I walked Flagler Street on a Tuesday morning in April, starting at the river and heading north. The street is fully open to traffic now — it has been since 1995, when the city finally admitted that the pedestrian mall it had created in 1976 was not working — but you can still see the evidence of the experiment in the pavement, in the placement of the trees, in the slightly awkward relationship between the sidewalks and the street.
The pedestrian mall was a response to the decline of downtown retail, which was itself a response to the construction of the regional shopping malls in the suburbs. The theory was that if you removed cars from the street, people would come back to downtown to shop. The theory was wrong, or at least incomplete. People had left downtown not because of cars but because the malls were more convenient, more air-conditioned, and more oriented toward the kind of consumption that postwar Americans wanted.
What Remains
What remains of the pedestrian mall era is mostly invisible. The street looks like a street. The buildings that survived the 1970s and 1980s are still standing, though many of them have been altered. The ones that did not survive have been replaced with parking lots or new construction.
The city's relationship with its own history is complicated. It tears things down and then mourns them.
The most interesting building on the street is the Freedom Tower, built in 1925 and recently restored. It is a good building — not a great one, but a solid example of the Mediterranean Revival style that dominated Florida commercial architecture in the 1920s. Its restoration is a reminder that Miami has a history worth preserving, even if the city has not always acted that way.