Anchors in Time and Space
How Miami’s Transience Reflects a Generational Disconnect
Take a sip of a Cuban colada—thick, sweet, and hot enough to kick the afternoon into high gear. The taste cuts through the humidity, grounding you in the present moment, even as the city around you continues to dissolve and reappear. Miami is a city that keeps reinventing itself, a place where what was here yesterday may not be here tomorrow.
The other day, I was driving down Biscayne Boulevard near 79th Street and noticed something missing. For as long as I can remember, there was a tall, unremarkable, and abandoned building that once housed the immigration office—a place where countless people came to process their documents, their futures, their new lives. I was eleven or twelve when I first walked through those doors. Now, after more than forty years, it’s gone. Torn down.
For the last decade, the building just sat there, empty. Too old to repurpose, too forgotten to matter. But seeing it razed to the ground felt like watching a chapter of Miami’s story close without ceremony. It was a little shocking, like a piece of the city’s memory erased in a single swipe. And also symbolic of our times.
That building was just one of many. I was in my early twenties when they tore down the pier by Penrod’s on South Beach. That was another anchor. I surfed there. That pier was a fixed point in a city always in flux. And then one day, it was gone. Not long after, Penrod’s itself morphed into Nikki Beach—a day club that came to define a different era of Miami, one of seeing and being seen, the kind of transience that promises to stay but inevitably moves on.
Wynwood’s transformation tells a similar story. In the 1980s, it was a run-down warehouse and garment district, the kind of place where you might get your car stereo stolen if you parked too long. Then came the art galleries, the graffiti-covered facades, the murals that turned the neighborhood into an open-air gallery. But even that phase was short-lived. Now, Wynwood is becoming a collection of high-rises and commercial centers, each wave of gentrification pushing out seniors, lower-income families, and mom-and-pop shops that couldn’t keep up with rising rents. The inimitable Wynwood Yard, long gone now.
Coconut Grove is another. The corner of Cocowalk once had grit—a blend of art and humanity, a place where artists, musicians, and wanderers mingled. It was raw, a little rough around the edges, but real. Señor Frogs was the anchor. Then they remade it. Cocowalk became a sleek, commercialized plaza—a polished, Disneyfied version of its former self. It lost that unfiltered energy that made it feel like a neighborhood rather than a backdrop.
And then there’s the nightlife. Miami’s club scene has always been transient, like the clubs themselves were destined to be evanescent. Take Amnesia, a nightclub that lived up to its name in the context of this post—a place that came, burned brightly, and then disappeared like a dream upon waking. And there have been countless others — Mansion, Cameo, Les Bains, Rebar, Velvet, Bash, and The Strand —each one emblematic of a particular moment in the city’s timeline, each one a phantom of Miami’s ongoing reinvention.
Maybe that’s why Miami’s tech, startup, and crypto scenes took off the way they did. The city doesn’t just welcome change—it craves it. It’s a place that tears down the past to make way for the next big thing. But in that endless reinvention, what happens to memory? What happens to continuity? What happens to the soul of a place when everything is always in motion, when the only constant is change?
If the city has no memory, what do we hold on to? If the people around us are always passing through, how do we anchor ourselves?
There’s something about cities that remain unchanged—the way they hold memory in their bones. In Paris, I can walk down a street and feel the echo of lives lived centuries ago. In Rio, the mountains are the city’s elder statesmen, watching over the coastline like silent witnesses. You can leave Rio, come back ten years later, and still feel like you’re home. The skyline will have shifted somewhat, at least in the Zona Sul, but the mountains remain, their outlines constant against the sky.
But in Miami, even the skyline feels like a hallucination. You can look up and see a high-rise where a single-story house once stood. The city is always shedding its skin, emerging each time as something newer, sleeker, less recognizable. And I wonder what that does to the psyche, to the soul. What does it do to us when the places we anchor to keep getting washed away?
In some indigenous and Eastern traditions, the elders hold the stories, the memories, the wisdom. They’re the living landmarks, the keepers of time. And the youth are the dreamers, the ones who keep the story moving forward. But here, in a city that’s forever remaking itself, where are the elders? Where are the children?
In Miami, the sense of transience isn’t just architectural—it’s social. It’s cultural. It’s generational. People come and go, drawn in by the promise of sun, sand, no income taxes, and opportunity. The city is a revolving door of tourists, immigrants, snowbirds. Friendships and social circles are fluid, transient, and often defined by age.
Maybe the city’s rapid transformation is an echo of our own inner landscapes—reminding us that nothing is fixed, that even what seems solid will eventually disappear. And in that recognition, a call: to anchor ourselves not in what we think will last, but in the erotic immediacy of presence. The way the breeze cuts through us by the seashore. The taste of a colada that wakes us from the heat. The way someone looks at you across a crowded room, and for a moment, the city stops moving.
Without those anchors, it’s easy to feel like time is slipping by unmarked, each year indistinguishable from the last.
Maybe the real landmarks aren’t buildings or streets. Maybe they’re moments. Maybe they’re closely held memories—the favorite restaurant where the waiter remembered your order, the park bench where you once sat to watch the sun rise above the skyline, the friends who showed up late but also lingered long after the party ended.
If the city is always changing, let us become the ones who remember. The ones who slow down enough to catch the moonlit night. The ones who attend the drum circles, who go on gallery art walks. The ones who dare to let the moment imprint itself on the soul before it, too, disappears.
Yes, Miami is a city of transience, of illusion, of dreams. But what if the lesson is not to hold on, but to root down in presence? To ground ourselves in the raw, unfiltered immediacy of the now. To suddenly see the rainbow eucalyptus tree for what it is—a burst of unexpected color. To sip the colada and taste the heat, let it burn. To close your eyes and feel the saxophone’s wail as it drifts down Lincoln Road, carrying the ghosts of those who danced at Van Dyke’s long before. To find the erotic pulse in the fleeting, the seductive dance of the present.
Because in a city that keeps erasing itself, the real map isn’t made of streets or buildings. It’s made of the people we love, the memories we keep, and the courage to be fully here, right now, before it all changes again.