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if you are familar with the maysle brothers documentary Salesman, then you may remember the location ali-baba avenue in opa-laca florida. its just a little north and west of miami. i know it personally because i worked for my uncle who had a fishing tackle manufacturing company there summer '73.

opa-laka is in the nyt today, they're boarding-up city hall :

Where the scrub palmetto once grew wild, Opa-locka has languished as a violent, drug-addled void on a cartoon stage set, one fantasyland too many in an oversubscribed state. Beneath a film of dust, a suggestion box at City Hall holds a single blue slip that says, “The best suggestion would be more police.”

For rehabilitation, the city has turned time and again to promoting the legacy of its architecture, a peculiar homage to Moorish antiquity that includes 20 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. Down streets called Sesame, Aladdin and Caliph, archways and turrets are adorned with brilliant mosaics and muted flowers in bas-relief.

But now even the fantasy’s veneer is crumbling. Pronouncing City Hall’s roof unsound, the walls moldy and the rats intolerable, the City Commission voted last month to move to rental space in a new four-story office building most vividly described as rectangular.
via vz
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