In his column in Ocean Drive this month, Brett Sokol profiles developer David Edelstein, who was part of a group that in 2005 bought about 10 acres surrounding the Miami Herald for $190 million.
It really does seem only a matter of time that the Herald relocates. Here's a key passage:
[Edelstein] adds that had Herald parent company Knight Ridder not been "unexpectedly" bought by the rival McClatchy chain, inserting a new set of players into the mix, such a land sale would already have been negotiated. Still, he's confident McClatchy's CEO will eventually crunch the numbers and come to the same conclusion as Knight Ridder's honchos: to take the money and run, or at least move to a less valuable location. "You have printing presses sitting on waterfront land!" he marvels. And with McClatchy's executives scrambling for fresh revenue in the increasingly beleaguered newspaper industry, "staying there just doesn't make any sense.
Edelstein makes sense, no matter what one might think of a potential move. But might want to wait until the market rises a bit ... you know, in 2013 or so.
After the Jump: Shepherd Wins A Biggee
Great work often goes underappreciated in the sprawl that teems on this end of the limp peninsula we call home. Such is the case with Gail Shepherd, New Times' food critic. Every week she brings it with a finely written, engaging story about the restaurants she searches out in South Florida. Here's an almost randomly picked passage from a recent column about a dynamite Thai place in central Broward called Bangkok Palace (that I tried and loved after reading Gail's piece):
The two I tried brought my first great Thai meal (eaten in London in the '80s) whooshing back with enough force to knock me out of my stupor. Kasinpila's green papaya salad (Som taam, $7.50) is Thai cuisine in tart, greeny microcosm: the puckery crunch of shredded fruit, sweet acids of grape tomatoes, and a handful of cut green beans and roasted peanuts for texture and contrast, all of it tossed in garlic-lime dressing.
That's just good food writing. Makes the reader go, "I want to be knocked out of my stupor too!" But you have to read the complete review. Anyway, I'm leading somewhere with this. Shepherd recently won the Association of Food Writers' Award for best newspaper restaurant criticism, beating out the Washington Post, which came in second. So if you're trying to search out good reads -- and, yes, an idea about where you might want to go out to eat -- find Shepherd every week.
