One Herald Plaza: Thanks for the Memories

Wikipedia

Close to 1,000 former Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald staffers descended on One Herald Plaza Wednesday afternoon. Reporters. Advertising executives. Printing-press mechanics. Bookkeepers. Publishers. Janitors. They all came to pay their final respects to the place that has defined journalism in this city for the last 50 years. Sometime in May, the presses will shut down for the last time as Miami's major daily newspaper packs up for its move out west to Doral.

So Herald bigwigs organized an open-house gathering to celebrate the memories and legacies created at One Herald Plaza, from winning 20 Pultizer Prizes to churning out great journalists such as Edna Buchanan and Carl Hiassen to being the beacon for hard-hitting daily news in a city that desperately needs chronicling.

Banana Republican stopped by the festivities, catching up with some of the former and current scribes, who recalled some of their favorite moments during the bittersweet occasion.

Television critic Glenn Garvin tags the One Herald Plaza farewell mural.

Lydia Martin, who grew up in Little Havana, joined the Miami Herald in 1986. During her 25-year career, she covered daily news before moving into the Features section, where she wrote a popular column interviewing celebrities and well-known public figures. In 1985, she got her foot in the door as a stringer freelancing for the Miami Beach Neighbors section. She would travel to every police station from Miami Beach to Sunny Isles Beach, collecting reports for the Police Blotter. When she graduated from college a year later, the paper hired her.

"This was home," Martin recalls. "When I was 13 years old, we had just moved from Flint, Michigan. I told my mother: 'See that building. I'm going to work there one day.' Obviously, I didn't set my sights high enough."

Covering the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew was one of her fondest memories. "Reporters lost their homes in South Dade, yet they came in every day," she says. "People hadn't changed their clothes in days, slept under their desks, and were eating crap from the cafeteria because there was barely anything left to eat. There was a shower in the women's bathroom that still had water. People would line up to use it. That's one of the cool things about being a journalist. When shit happens -- even when you've worked 15-hour days and you are not ever going to get overtime pay -- you respond to the story."