SAVING SOUTH BEACH

A Biography of a Neighborhood

by M. Barron Stofik

Published by the University Press of Florida

SNEAK PREVIEW!

The Shtetl

Lummus Park, 1970s

This excerpt is presented without endnotes

  Benjamin Levy started each day at 5:30 a.m.  He cleaned up, dressed in his fine white suit, and set out walking.  A few shopkeepers already were working brooms against cigarette butts and gum wrappers that had been cast recklessly on the sidewalk the previous day. Hotel lobbies were showing their first signs of activity as maintenance men checked at the front desk for overnight complaints of burned-out light bulbs and stubborn plumbing.  Platoons of domestic workers and hotel chambermaids were landing at bus stops.  There always were a few other pedestrians, some walking with dogs, more of them walking with canes.

    Stanley Worth had opened the doors for the breakfast crowd by the time Benjamin Levy arrived at The Concord Cafeteria on Collins Avenue. Orthopedic shoes shuffled across the terrazzo floor toward the food line where Broadway Charlie was sliding pans of his freshly-scrambled eggs and fried potatoes into their assigned spaces on the stainless-steel steam table. 

   Levy took a tray and pushed it along the serving line, assembling his usual breakfast of cereal, eggs, a soft onion roll with butter, Jell-O, and coffee. The cashier took his $3.50 with a smile and her customary “How’re you feeling today?” Other customers had the breakfast special on their trays: juice, two eggs, potatoes, just-baked bread, and coffee for a buck sixty-five. They examined each item with the intensity of a radiologist reading an X-ray, much to the amusement of Broadway Charlie, whose voice was as raspy as his spatula against the hot griddle.

    The 250 seats in the dreary dining hall quickly filled. The sounds of clattering dishes, clanking silverware and chair legs scraping against the scuffed floor echoed off the faded green walls and mixed with the chatter of voices heavy with accents of Russia, Poland, Romania, Brooklyn. 

    The Concord had been a neighborhood institution since Stanley Worth’s father-in-law opened it in 1947. Stanley had managed the cafeteria for almost twenty-five years. The food was good and fresh, the portions generous, and the prices inexpensive. It became a popular spot for celebrities and tourists, the meeting place for the Kiwanis and Lions Clubs, a first choice when the family went out to dinner.

    Benjamin Levy carried his tray to one of the wobbly Formica-covered tables. By 1976,the families, the civic groups, the members of the hotel orchestras dressed in tuxedos no longer frequented The Concord. They had been replaced by people like Benjamin Levy, who was born in Turkey in 1899 and didn’t own a tuxedo. They were European refugees like Sam Drucker, who had been eating alone since he moved to South Beach in 1959. Only five of the twelve thousand Jews from his Polish village survived World War II. His wife and children were not among them. The conversation at the tables was no longer of the stars who were appearing in the glittering showrooms of the big hotels. Now elderly patrons discussed the 6.4 percent increase that would show up in their Social Security checks the next month. It probably would not reduce the loss of the restaurant’s teaspoons, which disappeared out the door by the dozens each week.

   Yiddish language newspapers such as The Jewish Daily Forward littered worn tabletops. Readers wanted to find out about what Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was doing and whether Syria moving its troops from the Golan Heights suggested some agreement between the two countries. Others riffled through the pages of The Miami Herald, and mused about Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter’s surprising race for the Democratic nomination for president. The Concord’s patrons were almost exclusively Democrats. 

   Benjamin Levy finished his breakfast and headed south. Slender palm trees fluttered their fronds slightly beside American flags that had been displayed liberally in anticipation of the nation’s upcoming bicentennial celebration. It would be another couple of hours before shoppers would breath life into Lincoln Road Mall. A clerk was preparing to open the post office window at Woolworth’s.  Jeanette Joya had arrived for another day of work at Moseley’s and was sorting through the fine table and bed linens she would show to her well-heeled customers that day, as she had for thirty years. Soon the mall tram would start making its round trips carrying elderly shoppers whose arthritic knees rebelled against walking the eight-block-long promenade.

   The sun was heating the day and the volume of traffic on the sidewalks was picking up.  Women wearing wide-brimmed straw hats and trailing folding shopping carts made their way to do their marketing. People in roomy swimsuits and discreet cover-ups headed to the beach for a morning swim or to join their exercise group in the park. A few waited on benches for a city bus, one perhaps nervously going north to be tested on the new CAT scan unit at Mount Sinai Medical Center, the first in the county. Some just sat on the benches.

