It’s all there, in exhaustive detail: Code enforcement overhauls. Crime reduction. Computer labs at city parks. New sewers and street drains. Rebuilt sidewalks. Even a chicken-busters team.

The mayor who will likely best be remembered — and in some quarters, reviled — for presiding over an unprecedented development boom and an ambitious set of grand plans wasn’t focused just on the big picture.

“There was not an area of the city that didn’t get our attention, and this is something I’m very proud of,” said Diaz, hauling out the binder during an interview just days before leaving office. “This was my Bible, and we focused on everything.”

Diaz, who is term-limited, leaves office Wednesday in some respects to a tepid farewell. Public weariness over his big-ticket plans amid a recession loomed large in the landslide election of new mayor Tomás Regalado. The commissioner cast himself as the anti-Diaz, a champion of residents who felt ignored by the mayor.

But admirers believe Diaz will come to be regarded as a transformative mayor who ably channeled the high-rise condo boom to forge a grown-up Miami, bringing vision and basic competence to a city that had become the target of jokes and banana-chucking demonstrators.

“You want to know his legacy? Then look up,” said historian and activist Marvin Dunn, who started a large food garden in Overtown in part with city support. “Manny Diaz’s low-key and unassuming but tough style is what Miami needed.”

This is a Manny Diaz even his admirers might find hard to recognize — a sober, patient reformist up to his elbows in the minutiae of turning around a troubled city.

Every weekend, the Virginia Key Beach Park unveils its crown jewel, a 1950s Allan Herschell carousel.

After the noon opening, the booming music of the vintage ride fills the historic park — and attracts eager riders.

The carousel is part of the Virginia Key Beach Park Trust’s plan to restore the beachfront park to the popular playground it once was.

“In 1999, when the community came together and decided the park should be saved the concept was to restore the park to a walking museum so to speak,” Virginia Key Beach Park trustee Gene Tinnie said. “The idea of getting the carousel was driven so the [current] generation now can see what the generation before had worked for.”

The park’s executive director, David Shorter, found the Herschell carousel by chance — at a Miramar church carnival.

In February 2008 when the park reopened, the ride was leased from Modern Midways, an amusement ride company for $10,000. “We wanted to follow all of the history lines that were here when the park first opened,” Shorter said.

In May 2008, the park purchased the $250,000 carousel with private donations, a $50,000 grant from the office of Miami Commissioner Marc Sarnoff and money from the County Safe Neighborhood Parks Fund, according to David Friedman, the park’s marketing director.

The carousel was a bargain. Many 1950s Herschell merry-go-rounds cost as much as $600,000 depending on their condition.

During Miami’s earlier days of segregation, the ride partly represented equality between the “colored” Virginia Key Beach Park and the “whites only” Crandon Park. Both parks operated with a mini-train and carousel.

For Barbara Mason-Gardiner, a 1960 Booker T. Washington graduate, visiting the park today brings back feelings of nostalgia.

“Although it was segregated, to us those were some of the great times,” Mason-Gardiner said. “It really made you feel like you were on Miami Beach.”

For more than 20 years, the inside of the octagon-shaped building was empty. The original carousel had deteriorated by the time Miami took over the park in the 1980s.

The ride now rests in the pavilion just yards away from the ocean. It has been refurbished with electrical wiring — an upgrade from the generator the previous carousel used.

Now on Saturdays and Sundays, people stand in line for a carousel ride. “It’s a vital piece of our community,” Mason-Gardiner said. “Being out here is still a thrilling experience.”

Some teachers dress in outlandish costumes. Some bring their students outdoors. Others plan exotic field trips.

But Rohr Middle School’s Daniel Dreyfuss might be the only teacher in Miami-Dade — or anywhere, really — who has encouraged his kids to turn his van into a psychedelic, mobile periodic table.

Last week, the bearded science teacher handed dozens of middle school students acrylic latex paint and demanded that they paint blue, green, yellow, orange and red squares all over his 1999 Plymouth Voyager.

But it’s all for the sake of learning: What else would make studying the properties of niobium or silicon unforgettable, he asks.

“It’s a secret plan to get everyone educated,” Dreyfuss mused, as his students turned his van into a traveling science project.

Tzvi Rosenberg, 13, stood by the van as the class of teenage boys carefully painted black letters into every square of the periodic table covering the vehicle’s doors, hood and roof. Of the 117 elements that currently make up the periodic table, they managed to squeeze in 75.

“It’s a metal that has a very high melting point, so engineering plants use it,” Tzvi said, pointing at the Nb he drew to represent niobium.

Thirteen-year-old Jason Brody barraged his teacher with probing questions.

“You’re actually going to drive this around?”

“Yeah,” Dreyfuss responded.

“I’d kill myself,” Brody shot back, laughing.

But neither Dreyfuss nor his wife mind driving in a colorful, checkered collection of letters that causes passerbys to honk, shout and stare.

That’s the point — and they’ve gotten used to the idea. The teacher’s Voyager is the second vehicle to have fallen victim to his education schemes. The first was a Nissan sedan students painted when he taught in Cincinnati.

The success of the first project, he said, inspired him to buy the white van five years ago, keeping in mind that he would continue the tradition when the vehicle reached its final stages of automotive life.

That point came earlier this year, when it reached 137,000 miles. The odd lesson plan of “paint Mr. Dreyfuss’ car” appeared on his student’s weekly work sheets soon thereafter.

“We thought it was awesome,” recalled 13-year-old Sendy Gross as he used a black Sharpie pen to draw Mg near the van’s rear fender. That stands for magnesium, a metal used to make glass, cement and electronic devices.

But few found the idea too surprising. Dreyfuss is, after all, the teacher who walked his seventh grade science students from school to a nearby Wal-Mart to help them understand the distance from Pluto to the sun. The basketball he left at the school, he said, represented the sun.

It’s those kinds of quirky projects that make Dreyfuss’ class — otherwise known as Fussville — a favorite for the school’s 109 students.

“He totally understands kids. He’s teaching for the right reasons,” said Rabbi Ephraim Palgon, the school’s principal. “These kids will remember those elements forever.”