The Mike Eidson Factor

How one person can make a difference in both historic preservation and the arts

It had been raining for several days before we met attorney Mike Eidson and his wife Margaret for a tour of St. Mary’s First Missionary Baptist Church, the 1924 house of worship that for much of the past century served the black community of Coral Gables’ MacFarlane District. The church, which Eidson purchased and restored, felt like the safe oasis he intended it become, a place where the community could gather to both practice and experience the arts.

“It’s got dignity, and it represents a really, really important part of our history that was ignored,” says Eidson. “The people who built Coral Gables lived here. Their descendants live here now. They deserve for this to be preserved. It represents their history. It’s an important part of the history of Coral Gables, and it was just going to be torn down.”

Instead, after meeting with neighborhood residents to get their approval, Eidson bought the building for $860,000. “Inside it was a disaster. The roof had literally fallen in,” says Eidson. It was also filled with pews, which had to be removed in order to install what is called a Harlequin Marley dance floor, a “sprung” floor similar to what professional dance studios use.

“Miami City Ballet has one like this. So, dancers love coming here. And you see the light coming through [stained glass windows.] It’s really beautiful. And it’s their place, it’s a sanctuary for the artist.”

As for the pews, Eidson was able to repurpose them, donating them to a church in Haiti which had been destroyed by an earthquake and hurricane. “We took these pews, right here from this African American church, and put them in a church in Haiti. They actually rebuilt the church around the pews. That’s what you call faith,” he says.

In another act of faith, Eidson used the church in January to hold the annual celebration and reenactment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington put on by the Coconut Grove Ecumenical Network. “A lot of the people, when the church was lost, knew no other church. They grew up here,” said Carolyn Donaldson, who produced the program. A retired former VP of human resources for Noven Pharmaceuticals and Ivax, she attended the church as a child.

“We were the black community, and churches were a meeting place… St. Mary’s serviced the community. As an arts theater they will be serving the community. It’s just a different type of service.”

For Eidson, the saving of St. Mary’s represents one of the clear victories in his ongoing struggle to preserve what he can from Coral Gables’ past — and at the same time enrich local culture. A long-time advocate for the arts (he was chair of the Adrienne Arsht Center for five years, and president for seven years of the Miami City Ballet Board of Trustees) he was unable to garner enough support to restore the Coconut Grove Playhouse.

He also failed to save the old LaSalle Dry Cleaners building at the corner of Aragon Avenue and LeJeune Road, despite a pre-pandemic offer of $4 million to the owners. That building, which housed city founder George Merrick’s real estate offices in the 1920s, was torn down in 2019; it remains today an empty lot.

Eidson did, however, save the historic building where Books & Books is now housed. “Is there anybody who would argue that Books and Books is not better off being in that preserved building than it would be if we had another high-rise there? I think 99 percent of people would rather be able to use Books and Books than have an office high-rise there — except the guy making money from developing it.”

Left: A full house during a recent performance at Sanctuary of the Arts. Top right: The first Church of Christ, Scientist as envisaged by the architect Phineas Paist. Bottom right: The church seen today, home to Sanctuary of the Arts.

In terms of sheer potential for cultural impact, however, it’s Eidson’s restoration of the historic church compound across from City Hall that wins the prize. Two churches were built on the property west of LeJeune Road along Andalusia Avenue (marked by the round Christian Science Reading Room on the corner), a small one in 1930 and a larger, neo-classical First Church of Christ, Scientist — directly across the street from Coral Gables City Hall — in the early 1940s. (It had been designed in the 1930s by famed Gables architect Phineas Paist). In 2019, Eidson acquired a long-term lease for the property and created the nonprofit Sanctuary of the Arts.

“It fit right in with what I was trying to do in Coconut Grove and what we did on Aragon [Books & Books]… I thought, ‘Well, this is not being used.’ I ran into the caretaker, and he said it hadn’t been used for 10 years, and he showed me the whole property.” Eidson contacted the attorney who represented the church board and began negotiations.

“It didn’t have a stage, and it didn’t have acoustics, and it didn’t have lights on. I said, ‘I love the location. I love the preservation part of this.’” The city had already designated the building historic in 2004, and then-historic preservation director Dona Spain showed Eidson the city’s original file on the property. “It was not in great shape. There were a lot of problems. But then I hired somebody from the Adrienne Arsht Center to come tell me whether or not he thought I could turn it into a performing space.”

