5 June 13-19, 2024 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | Cafe | MusiC | Month XX–Month XX, 2008 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | CONTENTS | LETTERS | RIPTIDE | METRO | NIGHT+DAY | STAGE | ART | FILM | CAFE | MUSIC | 5 Month XX–Month XX, 2008 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | ART | STAGE | NIGHT+DAY | METRO | RIPTIDE | LETTERS | CONTENTS | REQUIRED READING T.D. Allman, journalist and Miami historian, has died at age 79. BY JOSEPH CONTRERAS I n the rarefied circles of the New York literati, T.D. Allman is being praised this month as the fearless and gifted wunderkind who uncovered the CIA’s secret war in Laos in 1970 as a 25-year-old freelance reporter on assignment for the New York Times. That exposé kicked off a glittering career as a foreign correspondent that would see All- man file news stories from more than 80 countries for Esquire, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, and other prominent publications. Over the ensuing 40 years, the Harvard-edu- cated Florida native rescued victims from a massacre in Cambodia, survived a kidnapping in Beirut, took a bullet in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, and investigated drug kingpins in the lawless hinterland of Colombia. But in Miami, Timothy Damien Allman is best remembered for Miami: City of the Fu- ture. A tour de force of literary journalism published in 1987, Miami was a meticulously researched and exquisitely written portrait of a metropolis widely thought to have been rot- ted to its core by wanton crime, rampant cor- ruption, and urban decay. Allman saw a very different Miami. “Apart from its biting observations and deep reporting, the book ran counter to what everyone else was saying about Miami,” says veteran journalist Jim DeFede, recalling that the then-editor of this newspaper, Jim Mul- lin, admonished him to read the volume when DeFede joined Miami New Times in late 1991. “According to the rest of the world, Miami had no future. But Allman understood that all of the problems that made everyone else write Miami off were actually the seeds of its greatness. “Yes, Miami was violent and corrupt; it was the canary in the coal mine for so many issues — drugs, addiction, homelessness, im- migration, race,” DeFede says. “But it was also sexy and cool, and how Miami dealt with its challenges would offer a glimpse into America’s future. Reading Allman made me realize this was a city worth understanding.” The celebrated author and journalist died on May 12 in a Manhattan hospital. He was 79 years old. The cause of death was respiratory failure, according to his partner of 25 years, John Sui. An Accidental Floridian Born in October 1944 in Tampa to U.S. Coast Guard officer Paul J. Allman and his antiques- dealer wife Felicia, Timothy moved with his family to Pennsylvania at age 5. He could claim only the most tenuous of links to the Sunshine State when he landed in South Florida in the mid-1980s to start work on the Miami book. (The adult Allman once described himself in print as an “accidental Floridian.”) But the already well-traveled bon vivant instantly took to the city, says Andres Vi- glucci, a veteran Miami Herald reporter who was working in the newspaper’s Miami Beach bureau when he first met Allman. “Somebody suggested he contact me. We kind of hit it off, and I started driving him around,” says Viglucci, who, along with his wife, fellow Herald reporter Linda Robert- son, became close friends with Allman. “Mi- ami was a dark and surreal place in a lot of ways back then, and he keyed in on some of that. He always liked Miami.” Another early contact for Allman was Woody Graber, a Buffalo native who’d moved to the area in 1979 and was working for the Miami Beach Community Development Cor- poration when he met the high-flying foreign correspondent. The nonprofit MBCDC at that time was in charge of conserving and re- furbishing many of the famous art deco build- ings that lined the streets of South Beach, and the campaign to save iconic hotels like the Cardozo and the Carlyle from the wrecking ball captured Allman’s imagination. “Tim was researching everything he could about South Beach, and he was very much in- terested in what was happening with historic preservation,” says the now-retired South Florida publicist. “At a time when the world was calling us ‘Paradise Lost,’ he saw Miami for what it could be, not for what it was.” Indeed, Miami: City of the Future is stud- ded with compelling profiles of the Magic City’s power-brokers and -wielders but also some of its more ordinary denizens. There is Maurice Ferré, the suave, charismatic pol from Puerto Rico who was elected as the city’s first Hispanic mayor in 1973 and, for the next 12 years, presided over the breathtaking transformation of Miami from what Allman termed “another Jacksonville” into “the world’s newest great city.” There is Isaac Bashevis Singer, the dimin- utive Nobel Prize-winning novelist who wrote in Yiddish with a fountain pen and sometimes treated visitors to a bowl of borscht at a restaurant in the affluent suburb of Surfside. And then there is “the Helpless Hooker.” In the epilogue to City of the Future, Allman recounts his quest in the company of Viglucci for a sex worker who used a wheelchair and whom the Herald reporter had described as “very pretty, even though she can’t walk.” Like a lot of the other prostitutes plying their trade along Biscayne Boulevard in the ‘80s, this woman would hang out at bus stops so that if a suspicious cop were to accost her, she could plausibly say she was merely awaiting the next Metrobus. The book also displayed the author’s unfailing eye for the bizarre. On another occasion, when he was riding shotgun with Viglucci, they stopped to feed a quarter into the tollbooth at the mainland end of the Venetian Causeway and Allman came face to face with a vehicle transporting a large number of big cats. “I saw we were surrounded by tigers,” All- man writes. “There were dozens of them — sleeping, stretching, scratching themselves, yawning, staring listlessly at the blinking neon city that reared up in front of them. “The eyes of the tigers were expression- less,” the account continues. “[They] no lon- ger questioned their cages. Even when their cages were put on trucks and carted across Venetian Way to the next exhibition of the Ringling Brothers Circus, they found no won- der in the world, not even when all the won- ders of Miami rolled past them.” A Local Bestseller Locally, the reception that awaited Allman’s book verged on the rhapsodic, at least in some quarters. “An extraordinary look at an extraordinary city,” gushed Edward James Olmos, the Mexican-American actor who played Lieutenant Castillo in the hit TV show Miami Vice. Books & Books owner Mitchell Kaplan (whom Allman thanked in his book’s acknowledgments section) remembers Miami: City of the Future as “a bestseller” for the bookstore because it offered “a complete history of Miami that hadn’t really existed before.” Xavier Suarez had just begun his first term as Miami mayor in 1986 when he granted Allman an hourlong interview at his bayside office. He says he didn’t encoun- ter a single inaccuracy or the slightest hint of personal bias in the 422-page book, which he compares favorably to Alexis de Tocqueville’s magisterial two-volume opus Democracy in America. T.D. Allman, 1944–2024 Photo by John Sui | METRO | >> p6
