a Jacob [was a] Rockefeller type of Republican, I guess first time Bush type of Republican. I guess president Bush himself in the beginning was that kind of Republican, then ended up being swayed by the Reagan Republican movement.

I could never see myself as a Republican. I didn’t register when I was 21, I registered when I was 22. I registered as a Democrat. My father was a Democrat. I decided that until I made up my mind, whether I wanted to go back to Puerto Rico or stay in Miami, I would run for public office and just learn.

I ran in 1966 for Florida Senate, which was a presumptuous thing for me to do. [I] shouldn’t have done it. [I] went against all my friends and advisors, and I said, “I can do it.” Well, I didn’t do it. But then I decided, there was an opening right after in the Florida House and I ran, won, served in the House, which was a wonderful learning experience. Those were the good old days of Florida politics.

I actually loved it because I learned the inner workings of politics, as to how Tallahassee and southern politics were really won. Though we live in different times today, the vestiges of Dempsy Baron, and old pork-chop days, are still very much a part of politics in Florida. It’s a lesson that isn’t easily learned. It was a great experience for me.

Ed Ball was a very interesting man I had many dealings with Mr. Ed Ball over the years--politically and business, but mostly business. When I got elected I said, “I’ve got to go up and see Ed Ball” because he was such an important factor in the life of Miami. I just had to meet him. I arrived there and I sat down, and met him. I’d known him, I’d met him before in Tallahassee. He had wonderful springs next to Tallahassee; I forget the name of the place.

He was a very interesting man Ed Ball. I went up to see Mr. Ball and we were in a lawsuit of some sort and I remember Mr. Ball when I first walked in was very cordial. He said, “So you’re taking over Bob Hyde’s seat.” I said, “Yes I am Mr. Ball.” He said, “Well, he’s down there shoveling coal right now. Bob Hyde had died in ’67, and Ed Ball hated Bob Hyde. He’s the guy that I guess started this lawsuit.

I really wanted to settle things down in the city of Miami because I thought there were so many problems and we needed to have one battle. I did meet Ed Ball about city business in ’73. Then this was this whole taking of the FPC property, which was my idea, and was my doing. While I was there, we got Bill Fredes to represent the city in that. Everybody was very [unintelligible] to me because I decided to do a quick take, which means that you put up the money and then you come back and buy it, but it freezes it at that moment. As it turned out, it was one of the best decisions I made as mayor.

Getting back to the late sixties, I ran for the Florida legislature, won, and served and also there were several things that I learned. One, Southern politics in Tallahassee, Florida politics, pork choppers in particular. Two, it was the constitutional revision. I went through that whole process, and it was a great. I’m not a lawyer, and this was a great educational process for me. Three because I made a lot of friends. That was the legislature session where Ruben Askew was in the Senate, Bob Graham was in the House of [Florida] and the Senate. Claude Kirk was governor then, and Claude Kirk was a good friend of mine through my appeal days.

I was the president of a company; he was president. We both were young men. I knew Claude from appeal meetings and we were friends. Claude went to Puerto Rico with me--he and his then wife. It was a great educational process for me. When Bob Hyde dies in ’67, I was called, and asked if I was interested in serving on the City of Miami commission. I really thought that that was even a better opportunity because what I was really interested in was local government. I really wasn’t interested, even then, I really didn’t have an interest in pursuing Tallahassee or Washington.

I thought that I eventually was going to go back to Puerto Rico, and I didn’t want to get too far away. I also thought that the issues that I was interested in were local--urbanization, infrastructure, the blossoming of Miami as an international city. I saw all those things. A lot of things that have been attributed to me were really my father’s ideas. My father was the one who back in the early fifties, said Miami was going to be the capital of the America’s. Miami’s going to be a very important, Spanish-speaking country. “Country” in quotes advisably, but

I was more interested in what was going to happen in Miami, in the future of Miami. There are several ideas that coincided in all this. One of them had to do with [unintelligible]. Munoz was the George Washington of Puerto Rico. His father had been resident commissioner and been a strong advocate for independence during the Spanish days. After an astonishing record in war, [he] became a representative in Washington of Puerto Rico. Munoz Jr. grew up as a young man with his father in Washington and then eventually went to Georgetown and stayed in New York. [He didn’t] go back to Puerto Rico to live until he was in his mid-thirties. My father was a role model, and my uncle, but Munoz was also a role model. Munoz comes back in his 30s and he founded the Popular Democratic Party. The rest was in the history of Puerto Rico.

