SEYBOLD BUILDING: INTERIOR: ARCADE

As you walk in to the Seybold, some of the first fronts are or were wrapped in black marble to give it an elegant sheen. Some of the fronts even have gold Art Deco accents, and dull, opaque siding that runs under and over the display windows.

The floor has a diamond checkerboard pattern, and all the fronts have enormous 1,000 gallon jewelry displays of their most valued pieces or watches or whatever pendant is in at the moment. I remember the displays for when spinning rings were popular had necks that jutted forward and back to give the tier on the ring some momentum. The jewelry displays in the arcade of the Seybold building could put you up for life and maybe send your kid to college in the future.

You will want to stray at this point and go down the rows of rings and watches and bracelets and take a look even though you have six dollars to your name. Why do you look? For the same reason that these jokers put their best, most expensive alajas just outside your reach: it is to make you want nothing more than to caress, and run your digits over these pieces, like some thief that can read Braille or denominations in paper money.

Look at those diamond-encrusted Rolexes, peep those Tags just sitting back in their ergonomic, velvety displays. The world is an oyster with overflowing pearls if you can figure out how to smash a three-inch plexiglass wall in under 15 seconds. The people milling about are wearing their Sunday best which makes no sense: when you go to buy jewelry, if the jeweler sees you rocking name brand he feels less of a sting when he charges you name brand, so from now on let's wear our rags to the jewelers so we can get basement barricks price.

Inevitably you come to the guard kiosk which is being guarded not by kiosks but by middle-aged men with flood pants, white socks, and athletic security guard booties. Their hand is reflexively on their holster, as if a memo had been issued by the administration that touching your peepee in public was now allowed. Who were they going to scare when they were always in their witches coven huddle, stroking their chins at all the viejas squeezed into spandex faldas, meng.

There's also an entrance on East Flagler with a narrower espalande, and the display windows are like unknown lodes of a couple of thousand dollars of trinkets and exotic doodads. The shops on the East Flagler side are smaller but somehow more compressed and thus packed. Like if people were going to go the Seybold to buy jewelry it was probably going to be done on the arcade because while access is not denied to strangers, the kiosk might get curious if they were to see you milling about, doing a close reading of the registry. It is here that my sister and I came to the least, the place we rarely trespassed, even when left to our devices. But, it is the place where we would have seen more a more normal Miami, than the rabble of fences, forgers, and pharaohs of smut.