Before the bronze sculpture of aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss was placed at the entrance to Curtiss Parkway, the main street of Miami Springs, the clay mold of “the fastest man in the world” sat in the studio of Cuban-American artist Natalie Plasencia, just a few blocks away.
Molding and observing, Plasencia sought to enter the world of the inventor, the daring aviator who, on July 4, 1908, climbed onto a kind of bicycle with wings and flew 1.6 kilometers at four miles per hour in Hammondsport, New York, the town where he had been born 30 years earlier.
The little plane is the June Bug, in which Curtiss made the first public flight in the United States. A highly stylized version of this biplane is part of the Glenn Curtiss & June Bug Legacy Memorial, which was unveiled last August 22, exactly one hundred years after Curtiss founded the city of Miami Springs…