Business: Ebb Tide at Miami Beach

From prosperity to torpor in two decades

Hyperbolic drumbeaters still proclaim Miami Beach as "the sun and fun capital of the world" to big spenders from the North. The reality, as first-time visitors will speedily discover during the tourist season that opens this week, is startlingly different. The sun is still there (temperatures last week were in the 80s), but not the fun. So rapidly has the seven-mile-long island degenerated that it can be fairly described as a seedy backwater of debt-ridden hotels, gaudy condominiums and decaying apartments. It has a permanent population so old (median age: 68) that lifeguards spend more time assisting heart-attack victims on the sand than pulling foundering swimmers out of the surf.

The signs of decay are almost universal. The 1,250-room Fontainebleau Hotel—so haughty in its heyday that Comedian Alan King joshed that it charged him $25 a day, not for accommodation but merely to use its name —was sold early this month in bankruptcy court. Next door, the Eden Roc has just emerged from years in receivership. Once it featured entertainers like Harry Belafonte and Wayne Newton; this winter its "headliners" will be its own singing waiters. At least three other hotels are tangled in bankruptcy proceedings; vacant stores dot the island, and even the members of the world's oldest profession have drifted elsewhere to more prosperous locations. No new hotel has opened in a decade; tourist spending in that period has fallen a precipitous 43% by one estimate, and revenues of some establishments have dropped as much as 50%.

True, tourist traffic may be higher this winter than during last year's disastrous season, if only because the weather probably will not be so bad again (temperatures dropped into the 30s last January). But convention business, which has become crucial to what prosperity the Beach has left, is likely to fall off by a fifth this year. The American College of Surgeons and several other large groups have vowed never to return until more first-class hotel rooms are available. At present, only 3,500 of Miami Beach's 27,000 hotel rooms rate that designation.

Says Mel Mendelson, owner of a meat-packing plant, who has been observing the scene for a quarter of a century: "Miami Beach reminds you of a New York subway." From a more scientific viewpoint, Frank Borman, the former astronaut who is now chairman of Eastern Air Lines, concluded from his company's research that "the Beach is dying as a tourist attraction." Eastern's figures reveal that as recently as 1971, more than four out of ten visitors arriving in Florida headed for the Miami area. Last year the figure was fewer than three out often.