One of Munoz’s dreams was that Puerto Rico was going to be the meeting point and the marriage point between the Spanish-speaking world and the English-speaking world, in the hemisphere. In other words, these are two European-based countries. One basically Anglo-Saxon, the other one Spanish, who went in very different directions and grew very differently but had a lot in common. Somewhere along the line there had to be a cultural union. Munoz thought that that place was Puerto Rico.

When the Cubans started coming here in ’60, that’s what changed everything. I realized that what was going to happen was that more and more and more Cubans would come here. Since they were well educated and middle-class professional Cubans, they would be bankers and chemists and sales people. They’d work for Chemical Bank and Chase Manhattan Bank, and that that would be a human mine that would then bring the multi-nationals to Miami for geographic reasons and because of language. We’re all Spanish-speaking. It’s obvious that, in the middle of Michigan, Dow Chemical [would realize] that they could better run Dow Chemical Latin America from Miami than from the middle of Michigan.

What occurred is all these Cubans that were around here--lawyers, and professional, and technical people--joined these companies. All of them got to be chairman of the board of Coca Cola. Many of them became vice-presidents of important banks in New York, who were then transferred to Caracas and Buenos Aires. But five, ten years later, they all [came] back to Miami. That is the basis for a very, very important human entity, in mind, and knowledge, and technology, and skill, and experience. From there what occurred was Latin Americans then started coming into Miami, because Miami really became the Mecca for them to go shopping, for them to do deals, for them to borrow money. As Miami developed, the importance of New York diminished for Latin Americans. I saw the potential of that back in the ‘70s

I saw professional growth because I lived in this. You’ve got to remember when I came to Miami, the population of the greater Miami area was 150,000 people. The Cubans are always saying that they made Miami; that’s bullshit. Miami was almost a million people when they got here. It was a major city, but it was tourist-oriented [and] not very important. It was the most important city in Florida.

It was [culturally] backward. It was a place where people came for vacations to be on the beach, to go to Hialeah racetrack. It wasn’t defined. It was very amorphous. It was in one of its many transformations. Miami is like a butterfly or a caterpillar, goes from one form to another. It’s transformed many times. It’s and ongoing transformation that occurs every quarter century almost. The Miami of 1900 is very different from the Miami of 1925, and that’s very different from the Miami of 1950. It’s totally different from the Miami of 1975, and it’s totally different from the Miami of 2000. I have lived in Miami.

That’s a very important point by the way because it deals with the definition of America and what it is to be an American. That is being defined here in Miami, or will be defined, and deals with the constitution. Basically it’s a major constitutional issue. In other words, we’re really digressing now.

I’ll just digress for five minutes. The concept is this. The concept deals with the definition. The basis for the definition is Jacques Mauritane’s book Madame State, where Mauritane very clearly defines some very basic concepts about nationality, citizenship, and so on. Basically it all goes back in the western world to Rome. Rome was able to distinguish unbelievably between citizenship and nationality. In other words, there was clear distinction in Roman law.

The classic case, for people who don’t understand this very well, is Saint Paul. When Saint Paul was apprehended in Antioch and he was going to be executed he said, “You can’t do that because I am a citizen of Rome.” The soldier said, “Well here it says you’re a Jew.” He said, “Well, I’m a Jew nationally, but I’m a citizen of Rome, and as a citizen of Rome I have rights.” That goes back to Seneca and all the issues that were established in the distinction between citizenship and nationality.

The question in American 2000 years later is, is there a difference between citizenship and nationality. Now in most American’s viewpoint, there is not. That’s the republican view of life. It’s very simplistic. More and more, as America grows and evolves and develops, it accepts the premise that people who were not Americans 100 years ago--the Irish who were animals and drunks, and couldn’t be trusted, and they were all thieves, and no Irish allowed here and all this kind of stuff--all of a sudden after second or third generation became Americans. But that’s alright because they’re Catholic, but at least they’re English-speaking people? They’re light-skinned, and they’re mostly married. They really become American through the immigration process, but not so for the Jews.

