The Street the Trees Built

I worked with high stakes, high stress construction in Miami Beach from 2005 to 2020. My job description was everything. I had to do, what I had to do, to do what I had to do, to get it done. At the beginning there were only a few employees, and I was all three of them.

Sometime in 2008, while doing payroll, I remember distinctly cutting a check for an obscene amount to one of the principal's partners. After it was signed I had to deliver it myself.

I had my windows open, it was a nice day, and on Pine Tree Drive a gust of wind blew through my car. The wind tunnel it caused took the envelope with the check in it and blew it right to the heavens.

I knew more or less where I was when it happened. I was going north past 41st Street on Pine Tree, so I quickly turned around and parked my car in the median where the Australian pine trees live. I scoured the east side of the street, desperately looking for the envelope, and after about thirty minutes of agony I just couldn't find it.

I called my Dad. I explained what had happened, and I vented and lost my mind while I searched frantically. It was getting dark, so it was getting harder to look.

The only option was not to call the signer of the check and tell him I lost $50,000.

Whenever I had intense situations like this, my father, hardly the positive thinker, somehow always found the support I desperately needed.

"You will find it, David."

"I'm going to pray to my father."

I didn't even know my dad believed in God, because it was never really discussed. But he would always surprise me growing up when he would say things like "I swear on the Jewish Torah," when he wanted your absolute trust.

My grandfather, David Solomon, who I was named after, passed away in 1950 at the tender age of 33. My father was only 4. My grandfather had juvenile diabetes, and as my dad explained it, he was always not feeling well.

As I crossed the street and got back on the median ready to give up, suddenly there it was. After two hours of searching it appeared, just a few steps from where I had parked the car all along.

I've taken that street a thousand times. I never once thought about why the trees were there, or who put them there, or what they were for.

A farmer did. John S. Collins, a New Jersey Quaker and horticulturist the City of Miami Beach calls one of its founding fathers, bought 1,675 acres here in 1909, at the age of 71, and started an avocado grove on the high ground in the center of the island, west of Indian Creek. The wind coming in off the ocean, across the narrow strip and over the creek, was tearing up his crop. So he put two lanes of Australian pines along his plantation road to create a windbreak, planted to shield his avocados, mangos, tomatoes, and potatoes.

That road is Pine Tree Drive. Those trees are still standing in the median.

Collins ran out of money building his bridge to the mainland. Carl Fisher put $50,000 into finishing it and came away with two hundred acres of Miami Beach.

$50,000 finished the bridge that made this island reachable.

A hundred years after a farmer planted them to stop the wind, the wind on that street took a $50,000 check out of my car. And his windbreak caught it, and held it in the dirt, until I found it.

In September 1920 Fisher wrote to Thomas Pancoast, Collins's son-in-law, and the Miami Beach Improvement Company, about the pines. He wanted them trimmed. They were shading the lots, and the lots were what he was selling.

“...the sale of our property there is worth so much more to us than the slight protection these trees give to the fruit... Some of these days the lots in the Avocado Orchard will be worth more money than all the avocadoes these trees would raise in the next 100 years.”

— Carl Fisher to Thomas Pancoast, 14 September 1920, quoted in the City of Miami Beach's Pinetree Drive Historic Roadway designation report, 2001

Fisher was bang on.

Twelve years ago this summer, I went knocking on Pine Tree Drive.

Pretty soon we needed a new project, and a big waterfront lot on Pine Tree is what the doctor ordered.

So I went door to door. I printed about thirty contracts and knocked on doors.

Most realtors knock on doors to fish for a listing, and then they get treated like the Jehovah's Witness they hope not to be mistaken for.

I always joked I would print big checks like Ed McMahon and bring them to people's doors, but I brought signed contracts instead, so I figured that was even more remarkable.

Not every door knock ends in success. Out of 30 I hit, I got one, and that one is the reason for this whole story.

The day was hotter than usual and I had gone out at a hotter time of day so I was driving in the car to each residence. I pulled up to the approach and rang in and without even asking who I was the gate was opened for me.

I had my assistant in the car and she was handing me the contract and she was telling me to bring a pen. My mind was somewhere else or was it in 50 other places at the same time??

I drove in around the circular drive. Simultaneously the front door of the house must have opened because I heard the sound of dogs barking. Lucky for me my assistant yelled at the top of her lungs, "David stop!!!" and immediately I slammed on the brakes.

The older of the two dogs stood a millimeter from my front bumper and somehow I didn't run it over. I also didn't even see it. If I would have been alone I would have killed that dog. Imagine. Here is a contract to buy your house and sorry for running over your dog.

I was so spent from the whole thing that I handed the contract to the maid with my card and just peeled off.

The property got listed with another agent for less than I offered a few months later.

After a few calling-the-police threats, dog chasing, and a few curse words, I finally came to a 30,000 square foot lot in a great spot on Pine Tree.

I rang the call box and before I knew it I was face to face with the owner of the property, with only the gate in between us.

I wrote each contract myself so I would see the names but no matter whose name it was I treated them all the same.

In my mind, I wasn't cold calling randomly or invading someone's privacy. I was going to talk to a friend about something they already knew was coming.

In this particular case I definitely recognized the name. In fact, most would.

It didn't matter. I had my eye on the prize. And that was getting an off market tear down waterfront lot on Pine Tree Drive.

We had a brief conversation and I left the contract with my card and I made sure we exchanged phone numbers. The offer was $5,000,000, close in 45 days. And then I continued on my contract route.

Sometimes you can have a great conversation with someone or have a rapport and then nothing ever comes from it again. They change their minds, they go a different direction, they just forget.

All I kept thinking was, All I need is one.

A day later. The seller reached out. And before you knew it, myself, the seller, and the buyer were meeting at the house to discuss the contract. The terms were discussed and in principle we had a deal.

In real estate they say, it ain't over till it's over. The ups and downs are real when you're dealing with emotion and people and money.

A well known, self respected real estate agent called me to "close the deal." All of a sudden the seller had an agent, though he had never been mentioned in any conversation I was part of.

We had a deal at $5,700,000. And it closed 45 days later. Wonder what that same piece of land is worth today?

Things were promised to me, but only I delivered on the land. A new agent would get the listing when the house was finished and it sold for well over $19,000,000 a little over a year later.

An Australian pine lives roughly fifty years. The ones on Pine Tree Drive are past a hundred.

They also cannot be replaced with the same tree. Australian pine is a prohibited species in Miami-Dade County, so when one comes down, another cannot go in its place. Every original pine that falls is gone for good. The city's 2020 Urban Forestry Master Plan calls for a phased transition of the median to native pines.

In 2001, the City of Miami Beach designated the stretch from 30th to 46th Street a historic roadway. It was a rescue. The county was running an eradication program, and the state had drawn plans to take out eleven of the pines to build a left turn lane. City planning staff wrote that they were gravely concerned.

The designation held. The turn lane was never built.

The trees are going anyway, one at a time. They come down for decay, for structural failure, for storms. Hurricane Irma took one.

And nothing simply grows back in the gap. The City's own record notes that Australian pines change the chemistry of the soil around them to keep other species out, so any replanting has to restore the ground first. As of August 2024, none had been reported at all.

When you stand under that canopy, you are standing under something older than almost every house on the street, and legally impossible to recreate.

“That was twelve years ago this summer. The trees on that block are still there. So am I.”

— David Hunt Solomon

If you are thinking about me door knocking for you on Pine Tree Drive, or about buying or selling, I would welcome the conversation. This is a street where knowing the real story is worth more than knowing the asking price. Let's talk.