   Levy turned west toward Flamingo Park, once the site of polo fields and pale people in whites playing civilized games of tennis. He had lived on South Beach for six years, so he still was considered a newcomer, but he had become a regular at Friendship Corner No. 3 where he played cards with other men who talked about the old country and how the baseball season was going. Players already were lined up for their turns on the shuffleboard courts, ignoring the teenagers who were getting their time on the handball courts before the lawyers and stockbrokers showed up and invoked the seniority rule.

   This was South Beach in 1976, home to more than fifty thousand residents, most of them senior citizens, and most of them Jewish. They were working people who had sent their sons to medical school and married their daughters to nice young men with good prospects. They had been frugal and saved their money. They had their Social Security, some had union pensions, and they wanted to spend a comfortable retirement in peace. The snowbirds came to the hotels for the season and retreated north to escape the humid summer months. The year-rounders settled into sunny rental apartments in the small buildings around Flamingo Park or south of Fifth Street. Some moved into cooperative apartments or one-bedroom condominiums bought by their children. The mouth-watering aroma of homemade chicken soup wafted through the halls.

   It was the old neighborhood recreated in the tropics, with everything familiar and within walking distance. The kosher delis on Washington Avenue held cases of salamis and whitefish.  Experienced shoppers dickered over prices at the open-front markets that carried plums and peaches that were extra ripe, easier for people with delicate digestive systems. People at the library, the thrift shop, and the drug store knew them by face if not by name. Hibiscus bloomed outside their doors in January and they could buy fresh orange juice at stands right on the sidewalk. There was a synagogue every few blocks. It was paradise, the promised land.

   Their days were busy. There were appointments to be kept at the South Shore Medical Pavilion, where ninety-five of a hundred patients paid with Medicare. The Jewish Senior Citizens Center offered a free hot lunch, art classes and sing-a-longs. They took adult education classes in pottery, folk dancing, and bookkeeping. Card games, impromptu music performances, and meaningful conversation provided amusement in Lummus Park, a green, landscaped ribbon that served as the front yard for the Ocean Drive hotels between Fifth and Fifteenth Streets.  Couples and groups of single ladies would go out to dinner, getting to their favorite restaurant in time for the Early Bird Special. There would be entertainment or bingo or maybe an ice cream party in the lobby that evening, or they would go to a Yiddish movie. They would dress up and gather at the band shell or the oceanfront auditorium for the dances. Good music, big band music, not that disco stuff like they heard from radios in passing cars.

   By one o’clock each day, Levy was on the move again, strolling down Ocean Drive past Lummus Park where women in flowered polyester sundresses and men wearing polo shirts and golf caps were sitting on the benches or under the seagrape trees in lawn chairs that they had carried with them. Their neighbors had retreated to the shade of the breezy hotel porches on the west side of the street. Men dozed while wives and widows critiqued the television shows they saw the night before and complained about how ungrateful their children were. They avoided talking about the threat that was looming over their homes and endangering the tight-knit community they had built on the oceanfront.

   Levy always stopped in the park at Seventh Street to rest his seventy-seven-year-old legs and people-watch for a couple of hours.  The smoke from his cigarette blended with the pervasive aromas of Coppertone and Ben-Gay. Elderly women wearing ruffled bathing caps walked alongside suntanned mothers lugging towels, toys, and coolers while herding toddlers toward the beachside shower to wash the sand from their feet before climbing in their cars for the drive home. Across the street was The Beacon hotel. Its main tower was five stories high, with faux columns slapped flat against the wall. Faded aqua paint highlighted slim horizontal stripes that worked their way across the front of the hotel, then hopped over to a three-story wing on the left. Air conditioners dangled from some of the windows, rusty water from their drains staining the white walls. Venetian blinds hung at varying heights behind the panes. A two-story sign with letters outlined in neon poked out from the tower. Five steps led to an arcaded terrace where a few retirees were resting in a row of aluminum chairs with vinyl-strap seats. To Levy and the others in the park, it looked pretty much like every hotel and apartment building on South Beach.

