Business: Ebb Tide at Miami Beach

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Miami Beach hotelkeepers, however, have only themselves to blame for much of their troubles. Though the notion of converting the island of swamps and snakes, mud and mangroves was the brainchild of Carl Fisher, a promoter of the Indianapolis Speedway, the modern sprawl of wall-to-wall hotels is in large measure the legacy of Ben Novack, operator until October of the Fontainebleau. Novack had the cunning of a Talleyrand when it came to raising money (one wag suggested that the hotel had as many investors as there were rooms), but little aesthetic sense. The Fontainebleau, which opened with ruffles and flourishes in 1954 and charged as much as $125 a day then for a suite, was a semicircular rococo monument that set the architectural style for the hotel building boom of the '50s. During the 1968 Republican Convention, Norman Mailer visited most of the big hotels and concluded, "All the rivers of the very worst taste twisted down to the delta of each lobby in each grand Miami Beach hotel . . . There was every color of iridescence, rainbows of vulgarity, aureoles of gorgeous taste, opium den of a middle-class dollar, materialistic as meat, sweat and the cigar." Even the merrymaking had a mechanical touch. According to one ancient joke, at 4 o'clock one midseason morning in the '50s, a woman threw open her hotel-room window and screamed "Fire! Fire!" A thousand sleepy voices replied, "Cha cha cha."

The tourists spent so heavily that hotelkeepers thought they could continue taking heavy profits out of their establishments without putting any money back into renovation. Novack, in particular, used much of the money from the Fontainebleau to finance outside ventures that never paid off. Meanwhile, his hotel and others deteriorated; a visitor to the Fontainebleau last week noted a bucket strategically placed on the 14th floor to catch water from a dripping pipe. Another visitor in the past was not enamored by the presence of snarling guard dogs. Hotels sectioned off the once magnificent beach so that it is now invisible from much of Collins Avenue, the main thoroughfare, causing erosion that in some spots has left little or no beach.

For all its vicissitudes, Miami Beach has long been a favorite playground for organized crime chiefs. Al Capone died there; Meyer Lansky, after a worldwide odyssey in search of amenable digs, settled into one of those beachfront condominiums. The rakish, raffish atmosphere that such residents helped to create may have attracted some visitors, but it has repulsed others.