Miami Beach Memoirs
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Jerusalem Post, September 25, 1992
It’s 10:30 a.m. on Ocean Drive, the uber-trendy heart of the hip-hop new Miami Beach, and only the ghosts are out under the scalding morning sun. Things shut down for the night just a few hours ago, at a time when most people are getting up for the day. The glittery fashion designers, actors, models and more models who jam the South Beach district by night are sleeping off their liquor in the pastel-colored hotels that, newly renovated, glisten in the Florida sun.
Wide awake, though, are the ghosts—the crumpled, elderly Jews who, once upon a time, defined the character of Miami Beach. They first come out of their residence hotels, the ones that are still unpainted and unrenovated, at eight or so, when the sun isn’t so hot and Miami Beach still looks a little bit like it did when they first came here, a long time ago, before the beautiful people picked South Beach to be their Soho-south (some are already calling it SoBe), and by doing so, drove the old people out.
Hurricane Andrew, which, to the everlasting relief of the Jaguar-driving set, hit south of here and did only moderate damage to the beach, could not have done a better, more efficient, job than the Jaguar-set did in helping to dismember the remnants of the unique Jewish culture that once was centered here.
Today, the Jewish population of Miami Beach includes roughly 18,000 elderly who live in virtual or actual poverty, constituting possibly the largest single concentration of poor Jews in America. You wouldn’t know they’re here, though, if you didn’t look hard, and early. They live circumscribed lives, in small rooms, with hot-plates, black-and-white TVs and their Social Security checks. Most receive some sort of government assistance; Jewish social service agencies do a Herculean job of keeping these elderly Jews from sinking too far below the poverty line.
Most of their families live far from here, an hour or more up the coast in Fort Lauderdale or West Palm Beach, or way up the coast, in New Jersey and New York. If they’re lucky, they see their grandchildren two or three weeks a year. At their age, and on their income, there’s not much else they can do for fun; many of them say they would like nothing more than to take a late-afternoon walk along Ocean Drive, or on the boardwalk that runs parallel to it.
But Ocean Drive has become too dangerous for them—before the revival, it was the drug dealers and muggers; with the eruption of youth culture along the beach, it’s the roller-blading body-builders and the kamikaze valet-parkers who turn the crowded Ocean Drive sidewalk between Fifth and 15th streets into a nightmare for people with weak hipbones.
For the people getting rich off Ocean Drive, the scene there each night is anything but a nightmare. South Beach has turned into a recession-proof money-machine for those who own the French cafes and the turquoise and pink hotels. For the municipality, the boom has turned their city into Florida’s Riviera, and it is more than happy to take in the tax revenue generated by the hundreds of restaurants, bars, hotels and surf shops that stand where all was quiet just 10 years ago.
One former mayor (who, like many city politicians, is Jewish) unintentionally summed up the attitude of the city fathers when he asked the residence hotels to make their elderly guests sit on the back porches, away from Ocean Drive, because the sight of the old people disturbed the other, prettier, guests.
And they are pretty. Miami Beach, once known for its gefilte fish, has become the world headquarters for model-scoping. The models, and their hangers-on, come here to hibernate in the winter and to use the beach and the Art Deco buildings as backdrops during their fashion shoots. There is more tanned flesh in a typical South Beach cafe today than there is in a leather factory.
It’s quite a carnival up and down the neon-lit Ocean Drive—not unlike Netanya in some ways, though there are fewer roller-blading German muscle-boys in Netanya than there are on Ocean Drive. If you’re young, it’s a fun and vibrant place—the food’s great and the cool breeze off the Atlantic feels good after a day on the beach.
It is also a shallow place, where status is gauged by the car you drive and the plastic surgeon who sculpts your face. South Beach has become emblematic of the American obsession with skin-deep youth culture. The smooth, tanned and rich who flock here encounter the old, wrinkled and poor when they arrive; their reaction typifies what happens when young people think their elders are in the way.
“They’re just waiting for the old people to die off,” says Yvonne Lee, director of a Jewish-run senior citizens’ center that serves the South Beach elderly. “The cultural displacement has been huge, but some of them seem to be getting used to it.”