The Jews are different. Also, these Polish Jews and all these Russian Jews, they’re not Americans and they’ll never be Americans because not only are they darker skinned, they’re different and they got big ears, and big whatever. They don’t do this and they don’t do that. They speak Yiddish. Well, all of a sudden, you have Jacob [unintelligible], you have many people, who fit into the pattern and they are Americans.

The same thing happened with the Italians. Mario Pomo is just as American as John F. Kennedy, just as American as Justice Goldberg and so on. We have a tradition in America of grudgingly accepting. The premise is this. And there’s a question and this is why it’s relevant to Miami. If there is a distinction between nationality and citizenship, then what really determines Americanism and to be an American is citizenship. Citizenship means the rule of law, it means and interest in the constitution, it means due process and procedure. Whether you’re white or black is not important. Whether you’re a Christian or a Jew is not important. The last battlefront.

We’re still fighting these battles as to old people, [whether] they’re really people under the law. Well, how about homosexuals? Well, we’re fighting that battle now, about equality. How about culture? Can a person whose culture is different from the Anglo-Saxon culture be an American citizen? The Puerto Ricans say, “Yes we can.” Then comes the issue of language. Language in my opinion is the last frontier that we as Americans have a battle on with this whole question of a definition of an American. That’s a battle that is nowhere near won. We’re a long way from it.

It’s being fought, and I think where that battle is going to be fought long is in Miami. You’re already beginning to see it. I see it with young Carlos Lacasa, with Mario Diaz-Balart. Perfect English speakers, grew up here, went to school, are as American, but they haven’t given up on their strong Cuban roots. Their children will probably be as American as Mario Pomo’s grandchildren.

The whole process of integration aside, I think there’s a much more important issue here. That is the definition of what an American is. I think that is an evolving process, which in my opinion, has not yet reached out, and is still reaching out. We haven’t really won the racial battle. There’s still discrimination against dark-skinned people, black and otherwise. We really have done a real hoopla on the Indians, but we really haven’t overcome that issue yet. We really haven’t solved that problem.

The issue of homosexuals and the gay and the lesbian community is still a battlefield. This whole culture thing is just the beginning. Most Americans are nowhere near accepting. I use the argument all the time on that subject that you go back to Brown vs. School Board of Topeka, and put it on a battle in 1953. They’re lost. It’s thanks to the constitution and the existence of separation of powers in the Supreme Court that Brown vs. School Board was a major step in deconstructing segregation and apartheid, especially in the South. It was a major breakthrough. It was a major stepping-stone for all of us--white, black, and otherwise. I guess the point I’m trying to make is all these ideas really came into line as I moved from the legislature to the floor to the Miami City Commission.

I’ve evolved; we all evolve and change. I was born in ’35, so by 1970 I was 35 years old. My mother died in 1960. She died in Boston, in her operation that didn’t succeed. The day before her operation, and this is very vivid in my mind obviously, I flew up and instead of going to Boston, I went to New York and I went to Fordham University where I had a very good friend of mine who is a professor there. [He] gave me Manner of the State. He said, “Here, you’re confused about this read this.” He became a guru on education.

He was a big, big, bite. He and I used to spend a lot of time together. He was then monsignor in the Catholic Church. He was then fighting the battle because the Catholic Church formed a political party in Puerto Rico. He was totally opposed to it. That battle was going on, and I used to go Puerto Rico. In those days I was thinking very seriously of going back to Puerto Rico.

In those days, he was in his early thirties. He was the youngest monsignor in the Catholic Church in America. He was a monsignor at age 32. He had two Ph D’s--one in history from the University of Heidelberg. He was a Croatian Jew. His mother was Jewish. His father was a Croatian. [He] survived the war, ended up getting all these doctoral degrees, decided to become a priest. [He] went to Rome to the Burgoyne College [then] went back to New York convinced at age 28 or 29 that he could solve Speldman’s problems. Speldman was a typical Irishman, had this real serious problem, who did not understand the Puerto Ricans and it was a major problem in New York. What did he know about those Puerto Ricans?

[I met him in the] late 50s. I must have been 24 years old then. I was 24, so that was around ’59. I met him in ’58 or ’59. I remember the impact because I always had remorse about that. At age 24, I was never expecting my mother to die. I go to Boston, and the operation was the next day it was a routine operation. Dr. White was the famous surgeon in Boston who did these aortic operations. It was the beginning of all this. He had only lost two patients out of 1,000 operations he made. She didn’t make it. It’s always bothered me, my conscience, that instead of being with my mother I had gone to see [unintelligible] at Fordham University, in early December of 1960. That place is a big breakthrough in my mind.

