In honor of women’s history month we’ve been highlighting some of the women who built South Florida into the place we know today, including some suggested by you. (Thank you for sending those along!)

But we noticed one thing – most of the women recognized have been white, and that’s a pretty incomplete picture of our history, especially here. Immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean have been part of SoFlo’s development from the beginning.

We were inspired by the New York Times “Overlooked” series, which has been sharing the stories of powerful women who didn’t make the obituary pages at the time of their death because back then, pretty much only white men did.

Who are the women of color in South Florida history that society missed? Just hit reply to the newsletter and let us know. We want to tell their stories too.

With so much information coming out about the FIU bridge collapse, today we’re focusing our news update on that. 

• These are the victims. (Miami Herald)
• The university and Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) met with engineers just hours before the bridge collapse, and talked about a crack the engineers found. Still, FDOT is trying to say it didn’t have much to do with the bridge project. Um, false. (Miami Herald)
• These are the two private companies involved with the project. (Miami Herald)
• One of the questions everyone is asking is, “Why the hell were cars allowed to pass underneath during a stress test?!” Turns out that this happens, and sometimes it’s just fine. But it’s rarely done when a bridge isn’t complete, like this one. (Miami New Times)
• FIU’s Center for Accelerated Bridge Construction was supposed to help the university become a national leader in new bridge construction methods like the one used near FIU. Back in 2016, it got a five-year, $7.5 million grant from the U.S. transportation department to move that along.  (SFBJ)
• The collapse could hurt FIU’s rep as a leading research university, but President Mark Rosenberg says now’s not the time to be worrying about that. (NYT)
• No one knows when 8th Street will open again, but classes resume today. (Miami Herald)
• There’s a bigger problem behind the bridge collapse that has been sort of overlooked: It had to be built because 8th Street was insanely dangerous for pedestrians. And rather than make the road safer for walkers and cyclists, Miami-Dade chose to build a bridge to separate them from drivers, and to use a much faster method than normal to avoid any traffic disruptions. (Streets Blog USA)

Oops. In Friday’s newsletter, we mentioned O Cinema locations in Miami Shores and Wynwood, but the organization no longer has a Miami Shores location.

Complete Streets take cyclists and buses into account, with a dedicated lane for each. A pilot program in Downtown Miami makes the street safer for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders, and it doesn’t slow down traffic. Give Miami-Dade Transit your feedback on which streets you’d like to see completed.

PRODUCED FOR MIAMI DADE DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION AND PUBLIC WORKS

THAT’S ALL FOR TODAY.

We’ll leave you with this review of Salt Bae’s new Brickell restaurant. The tl;dr version? Don’t bother, because you won’t even get a selfie with the man himself – Salt Bae is nowhere to be found.