Steve Masson
Interviewed by Gonzalo Porcel July 1, 1999
Gonzalo Porcel: In is July 1, 1999 and we’re at the School of International Studies with Steve Masson who is a resident of South Miami and has agreed to meet with us and talk about his experiences in South Miami as well as his recollections of his life in South Miami. When and where were you born?
Steve Masson: I was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico on January 28th, 1937. We moved to Miami in 1945. I have a brother and two sisters.
GP: What are your first memories of when you first got to Miami?
SM: My first memory of getting to Miami was arriving at the airport, which at the time was a wooden structure. It was just a long structure with a roof. It didn’t have any sides and the planes almost taxied up to the structure. I remember getting off the airplane and the steps coming out. ..We came to Miami on a Panamerican DC3.
GP: How would you describe your relationship to your family? Did you guys have a large family?
SM: Oh, yes we were a very large family, a very close family. My mother and dad were more or less the family leaders. They both had a lot of brothers and sisters, and all brothers and sisters looked to them and we have always been a very family-oriented close-knit group.
GP: Do you think that your family background and the close-knit family had an impact on your success later on in life?
SM: Yes, we were always instilled that, you have heard the old cliché, “Give back to the community what it has given to you” and I have always felt that way. I have always been very community-oriented. I have belonged to both civic groups and to fraternal groups. Since I am in the Residential Construction business, I belong to my trade association. So
I have always been, for lack of a better word, a “joiner” and I give a lot of my time to these organizations.
GP: Did you find Miami receptive of newcomers when you first arrived?
SM: We got to Miami in July of 1945, the war in Europe was already over, but we were still fighting the war in Japan. In those days, Miami in the summertime was like a ghost town. A lot of the people actually boarded up their homes and businesses and went north and would come back in the winter.
GP: What school did you go to here in South Miami?
SM: Well, I went for a couple of years to a Jesuit school in downtown Miami. Then I went to Shenandoah Elementary, Shenandoah Junior High School, Miami Senior High and the University of Miami.
GP: Would you say that your early teachers had a big impact on your life and on your outlook later on in life?
SM: Yes I had a Mathematics teacher in High School. She is the first one who taught me that you had to work hard in order to be successful. She was a non-sense teacher, but you
know the type of teacher that you hate at the time, but once you go out, you realize that the values that she passed on to you are the important ones.
GP: Were there a lot of books in your house at the time?
SM: Yes, all my brothers and sisters went to college. My father was a college graduate. My mother wasn’t, but my dad was. He was an engineer, he always made us very aware that we had to learn, we had to do our school and we had to read a lot. We were always very education-oriented and pushed in that direction.
GP: What kinds of people would you say that lived in South Miami at the time?
SM: I lived I guess in what you’d consider an upper-middle class neighborhood. Things were totally different then. People were really friendly. There were a lot of southerners who lived here and they all tended to be very friendly. The big population explosion, I didn’t seem to feel it until I got to high school in the early and middle fifties. That’s when you started to see the growth of [South Miami]. That’s when we started to get a lot of immigration.
GP: Which neighborhoods would you say were the preferred neighborhoods that people moved into or that was not an issue at that time?
SM: Well, the better neighborhoods, or what were considered the better neighborhoods were the areas South of 80th St. down to the Snapper Creek Canal and the areas… Actually, when you look at it, with the exception of the black area, South Miami was primarily a middle-class, upper-middle class area.
GP: Describe your experience at UM.
SM: I was at the School of Engineering. The School of Engineering was at the old original school down on University Drive. The School of Engineering here didn’t exist until 1962. I think that everybody looks at the University as the focal point of this whole area around here. And it’s gotta be, I think it’s a good institution. My dad was an engineer. I was sort of expected to follow. My father and his father and his father’s father were engineers, so I was sort of expected to follow along, and I sort of did that, although I have never practiced engineering. I have always been in Real Estate development and in the construction business. I took electrical engineering here but I have never done any electrical engineering. It’s all been real estate development and residential construction.
GP: When did you make the jump from engineering to real estate?
SM: No, as a matter of fact, while I went to school at the University, I had a part time job at the City of Coral Gables Zoning Department. At the time I worked there, Coral Gables was all planned and zoned. Coral Gables was all planned by Merrick. I worked in zoning first and the original zoning was all done by deed restrictions on the property and then all those deed restrictions were translated into the zoning code. The deed restrictions were placed there by Merrick when he developed the whole city. So, all those things have been in place for years. That’s been the big stability of living in Coral Gables.
GP: Was some consideration for public parks at the time when South Miami was being developed and if you recall going to the park when you were a kid?
SM: Well, I worked at the city of South Miami and that’s when the Dante Fascell Park was purchased. The reason it was named Dante Fascell is that he provided the grant money to the city to be able to buy that piece of land, because Dante Fascell Park was a private piece of property. And Dante Fascell through the Congress provided the funds for the City to buy the park. That’s how the City ended up with the park. This was probably around 1968.
