I had a friend ask why I ran the party photos of the young kids having fun at Flavour and The Taurus last week, he said all it would do was put a bad image on the Grove and make property values go down.
I told him that my goal, by showing the photos, was to show the outside world that Coconut Grove is alive and well and I felt that full bars and restaurants, rather than shuttered up storefronts, would help the Grove. And therein lies the rub. We have many in the Grove who have this mentality that anything above a whisper is bad. May I respectfully suggest West Kendall or the Everglades for those who prefer quiet?
Now I am not putting down those neighborhoods, it's just that they are suburban and by nature much quieter than an urban environment. Although we see that the Brickell hot spot Blue Martini just opened another location in West Kendall, so maybe the complainers need to just get ear plugs and blinders.
The Miami Herald liked our Taurus Salsa story so much that it ran online all weekend at the top of their homepage, we received a lot of internet traffic from that because people cared about it and were interested in going out, having fun, spending money and doing it in the Grove. Something that actually brings property values up, not down.
My complaining friend loves Burn Notice, and wants to keep them in the Grove, but probably doesn't realize that the bars, nightlife and car chases seen on the show are real and not just made for tv. That's what's going on out in the real world. It's art imitating life.
Ironically, a middle aged lady came up to me at one of the galleries during Saturday night's Gallery Walk. She was telling me that she reads the Grapevine and loves what I do and of all the stories she could have ever chosen to talk about, she said, "I loved the pictures of the kids at the foam party, you always have such great pictures in the Grapevine!" So she gets it.
The problem with the Grove is that we move two steps forward and one step back. Let's embrace the young people who want to party here. It's come up before -- just because we are getting older, we can't take the Grove with us. Let Coconut Grove live and thrive and be young. It's time for the younger generation to embrace it (along with the older people who want to "protect" it, from what, I'm not sure).
Wait till they get a load of FestiDan coming August 21.
No comments:
Post a Comment