Blaskey: Field of broken dreams: Homestead may demolish its ill-fated sliver of MLB history
From Sarah Blaskey at the Miami Herald on June 29, 2018:
The Homestead baseball stadium has been a lot of things in its time— a practice field for striking major-leaguers, a clandestine clubhouse for kids, a place where petty criminals were booked and held before moving to county jail, but mostly, a bit of an embarrassing money-suck for the city. Now, Homestead is considering bids to demolish the aging structure, a move that could seal the fate of one man’s 30-year old dream that never came true.
In the spring of 1989, an ambitious young city manager snatched millions in county tourism tax revenue out from under the usual Miami Beach recipients and used it to close a deal that he knew would change his South Florida city forever.
Alex Muxo, then city manager of Homestead, was going to use the $12 million bond and the loans he secured with it to build a baseball stadium — one so impressive it could be used for Major League Baseball spring training.
“It was a big thing,” Muxo remembered. “It certainly was going to put Homestead on the map at a national level.”
Read the full article here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/homestead/article213955574.html
Originally published: June 29, 2018. Last Updated: June 29, 2018.