GP: I wanted to get back to businesses in the community. Do you remember when the Holsum Bakery moved to South Miami and what role do you think that played in the community?
SM: I remember coming to South Miami to buy bread at the Holsum Bakery when I was a teenager, when I learned to drive a car. You know back on those days you could drive a car at 14. I mean they ruled the city while they were here. By the time I came to work at the City in the 1960’s they had already planned on moving to the site off the Palmetto Expressway and their prime consideration was that they needed a railroad siting, so they could have their flour delivered. The FEC was ready to shut down the railroad on US1 here.
South Miami has been an area of small businesses. You have all those small auto-motor businesses right off Commerce Lane and downtown South Miami has been primarily a mom-and-pop small shop operation. As far as shopping goes, South Miami has always been what I call a “Destination Shopping Point” where you went to downtown South Miami to a specific place because you knew it was there and you needed that particular service or you wanted to buy that particular product. But as far as being a general overall shopping area, I don’t believe South Miami has ever been that. Maybe the new shops at Sunset Place will change that.
GP: Do you feel that the development of Sunset Place is going to be a good thing for South Miami?
SM: Absolutely. It’s turned a dead downtown into a place full of vitality. Before the shops at 5.30 everyone closed their door and went home. Now you come here in the evening and there’s vitality, there is a lot going on. I think it’s going to be a better focal point for the community than there’s ever been.
GP: Could we get back for a moment to your experience as Chair of the Chamber of Commerce? Could you talk about that and what kinds of activities did you have? What kinds of activities did you have to promote businesses?
SM: I was president of the Chamber of Commerce which was then known as the South Miami area Chamber of Commerce in 1977 through 1979, for a total of two terms. And in my second term, my platform was to add the names of the South Miami-Kendall Area, because at the time the Kendall area was booming. The first year I was president we only had about 100 members, but by the time I left office we had over four hundred members. Now the chamber has over 2000 members. I take pride and give myself credit for having the vision to see that the local chamber was more than just the South Miami Chamber.
Chambers in general are all membership driven and the memberships are generally gathered up by other members by word of mouth. If you opened a business in our service area, I would want you to join the chamber of commerce. It would give you the opportunity to network with other business, it would give you the opportunity to find out about the community and give back something to the community.
GP: Were you aware of employment segregation being an issue back in the 1950’s and 1960’s when you first started working in South Miami?
SM: Well, you have to put yourself back in the context of the times. At that point, we had a black-and-white segregated society. There were certain jobs open to the blacks and certain jobs were not open to them because they were black and that situation changed rapidly with the desegregation of the schools. And that happened in fifty-seven, fifty-eight when Eisenhower was president. The job situation in South Miami was the way the job situation was in Florida. The Civil Rights Movement opened everybody’s eyes to the fact that just because you are black, it doesn’t mean that you are not capable of doing the same job as everybody else. When that whole scenario was happening is when I came into the business world. So, I just kind of grew up with it, where the fact that you were black did not necessarily keep you from getting a position.
GP: Do you believe that most people think that the city of South Miami works well on their behalf and that they know how to address their concerns if there is a question.
SM: We can spend hours talking about that. The politics in South Miami is very intense for a city of this size. When I first worked at the city, the mayor at the time was one whose platform was to designate a whole area for apartments, and he was successful for the first term that he ran. The second time around he got elected, he had a more difficult time because a group was formed, called the South Miami Hallmark Association, and the South Miami Homeowners Association didn’t like all this growth. They felt that the mayor was playing up to the developers. It’s never changed. The anti-growth crowd has to realize that South Miami is right in the middle of a huge metropolitan area and that it can’t think of itself as a little rural community any longer. They have a master plan that shows where the growth and the commercial should develop and they should let it work. I think the areas of redevelopment and growth in South Miami are well spelled out in their zoning planning. That’s basically the area of around downtown South Miami, you know 62nd Av. towards the highway.
If the city of South Miami has the guts to follow the CRA, the Community Redevelopment Area, South Miami is gonna be a beautiful place and it will all be done from the taxes generated by the new development in the CRA area and by the shops, because that whole redevelopment area will be financed by the extra taxes that places like the shops will generate.
GP: What do you think that can be done to make sure that South Miami can grow and at the same time make sure it is still easy for most people get around?
SM: That’s a bigger problem than South Miami. That’s a community wide problem. You know there is a proposal now that’s going to be put on the ballot. It’s on the ballot to vote for the one percent sales tax increase for transportation needs. And South Miami is part of that because they are part of the community. I don’t think per se the city itself can do anything because most of the city deals with the local residential streets. They have no control over the Metrorail, they have no control over US1. They have no control over (basically) over Red Road. The only thing they have control over are the local residential streets. The overall general problem that we have now is that this is an automobile-oriented community. We’ve never had a good transit system and we’ve gone through the era where everything is oriented towards accommodating the automobile and until we can change the mindset of the community at large to use rapid transit, to use bicycles, to walk. That’s not only going to affect South Miami. It’s gonna affect the whole South Florida, the whole community.