I begin the process in the city of Miami. I think what happened was I had done my apprenticeship in Tallahassee. I wanted to learn what the city of Miami was all about. I wanted to run for either mayor of Miami or mayor of Dade County. I started in ’67 and sure enough in 1970, I ran for mayor of Dade County. Steve Clark was my opponent. I lost, not by much. It was a very tight race. In the primary, I won or I was ahead, by 30, 40 thousand votes. In the run off, I lost. It didn’t make any sense, but that’s the way it was. In 1970, I was 35-years-old.

Steve pulled and ethnic cord on me. You’ve got to remember in 1970 the population, the Hispanic population was very, very little. In ’73, the candidate, who was then mayor of Miami, ends up getting indicted. Dave calls me up and asks me if I would serve as interim mayor. I accepted, and that was in April. In August, the charges were dismissed. There was a famous market connection with the city of Miami. He decided not to run for election. He subsequently got very angry and he said that I really double-crossed him. I had stepped in and just stayed on. The fact is he had very clearly told me that he was not going to run. When he decided not to run, then I [ran] for the mayorship and had seven opponents. [Unintelligible] backed my candidacy for mayor of Dade county in 1970, and now are opposed to me for whatever reason.

[The Knights] controlled but they didn’t get involved in local things. No that was when the powers in the Miami area really tried to dominate the city of Miami and did. The Miami News backed them up to.

Let me tell you a little bit about the history of these parks, as I remember. I become mayor in 1973. Let me jump and move forward now. I’ve made reference to it before, but let me talk about the Bayfront park area. When I run now, one of my big projects is going to be the Miami River.

My first curiosity involved in all of this starts as I recall it, when Mitchell Wilson calls me and says, “I want you to come with Hank Meyer and me to a presentation at the Dupont Plaza Hotel by Constantinus Daciatus.” I was fascinated by it. It was a wonderful study. It was crazy. Daciatus had this obsession--I think rightly so--that what completely destroyed American cities was the automobile. The automobile was the culprit and there was no way you can get around it. He was a wonderful showman; he’d draw these circles and he said.

In ancient Greece in the times of Pericles, a man would walk [unintelligible], and then he’d superimpose a map of Ahtens and then imperial Rome. The whole question of how long can a man go on horseback. Then there’d be the carriage, and all kinds of carriage, and what kind of a carriage, and then what happens when the automobile comes in. Basically his conclusion was that there was an inherent conflict that had no solution.

Listen to what he came up with, which in my view is unreal. He said we have to now have a two level system--the cars underneath and people up on top. What he really wanted was for all the construction of Miami to be done where the pedestrian level to be twelve feet above the ground. He wanted that throughout Miami and he wanted everything connected, so the pedestrians can walk and then roam into one destination then another. He wanted to, in effect, tunnel Biscayne Boulevard. He said Biscayne Boulevard was an obstacle course.

He was the one who came up with a famous phrase, which became a pretty historical phrase here. “The marriage of the park and the bay.” He wanted for the people of Miami to have access to the water. Seeing that Biscayne Boulevard existed and you couldn’t dig underneath because of the water tables, the only way you could do this was to elevate the platform of Miami where it could connect and then cross over Biscayne Boulevard pedestrian and then into the park and into the water. He envisioned a city that was connected pedestrian up on top and automobiles on the bottom. He was dreaming obviously.

I was fascinated by the man, so I ended up making friends with him and he invited he to Greece. I didn’t take him up on it. I later took up Maguchi and later went to Japan with Maguchi, which is another story I’ll tell you about later. But that first turned me on, fascinated me. I remember Mitch Wolfson looks into this very carefully. Mitch stands up and he says, “Dr. Daciatus, who’s gonna pay for all of this?” A typical Mitch Wolfson question. Daciatus says, “Mr. Wilson, you paid me to tell what to do not to tell you how to pay for it. That’s your problem.”