The answer, it turns out, was a resounding yes. Since it’s official opening two years ago, the Sanctuary has put on more than 100 performances. While much of it has been music — everything from chamber music by Mozart to jazz performances by flautist Néstor Torres — the Sanctuary also puts on something that’s rare in Coral Gables: Dance. And not just performances. It has become an important center for dance instruction under director Rafi Maldonado-Lopez, who Eidson hired to manage the facility and its productions.

“It’s a place for all of us to come together,” says Eidson of The Sanctuary. “There are literally 20,000 people who’ve [gone to performances]. That’s not widely known in the community. I’m still trying for everyone to understand what we’re doing here. The church board did, and leased the small church after seeing what we were doing in the larger space… We’ve already had 70 performances this year. There’s nobody else who can say that.”

Creating the Books & Books Space

I meet Eidson to discuss his love of the arts and historic restoration at Bachour café, a favorite spot of his since it is walking distance from his law offices. They are, ironically enough, now housed in the penthouse of one of the most modern structures in Coral Gables, the 255 Alhambra Circle Building. There, atop the modern glass edifice, is the Colson Hicks Eidson imprimatur.

This is the second Gables location for the powerhouse law firm, which has made a name for itself handling some of the biggest class action lawsuits in the U.S during the last half century. The first location, when the firm decided to move from downtown Miami in 1998, was on Aragon Avenue, where they built a three-story Spanish style building. Part of the property contained an old 1923 building, one of the commercial structures in Coral Gables. It had since added a second floor, but still retained its Mediterranean style arches, with the original tile floor and pecky cypress ceilings.

“We found out the history of it and how important it was. It had been the first medical office in Coral Gables. So, we decided to build something that would integrate it and save it,” says Eidson. “Instead of tearing it all down and building a 16-story building, we built our three-story [headquarters] next door and restored the old building… We had fallen into this great piece of property at a very reasonable price, and we thought, ‘Let’s maximize what can be done for the community here.’”

They were able to do so using something new at that time for the Gables: transferrable development rights. They sold those rights to developer Armando Codina, who used them to add a bit of height to his 355 Alhambra Building (for a signature cupola). That money helped pay for the restoration costs.

The restored historic building is now, of course, home to Books & Books, the heart of what Eidson calls “the prettiest street in Coral Gables.” Following the bookstore’s restoration, the city built the Coral Gables Arts Cinema (and its Mediterranean parking garage) across the street, while the old 1939 firehouse next door became the Coral Gables Museum. Together with Books & Books, they form a kind of cultural nexus. The bookstore, with its open-air bar, café, and courtyard is now “the intellectual center” of the city’s downtown, says Eidson.

Both the cinema and museum were born during the mayoral decade (2001- 2011) of Don Slesnick, another preservationist, who coincidentally was Eidson’s commanding officer in the 478th Civil Affairs Company of the U.S. Army Reserve in the 1970s (located at the Kendall Reserve Center on the UM campus). Both men had served in Vietnam, though not together.

“My earliest recollection of Mike — he was already an impressive attorney and a real “doer,” moving and shaking — was as a good leader, but certainly with an independent approach to military life,” quips Slesnick. “Obviously, I am in awe of the support he’s shown for the arts and culture by the investment of his own [money] and time, while saving the historic structures of the Church of Christ Scientist and St. Mary’s…. Had people listened to his plans, he could have saved the Coconut Grove Playhouse years ago.”

On the legal front, Eidson’s career has been nothing less than spectacular. He has been the lead or co-council in some of the highest profile liability cases in recent U.S. legal history — including the infamous Ford Pinto case with its exploding gas tank that helped make Ralph Nader a household name. He was also co-counsel in the suit against Firestone for its defective tires on Ford Explorers, and numerous class-action cases against pharmaceutical companies and airlines for personal injuries. In all, Eidson has handled hundreds of complex cases, including more than 120 jury trials, leading to a slew of national awards, including being named annually as one of the 100 most influential attorneys in the country by the National Trial Lawyers Association.

“Mike is a very unique person,” says Dean Colson, his law partner for 43 years. “He is a trial lawyer who is passionate about his clients and their causes, and he takes it all very personally. The same level of energy he brings to the performing arts he brings to his practice [and] his experience has always been in the product liability field, on the side of the people.”

