Riverday offered Miami River boat tours and much more

April 6, 1:27 AMMiami Travel ExaminerGeorge Leposky

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Tugboats help the Fair Seas, a shallow-draft
freighter from Panama, negotiate the Miami
River’s winding channel as it heads out to
sea. © 2009 George Leposky

Riverday, the 13th annual celebration of the Miami River and its multiple uses, took place on Saturday, April 4, 2009, at José Marti Park in Miami.

The event was sponsored by the Miami River Commission.  It included free boat tours up and down the river, and a close-up look at a City of Miami fireboat. 

Environmental organizations set up booths to promote their activities, an urban gardening group gave away free plants, and local food vendors fed the crowd seafood and Cuban fare. An instructor from Green Monkey in South Miami led a yoga class.  

Re-enactors in Spanish Conquistador costumes and Civil War uniforms displayed period artifacts and told visitors about life in those bygone days.

Entertaining the crowd from a portable stage set up in the park were singer/songwriter Grant Livingston and two bands: Lanny Smith and the Earthman Project, and Outta D’Blues.

Short, busy river

For Miami residents and visitors who typically see the Miami River only fleetingly while crossing it on a bridge, the boat tour offered a very different perspective.

Although the river is just 5.5 miles long, it’s extremely diverse. Most of the banks along its upper reaches are devoted to docks and wharves for shallow-draft freighters that transport goods to and from The Bahamas and the Caribbean.

Homes, pleasure-boat docks, and shipyards line much of its midsection.

Towers of concrete, glass,
and steel surround the mouth
of the Miami River. © 2009
George Leposky

Just west of downtown Miami are tugboat terminals; commercial fish, lobster, and shrimp docks; and several seafood restaurants.

Where the river loops around downtown, high-rise hotels and condominium towers have risen in recent years, turning the channel into a canyon with walls of concrete, glass, and steel.

At the river’s mouth, the canyon opens onto a broad vista across Biscayne Bay, with the Port of Miami just ahead and the open Atlantic Ocean far beyond. Here two major navigation channels cross – the east-west channel from the river out into the bay, and a north-south channel through the bay running parallel to the city’s shoreline.  This busy intersection is the liquid equivalent of Miami Avenue and Flagler Street, but with no stop-and-go lights to regulate traffic!

Many changes were noted

Narrators on the boat tours explained that the Miami River originally rose in the Everglades wilderness and spilled over a series of rapids located about four miles from its mouth. The rapids were removed early in the 20th Century as part of an effort to drain the Everglades. Now the Miami Canal brings water down through the Everglades from Lake Okeechobee to the river.
 

Participants in the City Year
community-service program occupy
the bow of the MT Celebration on
a Riverday tour of the Miami River.
 © 2009 George Leposky

The Miami River has required periodic dredging due to siltation and deposition of debris from industries along its banks. The most recent such project, completed in November of 2008, removed polluted sediment from the river bottom, improved the river’s water quality, and made passage easier for heavily loaded freighters.  

Boat captains and other members of the Miami River community report that manatees enter the river and are seen often in its waters. Signs up and down the river’s banks warn of manatee zones, where a law requires boaters to travel at no-wake speeds to avoid striking these gentle, slow-moving mammals.

Miami Circle changes

The tour boats also passed the Miami Circle, a Native American ceremonial site located east of the Brickell Avenue Bridge on the south bank of the river. Along the shoreline there, a seawall is under construction to shore up the bank, which has been eroding.

Tour passengers also got a close-up look at the Easter Island-like statues on the north side of the adjoining Icon Brickell condominium, which the developers put in place to hide ugly concrete columns supporting the portico over the condo’s garage and loading dock entrances. Their presence has sparked heated debate, because their South Pacific design has absolutely no connection to the Tequesta culture that created the Miami Circle.  

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