Mitch says, “Let’s just forget it; that’s never gonna happen because this community doesn’t have that kind of togetherness.” Mitch was a very practical guy. I remember he was a political mentor of mine. If I were to choose four or five people who were my guide he was one of them. I was very close to Hank [Meyer], and Hank was very close to my dad. [He] represented Mobil industries for many, many years, in the hey days. He was a different kind of a guy. Mitch was a very pragmatic visionary. He was a visionary, but he was very down to earth. .I have two relative stories about Mitch. One had to do with Guzman Hall; the other I think had to do with parking garages.

He was the author of all that and he ran it. He was the absolute czar. Once in a while, I had you know, a confrontation with him about it. We always worked it out. He was very, very reasonable, and very supportive, but he was very firm about things. One of the things he was absolutely adamant about was that we not put any commercial activity stores in the ground floor parking garages. I was very strongly for that because I had a very strong opinion, as did Lloyd Kinsey, who was one of the most important people in the history of downtown Miami. He was the director of the downtown development authority. I had a very strong idea that the only way you could humanize Miami was to have human activity at ground level. The opposite of what Daciatus concluded. I don’t think that we could separate the automobile and the [pedestrians] unfortunately. The only other alternative was to bring people to the streets and let them compete with automobiles. But the more people you have on the street, then the more people feel safe.

I was very strongly in favor of putting stores because that would bring [more people]. [I] loved the concept of the rambas, which was done in the mid-nineteenth century. By the way, Ponce, the city where I was born and grew up, is the only example of a nineteenth-century designed city in Latin America. Professor Le Jeune, Francois Le Jeune of the University of Miami, and a Puerto Rican architect, a very good Puerto Rican architect and historian by the name of Rigau, did some wonderful studies on the [success] of Ponce as a nineteenth-century design. It really talked a lot about rambas. One of the concepts about rambas was that people needed to work and live in the same place. The shops were on the bottom and people had apartments and houses on the upper floors.

Getting back to Mitch Wilson, I lost that battle. He absolutely refused to yield. His theory was typical entrepreneurial theory. He said we borrow money at tax-free rates because my main interest is to have the cheapest parking available because that will induce development in downtown Miami--good logic. Therefore, my interest is in developing Downtown Miami, and that’s my contribution to it. We need a lot and good cheap parking.

If we take that as a basis and then put shops there, in effect what you are doing is you’re competing with the private sector unfairly because you have an advantage. You’re really then going against the main purpose of what you are doing. The purpose of garages is to park cars, not to have stores on the street. I thought that he was wrong because I thought that what you gave up was a lot more than what you gained. He was very strict in that principle but by doing that he, in effect, continued the problem of dehumanizing the Downtown.

The second story that Mitch dealt with [was] Gusman. Maurice Guzman calls me one day and he says, “Look, I know you’re the mayor of Miami, but I think Miami’s a real Micky Mouse place and all these politicians are crooks and they’re bad. You have too many problems. I’m going to take Gusman Hall and give it to the University of Miami.” I called Mitch Wolfson, I said, “Mitch, we’ve got to go talk to Maurice Gusman.” He bought the Olympia Theater because he wanted to make a philharmonic call, and he wanted a Frenchman, who’s a very good musician or conductor with the philharmonic.

I said, “We need to turn this thing around. I think this is a great contribution if it’s done properly, but it’s not going to make money. At least it might be able to break even, but I think we should have it on the city.” That’s how it ended up, according to the off street parking authority because the only way Gusman would agree to give it to the city is if it were given to the off street parking authority. Of course he and Mitch Wolfson were both old men, and he didn’t accept the fact the they were soon to die.

That’s another story, getting back to Daciatus [in] ’67, ’68. I may have been on the commission, I don’t remember. I don’t think so. I think it was before that. Bob Hyde was alive. Bob Hyde was the guy that brought Daciatus to Miami. I remember in those days it cost him something like $60,000 and that was an outrage. It’s unbelievable. That was in 1960. Anyway, getting back to the three parks. . .

[END OF INTERVIEW]
Greg Bush said...

I did the oral history of Ferre back in 1999. We live in such a fast paced condensed world that its important to appreciate that an oral history is not a TV news clip. It is meant to allow subjects time and space to ruminate, bring up past associations and follow various trends of thought. Oral histories need to be edited, to be sure, but what I understand was included here had limited edits and from my perspective should be appreciated in those terms.

I have conducted dozens of oral histories and think that Maurice Ferre is one of the sharpest politicians in recent Miami history, respected and approachable by many. He can still do fine work for our community. Maurice is Maurice.