Sunscreen? Check.
Sexy bikini? Check.
Plenty of Mom and Dad's money?
Better double-check.
As Spring Break begins this week, the list of cheap beach landmarks that once defined Fort Lauderdale as Party U.S.A. has dwindled to an all-time low as the area embraces a new era of high-end hotel and condo construction.
Yellow caution tape encircles the drained pool at the former Howard Johnson hotel, so forget piling 16 of your closest friends into a room there. It's now emptier than a keg at 3 a.m., closed while the property owners propose building a huge new resort in its place.
Don't bother heading for Happy Hour drinks at Beach Bums either. It sits boarded up, just north of Las Olas Boulevard, awaiting development.
Snazzier neighbors have moved in all around. Staying at The Atlantic will set you back $740 a night for a deluxe ocean view room, according to online travel sites. The price jumps to $1,120 if you want the "King Tut" package, which includes a welcome cocktail and mummy wrap -- a one-hour exfoliation, lotion and towel wrap treatment -- at the spa. The St. Regis Resort, an undulating white behemoth of a five-star hotel, is near completion on the old site of the Candy Store, once famous for its wet T-shirt contests.
"Everything is too expensive," grumbled Jason Miller, 22, a recent graduate of Adrian College in Michigan, who said Spring Break has been so unexpectedly pricey this year, he has limited himself to one meal per day (plus alcohol, of course) to offset the cost of his $170-a-night hotel, a "dump" that was the cheapest he could find near the beach.
It's all according to plan, according to Nicki Grossman, president of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau, who expects the number of Spring Breakers to fall to about 10,000 this year, from 15,000 last year and the historic high of about 350,000.
She said the city has been trying to attract a higher-level clientele for more than a decade, after Spring Break turned into a drunken, often-dangerous party in the 1980s, resulting not only in fights and arrests, but injuries and deaths.
"No one thought we were going to be opening three five-star hotels here," she said with pride in her voice. "The beach was the home of MTV, home of the largest blow-up Budweiser beer can in the world, where they sold beer to kids. There was no place that they didn't leave beer bottles. No place they didn't urinate."
And now?
"There is no welcome place for college Spring Break," Grossman declared.
The symbols of Spring Break past have been disappearing for years. The Candy Store and the Button are long gone. Only a partial shell of the historic Lauderdale Beach Hotel remains, replaced by the Las Olas Beach Club still under construction. As for several other aging 1950s hotels -- the Gold Coast, Merrimac, Bahama, Southern Shores and Days Inn Oceanside -- they're demolished. Soon to be in their place: the W Hotel, due to be completed in early 2008, and Trump International Hotel & Tower, scheduled to be finished late next year.
Signs for the Trump high-rise feature rich-looking models, wearing oversized sunglasses, dashing from their private jets. Pamphlets for the Hilton Fort Lauderdale Beach Resort promise to bring "the Spirit of Elegance ... personalized."
The Howard Johnson still stands, but was bought in August for $20.6 million by Transacta Prive Developers who, records show, want to replace it with a 294-room hotel dubbed the Orion Resort, with a restaurant and retail and office space.
The Elbo Room, at the corner of A1A and Las Olas Boulevard, is one of the few memorable bar survivors. But the general manager, Elyse Penrod, said the crowd is older and more affluent now -- and will only get more so. Property records show El-Ad Florida Beach, associated with the same Israeli company that bought and converted the Plaza Hotel building in New York City, bought several properties around the Elbo Room in October. The land deal totaled more than two acres for a price tag of $56.3 million.
The company could not be reached for comment despite attempts by phone, and city officials said no proposals for the site have been submitted, but Penrod says the company wants to build an upscale, hotel-condo that would certainly dwarf the tiny bar.
"It's going to seem a little weird," Penrod said.
A group from Furman University in South Carolina said they had lived off $2 pizza all week -- even a local Mexican restaurant was too pricey -- and flocked to the few businesses that still openly vie for their business and offer free drinks, like Crazy Louie's, located on top of Beach Place.
Another tactic: Lying to hotel management about the number of people in their $216-a-night hotel rooms at the Sea Club Resort and using the fire escape to go in an out without being seen.
"If all our options are [hotels like] Trump Tower, we won't be able to afford it," shrugged Furman University student Paige Callahan, 19.
The irony, says Paul Flanigan, owner of the casual beach restaurant Quarterdeck, is that despite higher hotel prices and higher ambitions for the area, the beach area doesn't look snazzy yet. With all the steel, dust and piles of demolition detritus, it's like an awkward teenager with braces. The air is filled with the sound of pounding waves -- and jackhammers. Other stores sit empty and scruffy-looking, waiting silently for the wrecking ball.
"The [older] tourists are saying it looks like crap," he said. "You have from the Elbo Room to Spazios, that whole block is basically boarded up -- and that's the heart of the beach! The sense I get from the people is, `What happened?'''
Flanigan isn't too worried, however, saying appearances will have to change soon because of economic forces.
"If the land is worth $3 million, you can't sell $5 hamburgers," he said, seeing the change as a good one. "When you have friends coming into town, you don't take them to the beach, you take them to Las Olas, and it really should be the opposite."
Dean Goodwin, national director of sales for Student Travel Services, a travel company specializing in Spring Break trips, said that if Spring Breakers want to spend a lot of money, they'll bypass Fort Lauderdale for the glamour of South Beach. In most cases, however, he said today's generation of college students prefer places like Cancun or Jamaica, where they can get cheap package deals that include hotel, meals and parties -- and where they don't have to worry about drinking laws.
"Fort Lauderdale," he said, "is where their parents went."