GP: Do you think the media could play a positive role in providing or helping foster a new greener mentality, where the message would be “let’s walk, let’s use public transportation.?”
SM: I guess, you have to start with the political leadership. I guess you have to make sure that the alternative to the auto was convenient. Right now, if you live any place that is not convenient to get into Metrorail, say to get to downtown Miami, if you want to go to downtown Miami, getting there by bus is an impossibility almost . We’ve never had a mass transit system to convince people that they don’t need a car. What these big transportation corridors have done is open up areas to development. To get there conveniently in a way that you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to get to. I’ve lived in Miami long enough to remember that US1 was a two line highway with rows of trees on both sides.
GP: How do you think that people outside of Miami think of Miami compared to other cities?
SM: The image of Miami outside of the boundaries of Dade county is one that is crime-ridden, that has terrible schools, that has traffic gridlock and that is Cuban. And none of it is accurate. Time Magazine runs an article on some tourist getting killed here in Miami and then we had this big drug traffic in the eighties. You know, Miami was the cocaine capital of the world where people where out on the streets blowing away each other with Uzies. I’ve never seen that occur. But you now, perception. Perception is reality. This city, this area can offer you things that no place else in the United States can offer you, maybe with the exception of San Francisco. It is a very cosmopolitan area. There are all kinds of good things that are happening. You know, we got our problems just like every place where there is as many people. But we are not a Banana Republic like is perceived out there.
GP: Would you say for instance the McDuffie riots in the 80’s was unduly magnified?
SM: No, we were having the same kind of problems they were having in LA, in New Jersey, in Harlem. It was a phenomenon of the time. The blacks had grievances and they felt that the power structure was not treating them the way that they should be treated and that was the way to vent their frustration, by rioting. It’s unfortunate that we had that–. But I remember during those riots, I had the occasion to go to Jacksonville on business and the only thing that the people around there could ask me about was, aren’t you afraid? This was happening in a very concentrated area of town and I am fourteen miles away from it. I could be not aware that it was happening. I was aware that it was happening, but I just kept saying that it’s something that it occurs, what can you do?
GP: The demographics of Miami have changed dramatically. Would you say that there has there been tension as Miami has grown? Do you think that the growth of Miami has actually strengthened Miami?
SM: I believe it has. There is good and bad in everything. By and large, the influx of the Cuban exiles, I feel that the first wave that came right in the 1960s when Castro took over had a very positive influence on this community. That group that came over were educated people, hard-working people. They came here with nothing and they eventually ended up being community leaders and everything else. They were hard workers. The second wave when the Mariel happened, right after that was when we started having all the drug problems. We shouldn’t thank Castro, we should thank Jimmy Carter for letting it happen. I think we went through a bad period there, from that sort of exiles. Then along came the Nicaraguans who again were the upper-middle class, better-off, better educated group, and I think they have been a very positive influence to this community. The other migrations that we get from the rest of Central and Latin America have by and large been very positive for this community. I am going to use the Miami Herald as an example of what not to do. The Miami Herald doesn’t know what kind of newspaper it wants to be. They were the premier newspaper in this town, they were very influential. But it has turned into a pandering newspaper for the Hispanic community and particularly the Cuban community. They don’t realize that the Hispanics maybe don’t want to read the paper, and their circulation relative to the size of the population is very dismal. You don’t have the influence of that type of institution to keep politicians in line, to talk about the things that are bad in this community that should be talked about.
GP: Who would be someone or some institution that you think could play a leadership role in the community?
SM: The one I think of right off the top is the banking industry. The banking industry in this town is all owned by people outside of this town. Prior to today you had Southeast Bank which was a local institution. It was the largest bank here and it was a very community-minded spirited institution.
GP: South Miami bank was started in the sixties, is that right?.
SM: That’s been there forever, longer than that and they are owned by the International Harvester out of Chicago. They are not a local bank. Yes they are a community bank, but their ownership is not local. In Seattle you have Microsoft, you also have Boeing aircraft. In California you got all kinds of corporate leaders. New York city has all kind of corporate leaders. We have never been an industrial city, that’s for sure. Another big, what was considered a very community minded corporate leader was Womeco. They owned WTVJ at those times.
GP: Do you think that this affects basic freedoms? Do you think that the way the media is operating in Miami is an issue that one ought to consider when looking at the bigger picture?
SM: No, I think basically all the media is trying to do is get a market share, so they can charge the advertising rates.
GP: And to the extent they are market driven, does that somehow not affect what issues are covered?
SM: They are market driven, so they can pander to the audience. That’s the way I feel about it. We used to have national airlines, big corporate local owner–, Eastern airlines are no longer around. Florida Power Light used to have their headquarters here. Now, they are up in Jupiter. A whole bunch of what were good corporate citizens are not longer around and the corporate citizens that are around, their ownership is elsewhere. This just happens to be one of their branches.
GP: What has made you then want to stay or stick around Miami all the time?
SM: It’s my home. I don’t like what is happening, but I’m not going pick up my marbles and go play somewhere else, because this is my home. My family is here. My roots are here.
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