So this is beyond awesome and intriguing! Lara Stein Pardo is currently scheming up a way to unveil the Magic City’s artistic depth with a project titled Mapping Miami, which maps and pinpoints sites of historic importance in the city through places artists lived and worked. Quoting HuffPost Miami, Pardo said the reason she wanted to do this project was because “…Miami is a city in which the past is constantly erased by a focus on the future.” (truuuue)
Now, a little bit of history. The project will be covering a huge range of artistic individuals like: visual artists, writers, musicians, dancers, performers, etc. from the time period of the 1920s-1950s. Lara picked this time frame because “its both an interesting time period in between the development of the city of Miami- which was founded in 1896 and also the arrival of many more people from places like Cuba and Haiti starting in 1959.”
Discoveries like the fact Billie Holiday maintained a room at a boarding house called Georgette’s Tea Room in Brownsville and that playwright Tennessee Williams staged “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in 1956 makes Pardo hope that Miamians will get in touch with their own leads about unknown historical sites in Dade County.
Her project to plot Miami’s history was awarded a grant by Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and she’s currently seeking funds via Indiegogo to satisfy the matching-funds requirement.
Pardo also hopes to expand the project to include apps, tours, and podcasts as well as go nationally as Mapping Arts Project, plotting local sites of interest in cities throughout the U.S.
Good Luck! The305.com is excited to see this move forward.
