For some time, I have referred to Miami Beach's City Hall as "Hitler's Bunker Above Ground"; this is unfair for it bestows a sort of homey charm on the place. You know: Russian tanks approaching and home made cakes being baked with a chaser of cyanide.

No such luck for what I call this ghastly place: The House of Frankenstein. You enter this castle of doom and immediately run into mis-shaped, hunchback women dragging their clubfeet around and looking with their one (good) eye under perfectly drawn brows. They mutter instructions through their puffed-out cheeks; avoiding the spittal requires the reflexes of a tennis pro. The hapless males all moan under their obvious deformities, too, most wearing a cheap polo shirt with an embroidered City crest; this allows them to ask, "You visit The House of Frankenstein? I WISH I could help you."


It is no wonder that my slow recovery from this summer cold was encouraged by visits to this temple to horror. Instead, I climbed to the roof of The Palace. I relaxed to the approach of storm clouds from the Bahamas; a good rain storm draws people together and makes the deformed ones at City Hall growl and claw toward the sky.