View from Above

[written on Monday evening, June 5, 2006 -- posted Tuesday when the wireless came back online]

Even on the most indulgent of sunny mornings in London, I used to see natives clutching a black brolly along with their briefcase and morning paper on early hour trains—each day certain the early beauty would be broken by rain. Outdoors, the most insignificant drizzle would bring blooms of umbrellas, most pedestrians unfolding them without skipping a step. Miami, on the other hand, seems to be a city perpetually unprepared for its weather. Look at its roofs.

This Monday, once again on a train in a foreign (well, to me) city, I slid by the Miami landscape from above. Besides reinforcing the suspicion that the city is covered in palm trees, a ride on the MetroRail provides a short course in roof styles of America’s Hurricane capital. Scalloped roofs abound, for reasons that escape me (perhaps their odd symmetry with palms?). More curious is the abundance of flat roofs.

Any high-riding public transport, trip in a helicopter or just the vista from a tall building will show you that most commercial buildings in the U.S. favor flat roofs. I imagine they are cheaper, in addition to making it easy to holding noisy and unattractive circulation machinery. But look out over Miami from above and you will see puddles, pools, even ponds of water.

Riding six stops from Government Center to Dadeland South I saw many a water-bearing roof. Hemmed in by extending walls, many roofs were completely covered. Ripples formed in the wind. The Target I visited—one beach towel (checkered), one bath towel (brown), one reading lamp (with a broken light bulb), one lightbulb (too small for the lamp)—had buckets catching leaks from its roof. Too much water buildup on top?