In person, Eidson is mild mannered, polite, and unassuming. He speaks with a soft southern accent (raised in Georgia), the kind of voice you would expect from Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mocking Bird.” He is, in essence, a modest man whose pleasure comes in the enjoyment of his accomplishments, rather than their broadcast. “This story should be about what we built, and preservation, and not about me,” he says. “Because maybe someone will look at this and say, maybe I should help.”

Eidson’s love for the arts really began when he spent a year abroad studying in England, at the University of Warwick. “I would go down to London with my friends, who were much more sophisticated in music and dance and all the arts than I was, and we go to the theater every weekend. We’d take a train from Coventry down to London, and they would take me out to hear the sympho- ny. And one day I saw Edward Villella and the New York City Ballet, which was visiting. And I said ‘Damn, I’ve never seen anything like this before.’ I fell in love with it all.”

Besides his experience in historic England, his affection for preservation stemmed first from his undergrad years at the University of South Carolina, one of the oldest universities in the country, where he lived in dormitories called “the tenement” that had been built before the Civil War and “could have been torn down 100 times.” He also attended Emory Law School, where many of the marble buildings were erected in 1913 and 1915 by the then-CEO of Atlanta-based Coca Cola.

It was also at the University of South Carolina that Eidson met his wife of 56 years, Margaret, who has been a partner in his quest for culture and preservation. She got a master’s degree at Emory, a medical degree at the University of Miami, followed by a fellowship at Sloan Kettering in New York. She then returned to become head of pediatric endocrinology at the University of Miami, where she taught for 32 years. “She is very, very smart,” he says, and a culture maven.

When Eidson served as president of the board of the Miami City Ballet (2000-2007), and then as its chair (2008), the two of them attended literally every single performance — at Margaret’s insistence, says Eidson — traveling to Broward and Palm Beach counties to see the performances there.

“We never missed one of their programs,” says Margaret. “If we missed it in Miami, we’d go to Fort Lauderdale or Palm Beach. We used to go to all three events, three places for each program. We go to two now, instead of three. We’ve cut out Palm Beach in the last couple of years.”

Eidson’s affection and respect for his wife is another of his personal attributes; he says he never makes a decision on any project without consulting her. “Margaret is the smartest, coolest, kindest, calmest person — and beautiful. She is the person you would want to be in a foxhole with or the pilot of your airplane if it was in trouble,” he says.

“For her, preservation includes the aesthetic. For her the most important thing [at The Sanctuary] is when you walk in the door, and you look up, it looks like a jewel box. She had a lot to do with the way it looks. When I painted it, when I put up fabric and I put those posters up, she had to approve it. She’s pretty good at that, and I think it’s really pretty. The chairs are big, and everybody’s close to the stage. There are no bad seats. There’s not another building like it.”

While he remains an ardent preservationist, Eidson is also a realist. “I don’t think it’s important to preserve every old building. The Coconut Grove Playhouse, other than the pride of it, there’s not a lot of aesthetic reasons to preserve it.”

But there are two reasons to put any building on the national list of historic places, he points out. The first is whether the building is an important artistic achievement by an architect. The second is what happened inside the building. That’s the case with the Coconut Grove Playhouse, he says, which held scores of national caliber plays (with innumerable famous actors, from Jack Lemmon, Liza Minnelli, and Walter Matthau to Carol Channing, Bea Arthur, and Denzel Washington) from 1956 to 2006.

“It became one of the first regional theaters in the United States, one of the most successful, and it was by far the biggest economic impact in Coconut Grove. At one point they say that 40 percent of the money spent in Coconut Grove was the result of the playhouse.” In the last year before it closed, over 100,000 people attended.

Eidson, who has been on the Arsht board since 2005, wanted a similar facility there. “Over my objections, they would not build a legitimate 500-700 seat theater. They thought it would compete with the Grove,” not knowing the Playhouse would close the same year the Arsht opened. Now empty for 17 years, the Playhouse remains threatened with demolition. The back can modernized while saving the facade, says Eidson. “It’s something that was important, and ought to be preserved,” he says.

Creating the Sanctuary

While he hasn’t been able to save the Coconut Grove Playhouse, the Sanctuary of the Arts is another story. In its own way, Eidson’s transformation of the Sanctuary from its original roll as a church is the ultimate confluence of his – and Margaret’s – love of both the arts and historic preservation.

