Goodbye Trail Arch, We Barely Knew You
Until this week, a mysterious 70' tall concrete arch stood just east of Dade Corners. What happened? Jason Katz digs into a history of Tamiami Trail arches and finds out.
If you’re reading this, it’s likely you’ve driven past this arch and wondered just what the hell it is. The road in South Florida is long and flat, and when the road is long and flat, it’s usually the natural landscape which offers visual relief; but here there are no mountains—though the clouds sometimes appear this way—just this reliable, mysterious old arch… at least until sometime in the last two weeks.
I drove past the Tamiami Trail Arch on MLK Day and it was gone. According to followers of the Islandia Journal instagram, the arch still stood as recently as January 9th. What gives? I took this photo out my windshield the other day.
The property on which the arch used to sit is owned by the Miccosukee Tribe of Florida. Miccosukee Chairman Talbert Cypress confirmed the arch was removed but wasn’t able to share more detail at this time. I’m not one to infringe on Miccosukee sovereignty over their property, so I’ll leave it at that and instead use this space to tell you as much as I know about the history of Tamiami Trail archways.
The First Tamiami Trail Arch
It began in 1915; A handful of car industry fellows and developers, including Miami’s James F. Jaudon, started a 13-year long, $101,000,000 (in today’s money) project to construct the 275 miles of US 41 in Florida known as the Tamiami Trail. By dredge and with funding from various developer families, including the Colliers, they arrived finally in Dade County. This arch below was constructed to signify the county line. Today, the county line on the Trail is somewhere between MM 43 & 44. At the time of writing this, I haven’t uncovered what ultimately happened to this arch besides that it disappeared. Arch 1 died so that the arch which this article is eulogizing could live.
It wasn’t until 1962 that the Trail again served as the home to a notable arch. I found some information about the Trail Arch in a 1994 Miami Herald news clipping:
James Pace, the owner at the time, applied for a permit, built the arches, and dug a canal to nowhere which still sits on the property. He never completed construction of his planned industrial park, just got the arch up—putting the cart before the horse.
Abandonment and Curiosity
It wasn’t long before strange things started to happen around the arch; it was as though, in constructing the arch and very quickly abandoning it, Tace had loosed a dubious energy portal onto an unassuming, yet very ready, South Florida populace.
Here’s a brief timeline of strange events at the arch:
1960s
According to an Islandia reader, the area behind the arch was used as a CIA training facility.
1976
Miriam Chapman’s body was discovered beneath the arch. The 26 year old had run away from her spouse and children in Indiana and ended up in Florida, where she became one of the victims of the serial killer Samuel Little.
1979
Filiberto Cardenas and two friends set out from Hialeah—where Cardenas was a notable botánica owner—to secure a whole pig for roasting. While out on Okeechobee Road, their car broke down and Cardenas was abducted by aliens. He was brought to an undersea headquarters where the aliens taught him the value of universal love. When he was returned to the terrestrial world, he came to next to the Trail Arch.
1986
By the time they arrived at the arch in a stolen sedan, William Russell Matix and Michael Lee Platt had already robbed a string of banks. They used the canal area behind the arch as a place for shooting target practice. A month before they got in a very famous, deadly shootout with the FBI in Pinecrest, the robbers encountered a fisherman named Jose Collazo out by the arch. They shot him, left him for dead, and stole his Monte Carlo, but Collazo crawled back out to the Trail and survived. When asked by police to describe the assailants, he had one word: “Rednecks.”
A Mystery Remains
The Trail Arch is gone. This we know. Yet, one mystery remains. In 2008, a user who goes by the name “tallrick” on a city-data.com forum about the arch posted, “I remember seeing the word SEATTER on the arch.” I was able to snap some close up images of the arch back in 2021 which support tallrick’s reading. Check ‘em out:
The Trail arch lives on as a mystery. Who will solve it?
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