Miami Beach was once the home to an extraordinary, bubbling mass of Bundists, Zionists, Yiddishists, Socialists, Communists and maybe even a Republican or two, who fled their tenements and rowhouses in Brooklyn, the Bronx and Newark each winter for a place where they could exercise their lungs and swim in warm water. It wasn’t luxurious, not since the Great Depression, when the Wasps who founded the area unloaded their property cheap to the working-class Jews they had previously shut out.
But when the Jews reached retirement age, many decided that Miami Beach was a friendlier place than the cold north, so they stayed, paying modest rents at the hundreds of residence hotels that were scattered around the island city.
Miami Beach didn’t turn out to be friendlier, though. As the Caribbean and Europe pulled more and more vacationing Jews away from Miami Beach, and as condominium culture took root in the communities north of Miami, South Beach fell on hard times. While the Fountainbleau and the Eden Roc, the monstrous, faux-opulent hotels to the north of South Beach, continued to pull in the customers, the smaller hotels, many of them priceless relics of Art Deco architecture, suffered.
Only the discards of newly affluent Jewish society—the European refugees, the oversized Orthodox families and the elderly poor—continued to come to South Beach in the 1970s. They were attracted to the area by cheap rents, which at the time were the only way to bring people here, since crime and decay threatened to submerge the district for good.
But then some very shrewd members of New York’s arty set noticed that, if you got rid of the peeling paint, the old people and the drug dealers, you could recreate the Riviera less than three hours flight-time from New York. And so they did it, snapping up property dirt-cheap, convincing the police to clear out the drug dealers, and raising the monthly rents to the point where the elderly had to move out—an aspect of Miami Beach’s revitalization that not many people want to talk about.
Julius Nadler is a senior citizen who had to find new accommodation when the hotel where he lived went upscale. A retired hat-blocker from New York, Nadler is in his mid-80s and not in the best of health. “I’m on a fixed income,” he says. “I had to go look for a new place to live. It’s not so easy to do at my age. But that’s what’s happening around here.”
The lucky ones, the elderly who live in government-built housing, have their own complaints, about the noise, the prices, and the alien culture that has descended upon them.
“This is not my element,” says Edith Jaffe, a retired bookkeeper from New Jersey. “I like to see progress, of course, but I haven’t walked down the street since the changes started. It’s very crowded there, bumper-to-bumper. I know how young people feel towards the elderly. They see us as surplus.”
Then, of course, there’s the food. “There’s no regular food for people to eat any more,” says Frieda Dampf, who worked in a thermometer factory in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn before moving to Florida 15 years ago. She is walking, very slowly, down Ocean Drive, squinting to read the menus posted along the sidewalk. “Arugula? What’s arugula?” Dampf asks. (Lettuce, by any other name. )
Over the past 10 years, the kosher restaurants that used to dot the southside of Miami Beach have moved north, to serve the growing young Orthodox community, or have shut down completely. Now, if people like Dampf want to eat out without taking a taxi away from their neighborhood, it’s $10 plates of grilled eggplant with buffalo mozzarella and $20 vodka-soaked penne garnished with arugula.
“I don’t want arugula for 20 bucks,” she huffs. Dampf lives on $450 a month, and she says she’s perfectly content to boil a can of soup for dinner. She continues to hobble down the street, past the the leather-boys sitting on their Harleys, past the six-foot-tall blondes in bikinis, past all that Miami Beach has become.
“The old people are living longer than everyone expected them to,” says Yvonne Lee, director of the senior citizens’ center. “In many ways, what’s happening here is vicious.”(B
(Box) A GLIMPSE OF MIAMI
The vivid contrasts of Miami Beach are portrayed in a photography exhibition, “In the Land of Miami,” currently on display until October 30 at the American Cultural Center in Jerusalem.
The photographs, taken by graphic designer Bez Ocko, include everything from grand hotel lobbies to rundown retirement hotels. “There are pockets of historic architecture set in a paradise of palm trees,” notes Ocko, a native of Syracuse, New York who now lives in Tel Aviv. She documented the area while she resided in Miami from 1990-91.
The exhibition can be viewed Sunday through Thursday from 10 to 4; Friday from 9 to noon.