   It was the hotels and apartments and the elderly people that drew Barbara Capitman, her son John, and their friend Leonard Horowitz to South Beach. John had enjoyed spending time in the area when his parents moved to Florida three years earlier and settled into a quiet apartment on the Venetian Islands between Miami and Miami Beach. His dad loved the old kosher restaurants and the pedestrian environment of South Beach. His parents would reminisce about people they knew who had vacationed there when it was clean and sleek and so different from the gray buildings and gray winters up north.

   A lot had changed in those three years. Barbara’s husband had died suddenly. She had moved to a condominium on Key Biscayne. John had graduated from Yale and was about to begin working on his master’s degree in public policy at Florida International University. Her older son, Andrew, was traveling internationally, doing economic studies for exporters from Latin America. And South Beach was not clean and sleek anymore.

   The Bicentennial had engaged Americans in a burst of patriotism. People were buying flags, planning parades, and trying to remember the second verse of “America the Beautiful.”  Television specials were reminding viewers of how, in two hundred years, America had grown into a powerful country that brought the world democracy and Coca Cola. All the reflection was prompting thoughtful designers to look at what the nation had built in those two centuries. The county’s new monolithic fifty-story government center was being planned for downtown Miami.  Tall, sharp-edged condominiums were replacing the graceful mansions of Millionaire’s Row on the west side of Biscayne Bay. A dark, looming hotel and shopping mall complex was rising near the entrance to the Venetian Causeway, around the corner from the funky apartment where Horowitz lived. Barbara Capitman and Leonard Horowitz didn’t like what they saw. It was a commonly-held opinion, described by Christopher Alexander writing in a 1965 issue of Architectural Forum, “The non-art-loving public at large regards the onset of modern buildings and modern cities everywhere as an inevitable, rather sad piece of the larger fact that the world is going to the dogs."

   That afternoon, the Capitmans and Horowitz decided to take a drive around South Beach. They started in the small triangle of land south of Fifth Street, the area originally known as South Beach until the town expanded northward. Ocean Drive and Collins Avenue were lined with unpretentious hotels built in the 1920s and 30s. Some looked as though they hadn’t been painted since. On the cross streets were old wood-frame apartment buildings that appeared to have developed a slight permanent tilt away from the constant breeze off the Atlantic. There were a few simple bungalows from the Beach’s early days, some of them faced with native oolitic limestone (commonly called coral rock) with steeply pitched roofs and large windows shadowed by generous eaves to keep them cool in the days before air conditioning. The city marina, which had seen better days, sat on the edge of the bay and across the street from a rusty water tower.  Sprinkled among the jumble of old houses, hotels, and apartments were fruit stands, restaurants, auto repair shops, a meat-packing plant, warehouses, small manufacturers, several nondescript co-ops and condominiums built in the 1960s, some low-income housing, and the Beth Jacob Hall, home of the oldest Jewish congregation on Miami Beach.

   They turned north of Fifth Street onto Ocean Drive. There was little traffic on the two-lane street and few cars were parked at the meters on either side. Lummus Park, the broad sandy beach, and the Atlantic Ocean were to their right. It was the only stretch of Miami Beach where there weren’t buildings between the road and the ocean. Block after block of small hotels were on their left. When they reached The Beacon hotel, across the street from where Benjamin Levy spent each afternoon people-watching, Horowitz shouted, “Stop the car! Look at all these fab-ulous buildings!”

   Leonard Horowitz was a designer by profession, flamboyant by nature, and an artist by providence. Under the hotels’ layers of flaking paint, he saw something magical. To the left was The Avalon, blonde concrete eyebrows shading its windows. To the right was The Colony, where neon outlined the lettering on a spire and canopy worthy of a 1930s movie palace. A block south was The Park Central hotel, its corners feathered by wraparound windows, giving it wings to float seven stories above a columned porch. A block north sat The Waldorf Towers, a cylindrical lighthouse tower looking out to sea from atop its rounded rooftop corner. Another block north was The Breakwater, three stories with a soaring tower and a roof deck surrounded by a railing that would be at home on any of the cruise ships that sailed along the horizon.  Everywhere were walls of glass block, doorways trimmed with shiny black Vitrolite, brushed tin canopies overhanging porch steps, lines and curves of neon, porthole windows, arches and balconies, glass panes etched with flamingos and palm trees and tropical fish. And the names: Waves, Tides, Beach Paradise. They shouted, “It’s vacation time! Come play on the beach!”

©2005 M. Barron Stofik

Lincoln Road, 1960s

Afternoon at the Senator, 1970s

The Cardozo hotel, early 1980s