FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA.—Hardly a week goes by that Tim Shiavone doesn't think about the good old days when this coastal city was spring break central and the beach was packed with thousands of college kids partying until all hours.
"People come in here all the time and say, `I met my wife here, I met my husband here, I used to drink seven beers for a dollar here,'" says Shiavone, owner of The Parrot, one of the prime hangouts of the spring break crowd.
"Back then you could put 10 guys in a station wagon and they would all have $10 a piece and stay in Fort Lauderdale for a week.
"For some people, spring break was mayhem. But for me, it was awesome. An ocean of people would come into town for anywhere from six to 10 weeks every year — and every one of them couldn't wait to party."
But all that changed 20 years ago when the then-mayor of Fort Lauderdale went on Good Morning America and said, basically, the fun is done.
"He told kids, `Don't come here. You're simply not wanted in this community — find someplace else,'" says Nicki Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau.
Since then, Fort Lauderdale has undergone a remarkable transformation. Most of the old spring break hangouts — with the exception of the two beach-area landmarks, The Parrot and Elbo Room — are long gone. In their place are springing up more than $1 billion U.S. worth of upscale hotels and resorts, far beyond the wildest dreams of civic officials two decades ago.
Whether shopping or dining along trendy Las Olas Blvd. or in the world's biggest discount mall, Sawgrass Mills, ogling the expensive homes along its picturesque inner coastal waterways, or enjoying a different view of the city from its charming water taxis, visitors to Fort Lauderdale are finding this college town is all grown up now.
"We've done the big makeover. Fort Lauderdale is the Swan City of the United States of America today," concedes Shiavone, acknowledging that the transformation has been painful, and downright deathly, for many former spring-break hotspots.
"We went from a wet T-shirt, drink-till-you-drop mentality to a world-class destination with fine dining and culture and artistic value."
Getting from there to here wasn't easy.
For decades, especially since the 1960s Hollywood hit Where the Boys Are, "the words spring break equalled the words Fort Lauderdale," says Grossman. "George Hamilton and Connie Francis told the whole world where it was.
"Spring break was the easiest money that a hotel could make in the '50s, '60s and '70s because those kids were very non-discriminating. If you didn't have air conditioning, they didn't care because they were using the windows to come in and out of anyway. One person would check into the room and in the morning there were 12 bodies on the floor."
What started out as a few thousands kids parking their cars along the beach-front main drag, the A1A Highway, and partying on a less than two-kilometre strip of sand had grown by the late 1970s to the point where traffic into the city was bumper to bumper for about nine weeks in spring as out-of-state students headed for the waterfront.
Tobacco and beer companies would hand out free samples and there were more open cans of beer on the beach than terry towels.
Then, in the early 1980s, MTV moved in.
"Instead of 200,000 kids having sophomoric fun, it was 380,000 kids having MTV kind of fun and Girls Gone Wild kind of fun," says Grossman. "Hotels were being trashed, front lawns were being used as public toilets.
"There are 23 miles of beach and you were like an outcast if you didn't stay on that one-mile stretch."
Many area businesses, even those that depended on spring break for much of their livelihood, "basically held up a white flag and said, `Make this go away,'" says Grossman.
In 1986, the city refused to issue MTV a permit to operate on the beach and introduced a bylaw banning open beer. Parking was no longer allowed along the A1A and tobacco companies were prohibited from handing out free cigarettes.
It helped immensely that, at the same time, the legal drinking age was boosted from 18 to 21.
"Businesses were folding like crazy back then," says Shiavone, for whom spring break some years accounted for 50 per cent of The Parrot's annual revenues. "The city had a knee-jerk reaction and took an axe and a sledgehammer to spring break. They should have phased it out. It would have been so much easier for this town."
As downtown hotels and bars shut down, the city started looking elsewhere for business and, starting in 1990, built its first convention centre, performing arts centre and museum of art, all in less than a year.
It also added major new shopping centres which weatherproofed a city whose only major attraction up until then had been the beach.
Now, says Grossman, the numbers speak for themselves.
While those 380,000 spring break visitors contributed about $110 million to the local economy in 1985, last year Fort Lauderdale had about 700,000 visitors during the same nine-week period — most of them families, Canadians and European visitors — and they spent $800 million.
"Turning it around was a challenge," says Grossman.
"But it was fun watching places like the Candy Store Lounge — where the wet T-shirt contest was born — being torn down so that the state of Florida's first (luxury) St. Regis Hotel could be built on the very same spot.
"The Candy Store Lounge was the epitome of spring break — bikini contests, wet T-shirt contests, beer binges, you name it."
Some nine new or redeveloped hotels are going up just across from the beach and even landmarks like the Pelican Beach Resort are almost unrecognizable now.
The family-owned business, one of just a handful of hotels right on the beach (development so close to the water is now prohibited by the city) has gone from having 110 rooms in nine buildings — some of them dating back to 1939 — to a new, 180-unit facility. All the beach-front rooms and suites in this charming hotel, which caters mainly to families, have verandas from which you can watch kids playing in the ocean or the hotel's lazy-river pool.
"I've always seen Fort Lauderdale as a very unique place and a great place for families," says Steve Kruse, the owner of Pelican Beach.
"It's a big small town. We have a small town feel. I think now we're keeping the good part of the old and upgrading and making it better."
While it took Shiavone's bar 10 years to recover from the loss of spring break, even he admits the changes have been for the better.
While he now faces much more competition — where there used to be just eight licensed establishments within an eight-kilometre radius of his bar, there are now 100 — The Parrot is now packed with families and higher-income earners who also love to watch the surf from the bar's open windows.
"It's never going to be the same kind of fun again. I was surfing on a wave back then that never hit the beach," says Shiavone, now 54, with a laugh.
"But you've got to know in life that the melody is going to change, the rhythm's going to change. That doesn't mean you have to stop dancing."
For more information on Fort Lauderdale, see http://www.sunny.org or call 1-800-22-SUNNY
For more information on Florida, see visitflorida.com or call 1-888-7FLAUSA
For more information on the Pelican Beach Resort, see pelicanbeach.com or call 1-800-525-OCEAN
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Susan Pigg is Associate Travel Editor.
03/2005
