Opa-Locka, Forida deserts it's Middle-Eastern themed City Hall

[TheMightyFavog]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/16/us/16opalocka.html?em&ex=1174190400&en=44ed8435cb8f8777&ei=5087%0A

OPA-LOCKA, Fla., March 12 — The desert-yellow walls of the old City Hall rise rippled and pockmarked to pink domes and narrow minarets. Decorative peaks like tiny staircases top the barrier walls. A pointed pink-and-white archway frames the view down to Ali-Baba Avenue, the main road through a city once called the Baghdad of the South.

Movers taking furniture out of City Hall in Opa-locka, where the architecture runs to Moorish antiquity.
Enlarge This Image
Alex Quesada for The New York Times

Commissioner Timothy Holmes, watching the move, said he did not want to move out but would eventually. “I’m very proud of these buildings,” Mr. Holmes said, “and whatever I can do to keep it up, I will.”

Out in the street last week, two big trucks idled by the curb. Ten men loaded office machines and desk chairs, portraits and plaques, the old signs for another year’s Budweiser Presents Arabian Nights Festival.

“We’re moving,” declared the city clerk, Deborah Sheffield Irby. That was all she had to say.

Founded in 1926 by a whimsical aviator from the Finger Lakes region of New York, this small city about 10 miles northwest of Miami succumbed long ago to familiar agents of decline, from the Depression through slum clearance and on to the crack trade.