This postcard depicts the Omni International Miami, designed by Joseph Amisano of Toombs, Amisano & Wells in Atlanta and completed in 1977.1
The Omni complex was built as Miami’s “first and only megastructure”2 and included a multi-level shopping mall with an attached conference center and hotel.
It was easily the most Portman-esque thing Amisano ever put his hand to, influenced by similar urban developments like Peachtree Center in Atlanta.
The Omni mall closed circa 2000, although the hotel remains and is now named the Hilton Miami Downtown. The Miami Herald has many fine photos of the mall’s interior.
Published by the Gulf Stream Card Co. of Miami, the postcard shown above includes the following description on the back:
OMNI INTERNATIONAL WITH BISCAYNE BAY IN THE BACKGROUND, TROPICAL MIAMI, THE MAGIC CITY, 79-6.
Not very interesting, but neither is the building.
You can see who designed this giant phallus—their names are right on the postcard. Well, that’s not completely accurate.
I’ve mentioned before that A. Ten Eyck Brown often took credit for work that he had little to no hand in, though he usually let the real designers of his projects share at least some of the glory.
By the time construction was complete on the 28-story Dade County Courthouse and Miami City Hall in 1928, it was fairly evident that the primary designer was Brown’s associate, J.W. Humphreys, who superintended construction.1 2
Humphreys even cut the ribbon at the building’s dedication ceremony,3 4with Brown conspicuously absent.
Built for a whopping $4.1 million,5 the obelisk-like structure was purportedly “the first complete county courthouse and city hall ever to be built in the United States along strictly modern lines,” and the “largest and tallest building of either a public or private nature south of Washington, D.C. and east of the Mississippi river.”6
Brown’s firm simultaneously designed plans for a 20-story city hall in Atlanta that would have been nearly identical in appearance to the Miami municipal building,7 but the project was ultimately awarded to G. Lloyd Preacher.8
Speaking of someone who took credit for other people’s work…
There are certain places I have no interest in visiting. Like zero, zilch, none.
Miami tops that list.
Only a few buildings in Miami even mildly pique my curiosity, and this is one: the former Central Baptist Church, designed by Dougherty & Gardner of Nashville.1 2
Edward E. Dougherty was an Atlanta native who became the first architect in the city to complete training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.3
Dougherty began working with Thomas W. Gardner in Nashville in 1915,4 5 6 and within a few years, they were touted as “the foremost church architects in the South,”7 completing over 50 church buildings by 1926.8
It appears that Gardner, not Dougherty, was the primary designer of Miami’s Central Baptist,9 and I don’t consider it one of his better efforts. The exterior looks more like a government building, and the interior, as shown in the postcard below, is quite gaudy.
The Beaux-Arts-style structure was originally designed as the First Baptist Church and was completed in 1928.10 11
Eight years later, Central Baptist Church was formed by merging First Baptist and Temple Baptist, and the combined congregation used the building12 13 until 2007, when it then merged with Christ Fellowship Church, which now owns the property.14
The Stone Mountain daisy is a true Georgia native that typically grows on granite outcroppings in the Southeast, notably on and around its namesake, Stone Mountain.
Technically a sunflower, the plant’s beautiful yellow blooms appear in early fall, and while it reportedly grows in places as distant as Alabama and the Carolinas, you’ll find the greatest concentration of it in DeKalb County, Georgia.
I don’t have a clue where I found this one—I see rocks and water in the background, so the conditions were obviously right. My time in the South is already a hazy memory.
I’d been spending a quiet afternoon in Brooklyn Bridge Park when the place was suddenly mobbed with people, all of them with phones and cameras in hand to snap a sunset shot over Manhattan.
I could see none of them had a clue what they were doing: they just needed content to post on their socials.
It was a super cloudy day, and I could’ve told those two-bit photographers they were wasting their time, but people have to learn these things for themselves—and I don’t talk anyway.
As a line of solitary clout-chasers fixed their lenses on the Financial District for likes and engagement, soon to be disappointed, I watched this pair quietly engrossed in actual conversation.
What a novel concept, I thought.
