With Biscayne National Park’s boundaries just outside Virginia Key, the National Park has long been eyeing the island and surrounding areas as locations for a new northern visitor center.
Sites that could be considered include the Miami Marine Stadium parking lot area, an area near Miami Seaquarium and Cape Florida State Park on Key Biscayne.
Bernadette Rabb, a graduate of the Florida Atlantic University’s College for Design and Social Inquiry in the Urban and Regional Planning Department, took on the issue in a recent planning project that explored the significance of this unique, (mostly underwater) 173,000-acre national park in our community and the challenges and opportunities of proposed sites in the Virginia Key area.
Rabb’s study has been shared with the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), the nonprofit National Parks advocacy group. The following multi-part series are excerpts from her paper:
An additional visitor’s center at the northern end of the park would benefit people in the Miami Dade area, including those who live in or visit the City of Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables and other surrounding communities. It would also attract those coming from Palm Beach and Broward County who would not consider driving down to the existing facility in Homestead.
Biscayne National Park is one of 392 national parks in our country. What makes it unique is that it contains 173,000 acres of mostly aquatic life with 96 percent of the park being water and the other 4 percent land. It is the largest marine park in the United States... It has an extensive mainland mangrove shoreline, is part of Biscayne Bay, and it contains the northernmost chain of coral keys in the United States with 20 miles of submerged coral reefs.
The issue at hand in 2010 is that the park encompassing a large area from just below Key Biscayne at the north end to Key Largo at the southernmost point has one visitor’s center located in Homestead, Florida. This location is 30 miles south of Miami. With the majority of the population and visitors being close to the Miami area, approximately 2 million people, it makes sense to have another access point to the park at the northern end.
This visitor’s center would provide a place of civic engagement, public education and general outreach to the public. Its purpose would be both informational and educational. It would also serve as a source of protection for the park’s many cultural, historical and natural resources by having a physical place for law enforcement. This structure would give enormous support to the proper management of Biscayne National Park.
Next in the series: what makes a good visitor’s center and what is offered at various sites under consideration.
Photo: Angelfish in Biscayne National Park waters. Courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey.
Resources:
Biscayne National Park: http://www.nps.gov/bisc
National Parks Conservation Association: http://www.npca.org/southflorida/
@All Rights Reserved 2010
Also on Facebook: Friends of Virginia Key
Go, Blanca, go!
ReplyDeleteWow, that would be great, more attention needs to be brought to this wonderful park. I want to put up some photos of Lancelot (or any or all of the the Joneses) at Rickenbacker Fish Company (to open in three weeks). I was on a sailboat down there last week but Jones Lagoon was too shallow for the boat to get into, so I'm going back for a look sometime soon, I have to have a look at the site of that old homestead ...
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