In a heartwarming display of goodwill, Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputies tomorrow plan to distribute 45 free bikes to kids in Belle Glade. It’s a lovely gesture, sure to be appreciated by children in a city plagued by crime and poverty. Only, the timing is a bit unfortunate.The bike giveaway…
Miami-based real estate giant The Related Group has struggled to weather the housing bust, watching its massive Icon Brickell condo project on Biscayne Bay sit largely empty, while its CityPlace South Tower in West Palm Beach goes into “friendly foreclosure.” But that hasn’t stopped Related’s thirst to keep building. According…
Behind some of the area’s biggest condo ghost towers — Tao Sawgrass in Sunrise and Trump International Hotel & Tower in Fort Lauderdale — lies one very cash-strapped bank. Chicago-based Corus Bank has become a poster child for the condo meltdown, because it lent money to at least 16 South…
Males. When they’re young and brash, trying to mark their territory and impress girls, there’s no telling what they’ll do. Run off to Georgia, even, and get themselves killed.That’s apparently what happened to a Florida panther who was shot and killed by a hunter last year in the woods of…
You’d think that South Florida, with one of the largest Jewish populations in the U.S., would be a mecca for young people looking to marry within the faith. How many times has your Bubbe tried to set you up with a nice young doctor whose great-aunt is her neighbor in…
The hits keep coming for Miami real estate giant The Related Group. First, the lenders on its extravagant, 420-unit CityPlace South Tower condo in downtown West Palm Beach took control of the project in a “friendly foreclosure.” This is a polite way of saying that Related couldn’t pay its mortgage…
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration has devised an ingenious way to cut down on the number of homeless families in New York City shelters: Handing out one-way tickets to leave town. And what’s one of the most popular destinations for the fleeing masses? Florida, of course.According to the New York Times,…
Millions of dollars for police officers, schools, roads, bridges — no one’s going to argue with most of these federally funded stimulus projects. In tough times, people want cops, teachers, and construction crews to stay on the job and pump money back into our battered economy. But the Boca Raton…
After reading New Times’ cover story about a rape at Palm Beach’s most exclusive country club, you may still have questions about this strange criminal case. It’s a complicated one, involving two employees who lived and worked at the Everglades Club — a white cook named Melissa and her alleged…
Aside from the racial and religious discrimination discussed in this week’s New Times cover story about the Everglades Club, there are some more eccentricities worth noting about life at the exclusive Palm Beach country club.First, there’s a significant portion of gray hair on the Worth Avenue campus. The average member…
On the night of April 1, 2006, a young chef dropped by her coworker’s dorm room at the Everglades Club in Palm Beach to pass the warm hours with wine and music. Melissa, whose last name New Times is withholding to protect her privacy, was a 20-year-old white woman with…
In this week’s cover story, “The Chef and the ‘Amigo,'” New Times goes behind the scenes at Palm Beach’s oldest country club. When Esdras Cardona, a Guatemalan immigrant and dishwasher at the Everglades Club, was accused of raping a white coworker, the case put a spotlight on the club’s long…
Those of us who grew up with online banking and debit cards have been more than a little unsettled by the bank failures of the past several months. We’re accustomed to dealing with faceless, computerized corporate giants that text us with account updates and give us free airline miles for…
Last month, we introduced you to some of the saddest tales from South Florida’s condo meltdown, including the ghostly Tao Sawgrass towers in Sunrise and the now-foreclosed CityPlace South Tower in West Palm Beach. It would be easy to assume that downtown Delray Beach was immune to such problems, since…
Speaking of Gov. Charlie Crist’s fundraising skills…This weekend for $1,000 a pop, Crist fans in Sag Harbor, New York, can attend a party hosted by his celebrity pals: Jill Zarin, one of The Real Housewives of New York City, and Donald Trump. Zarin is close friends with Crist’s wife, Carole…
Few places illustrate South Florida’s housing bust better than Pembroke Pines. A few years ago, it was one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities, with a population that more than ballooned from 65,500 in 1990 to 147,000 in 2007. Now, thanks to a multimillion-dollar drop in permit revenue from new construction,…
OK, so a few hours of breathing and stretching won’t get your house out of foreclosure or convince your boss to postpone layoffs. But these days, anything free is appealing, and you’d be amazed how good it feels to pay nothing for exercise classes that usually cost $17 a pop.That’s…
It’s been five months since 5-year-old Haleigh Cummings disappeared from the bedroom of her family’s trailer home in Satsuma, a rural community north of Ocala National Forest. Haleigh, with her blond hair and eager smile, captured the attention of the Nancy Grace media brigades just after the memorial service for…
Now that three former Palm Beach County commissioners have gone to prison on federal corruption charges, it’s tempting believe that local government has been reborn in a cleaner, more-efficient fashion. But of course, the cynics among us are still trying to sort out the damage that ex-commissioners Mary McCarty, Warren…
It’s 5 p.m. on a Tuesday. You’re drunk, and trying mightily to push your car out of a water-filled ditch. Now, you have to explain to some cop that your day job is working at a prison?Alas, this was the sad plight of Lisa Mae Hawkins, arrested this week on…
As the head of a homeless shelter in Hollywood, Sean Cononie has hosted more than his share of funerals. Recently, he decided to begin celebrating a lesser-known side of life on the streets: love. His group, the Coalition of Service and Charity, organizes and pays for the weddings of couples…
It was 6 p.m. the night before a long weekend, and so far my getaway trip was going smoothly. I’d made it through the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport security screening line with half an hour to spare before boarding time. Now, I was starving. But where the hell could I…