The smaller church on the property, facing LeJeune Road, is used mostly as a dance rehearsal space. The larger one, with First Church of Christ Scientist engraved above neo-classic columns facing Andalusia Avenue, is used for performances. Offices form a courtyard connecting the two churches. The Christian Science Reading Room building, on the corner of Le Jeune and Andalusia, is still used by parishioners for their services.

“We use the rest of it,” says Eidson. “We teach classes here in music, theater, fundraising — we teach how to be a professional in the world of art, and we try to bring the community together through all the art forms.”

The Sanctuary is now used for symposiums, for book launches, and by schools, and of course for dance and music. Its grand opening concert in March 2022 was by the famous violinist Joshua Bell, who performed with the equally famous St. Martin in the Fields chamber orchestra from London.

“We also have a Mainly Mozart classical series that’s had 10 concerts alone,” says Eidson, who co-founded (with Ukrainian-American concert pianist Marina Radiushina) the Miami Chamber Music Society in 2013 to present the Mainly Mozart Musical Festivals annually in Coral Gables and Miami. “We didn’t really have a home. We performed at Gusman, the Arsht, and at the Biltmore… I presented, with Marina, 100 concerts before I even did this thing. Now we’ve got [the Sanctuary] and the acoustics for her. So, she’s happy.”

Besides the Miami Chamber Music Society, the Sanctuary is currently home to four other resident companies: The New Canon Chamber Collective; Syncopate Collective; Inter-American Choreographic Institute; and Sanctuary of the Arts Dance Ensemble. The University of Miami’s Frost School of Music has an arrangement with the Sanctuary to put on weekly Thursday concerts.

On the afternoon Eidson gave us a tour of the facility, Rafi Maldonado-Lopez’s “Men Who Dance” company was rehearsing in the small church, leaping in the air while dance instructors Alice Arja and Renato Penteado barked out instructions. Penteado, principal dancer for the Miami City Ballet for 20 years, instructs dancers (all of them from South America) every day at the Sanctuary. Arja, whose daughter Nathalia is now the principal dancer at Miami City Ballet, was recruited from Brazil by Eidson.

“Alice is a creative genius. She has got the largest syllabus for teaching dance — forty different companies use her,” says Eidson. “She trained eight of the dancers at Miami City Ballet. Dancers and principals in 34 companies around the world were trained by her. She is like a goddess of dance.”

Taking a brief break from rehearsals, Arja is quick to praise Eidson and Margaret for their support. “They’re very caring for the art form, and they have good professional hearts,” she says. “For us as artists it’s very rare to find people like Dr. Margaret and Mike who give the support, the encouragement, and open the doors.” adds Penteado, “He likes the music too, not just the dance side of it, and these two things marry together very well.” Among other upcoming performances, the Sanctuary dancers will be performing to the music of composer Ernesto Lacuona.

This afternoon is also a special one for Eidson; earlier in the day children from public schools across Miami-Dade County were bussed to the Arsht Center’s Knight Concert Hall to see the Cleveland Symphony perform, accompanied by dancers from the Sanctuary.

“We did two dances, and I think the dancers held their own. It was a great culmination [for me]. I worked at the Arsht Center — our name is [inscribed] outside. I worked at the ballet. Now we’ve got the Sanctuary. We got to sit there today and watch all of that coming together. It was really a special thing,” says Eidson. “The children were so enthusiastic and so excited about seeing the dance and the music. [Cleveland] is one of the greatest orchestras in the world – and they congratulated us for helping do this event… And now they are going to perform chamber music here in March. The Cleveland Orchestra! At the Sanctuary!”

With the coming season now programmed, Eidson is thinking about the next steps for the Sanctuary. It may be time to move into non-performing arts. There is a large empty lot next to the First Church of Christ Scientist which Eidson would like turn into a sculpture garden. Some arts advocates want the city to build an art museum there, but the church does not want to sell the property. Edison wants the city to buy one of world-famous sculptor George Segal’s dancers to place there.

Over at the Baptist Church there are other plans afoot, as well. While Eidson donated the church to the nonprofit Sanctuary, he held on to several empty lots across the street. He wants the city to buy them from him, with the stipulation they build affordable housing for artists there, creating a sort of artist village.

“You’re two blocks from Metrorail. You could build 600- to 1,000-square-foot apartments at a reasonable price — so this doesn’t end up with “West Grove” million-dollar houses that almost touch each other. Otherwise, that’s what you’re going to end up with. And who wants that?”