Ebb Tide at Miami Beach

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.

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."