What I also learned on my first visit to Miami in 1993 was the term “Bad Neighborhood.” I did not know that one should leave the office through a certain door. I was not familiar with the concept of taking a car to get anywhere. I did not even know that all cars in Miami had air conditioning. I walked out of the office through the wrong door. THe place was located in a not very glamorous looking part of Miami. It was March of the year when some German tourists would die, because they took the wrong turn in their rental cars on the wrong bridge heading for Miami Beach. I do not even think I had a car. I just decided to walk. I did not tell anyone that I was about to step into the heat and through the bad back door, I just did. The first thing I found, just yards from the office, was this safe. It was a heavy one and it had a key and a number combination on the door. Somebody must have worked really hard to get the thing all the way where it now was. And they still did not have the right tools to actually open this thing. It looked a bit like a fresh kill which the lion left behind for just a moment. Somebody had tried to force the door of the safe open, but they only managed to bend a layer of steel out of shape. The actual object seemed still very closed. I was a cameraless observer at that time. And it was just the beginning of my walk.
There were no sidewalks where I decided to walk. There was grass and large black birds on the electrical posts which littered the landscape. Everything seemed to be in the open here, but at the same time not very inviting for a pedestrian like me. I walked for quite a while and just wondered if there were any people in the dwellings left and right off the street. They might have looked like houses to the fast driving car, but to the pedestrian these ware barely standing shacks. There was no money here to paint the door, the walls, to replace the broken windows. It was quiet and hot and empty. I knew that there was plenty of time left to open that safe behind the office. It probably was not somebody form here who brought it here. It was probably somebody who thought that this was the kind of neighborhood that would not have the energy to worry about a slowly opening metal box.
Somebody in the office later told me that I had walked through a really bad neighborhood. My impression was that the neighborhood was just not rich and overly stimulated as Ocean Drive. People seemed to be very poor, but there seemed to be a feeling of dignity in the air. I do not believe in “bad neighborhoods.”