A Massive Tequesta Cemetery
The Developers of this site were the MDM Group whose prinicpals were Ricardo Glas & Luis Polenta
Southeast Florida’s largest known Native-American cemetery was discovered here in 2005. The remains of more than 500 Tequesta remains were removed from this site to make way for downtown’s Whole Foods Market. Most of the examined bones were dated from two around thousand years ago.
There is an untold story of collusion between the developers and certain City of Miami Officials to suppress this remarkable discovery. In 2005 Dr. Alison Elgart-Berry, the City of Miami’s first (and so far only) city archaeologist was fired when she began to petition for preservation of this site after recognizing the unique significance of this massive Tequesta cemetery.
“I was told [by planning department director Ana Gelabert-Sanchez] that we never fight the developer, we always try to work with them, apparently even if this means that hundreds of human burials will be destroyed in the process.”
Now, almost twenty years later, there is still no published archaeological report of these findings.
The so called Met 3 development, is located at the northeast corner of SE 2nd Avenue and SE 3rd Street in downtown Miami. The building is 32 stories atop a ground-floor Whole Foods grocery store, a self-parking parking lot with several hundred spaces and includes 462 luxury apartments that will range in size from 680 to 1,450 square feet. The interior amenities package at the Monarc includes an open lounge area, a club-quality fitness center, spa with treatment rooms, and a screening room with theater quality sound. Outside, residents have access to a landscaped deck that surrounds a resort-style pool, as well as a yoga lawn, bocce ball court, outdoor grill and kitchen and two outdoor bars.
Over Five Hundred Human Remains Removed
Above is a map of the footprint of the Met 3 development ( often referred to as the Miami One Site ) which shows the areas of burial. This map was submitted as part of a thesis called "Life in the Florida Everglades: Bioarchaeology of the Miami One Site". by Cristina Echazabal. She studied the skeletal remains of 63 individuals from what is marked at the bottom right of thie map as Feature 164.
