MY TOWN
Deck the Halls With Matzo Balls. Going Home for the Holidays—to Miami Beach
Snowbirds go to Miami Beach for fun, for sun, and to live la vida loca. Gate-crashers, IMHO. I was there first. I’m a native.
This is the Miami Beach that tourists saw when I was growing up. The amphitheater-like cabana area of the Fontainebleau can be seen at the extreme lower left in this aerial view of Collins Avenue from 1957.
PHOTOGRAPH BY PHOTOQUEST, GETTY
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 18, 2014
I am packing to go home for the holidays. Shorts ... check ... T-shirts ... check ... tennis racquet, swimsuit, sunglasses ... ditto.
While friends head out for less temperate destinations, like Minneapolis, Buffalo, or Detroit, I am going to Miami Beach. I'm dreaming of a bright Christmas, a green, sunny one, don't you know? You can have your jingle-belled, snow-flaked holiday. Give me sun. Give me surf. Palmy-balmy days, if you please.
This is not self-indulgence. Miami Beach is my hometown. Though I don't live there now, my family still does. I grew up there. It's home.
Of course, the Miami Beach I grew up in during the 1950s and '60s was far from the hip, trendy, gilt-edged sandbar of today. That Miami Beach, my Miami Beach, had a different vibe, one that was more along the lines of a Meyer Lanskythug in an iridescent sharkskin suit drinking rum and Coke at the Five O'Clock Club (so named because drinks were on the house if you were still upright at 5 a.m.).
Back then, what is now hipster heaven South Beach was the land of Kosher hotels and frail pensioners in one-room apartments, hence the sobriquet "God's waiting room."
When Elliott Roosevelt, son of the New Deal president, ran for mayor of Miami Beach in 1965, he won handily; the aging populace living out their days there thought they were voting for his father, who'd given them Social Security. I should know. My father, a public relations consultant, handled his campaign.
When Elliott Roosevelt, son of the New Deal president, ran for mayor of Miami Beach in 1965, he won handily; the aging populace living out their days there thought they were voting for his father, who'd given them Social Security. I should know. My father, a public relations consultant, handled his campaign.
That demographic began to change in the '60s and '70s as more and more refugees fled Castro's Cuba. By grace of immigration (more than 50 percent of South Florida is foreign-born, mostly Cuban but also Haitian, Colombian, Nicaraguan, and others), the area now dances to a salsa beat, Latin America on steroids and speed-more naughty, sexy, smoldering than anywhere else north of the Tropic of Cancer. It is not, my friend, your bubbe's Miami Beach.
In my day, pre-la vida loca, before Gloria Estefan, Gianni Versace (RIP), and Ricky Martin moved in, local celebrities were Jackie Gleason (the Great One broadcast his show from the Miami Beach Auditorium) or whoever happened to be playing the Boom Boom Room in the Fontainebleau Hotel (Tom Jones! Shirley Bassey!).
Here I am in my work surroundings at National Geographic headquarters in Washington, D.C., around 2000. The tan has long faded.
PHOTOGRAPH BY SISSE BRIMBERG, COURTESY CATHY NEWMAN
The Fontainebleau, at 44th and Collins Avenue, with an architectural style once described as "Miami Beach French," was designed by Morris Lapidus. Lapidus, known as the Liberace of architecture, gave his concrete creation a seductively curved exterior, a swimming pool the size of Lake Michigan, and a "staircase to nowhere." His flamboyant monstrosity or masterpiece (take your choice—one critic called it the "grossest national product") may be remembered among other things for the opening scene of Goldfinger. The hotel is where Bond first meets his nemesis, Auric Goldfinger, cheating at cards, and where his gilded girlfriend, Jill Masterson, meets her demise.
It was also, incidentally, the scene of one of the more famous headline-making events in Beach hotel history. Sometime in the mid-1970s, a well-heeled father of the bride booked the hotel for his daughter's wedding. The intended, layered in satin and lace, was all set to float down the Staircase in swirling clouds of pink dry ice to the accompanying flutter of released white doves. All well and good, except that the groom got cold feet and didn't show up.
Hotels like the Fontainebleau were for tourists—the true invasive species of South Florida—but I did go there for a bar mitzvah, the big social event in the predominantly Jewish community I grew up in.
And when I was a reporter for the Miami News (now defunct) in the 1970s, my editor thought it would be a hoot for me to do a George Plimpton-like first-person feature working as a cocktail waitress at Harry's American Bar at the Eden Roc (another example of Lapidus architectural overstatement). I lasted five hours, collected $9.75 in tips, parceled out 15 percent to the busboys, and decided to keep my day job.
The highlight of my stint, though, was serving a little old lady who tottered into the bar on white wedgies, took one look at the bouncing breasts on stage, and covered her eyes. After a while, she peeked through her splayed fingers. When I looked at the stage, I realized her eyes were riveted on three male dancers, covered by a cloth strip that made an athletic supporter look generous. I approached to take her order. "Out of the way. You're blocking my view," she hissed.
My editor at the now-defunct Miami News once sent me to the Eden Roc Hotel to be a cocktail waitress for a night for a story I wrote in 1972 as a newspaper intern. That's the kind of thing they did in those days.
COURTESY CATHY NEWMAN
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