The Sun-Sentinel's new entry into the glossy-magazine market, City & Shore, has arrived, and it reads suspiciously like Sunshine,the daily newspaper's defunct Sunday magazine. In February about 35,000 copies of the 140-page, bimonthly publication showed up on newsstands and in mailboxes, says editor Mark Gauert(formerly of Sunshine). The mag features colorful pics and fluffy copy, including a fashion piece, a gossip column, and other semivacuous fare. Its staff includes two full-timers, a passel of part-timers, and a few freelancers. Sun-Sentinel muckamucks believe City & Shore can fill the same niche in Broward as Ocean Drive does in Miami-Dade and Boca Raton in Palm Beach; each has made a bundle. For a thumbnail review, Undercurrents turned to Jerry Powers, publisher of Ocean Drive. He was... less than charitable: "I think this is a piece of shit typical of the Sun-Sentinel," Powers comments. "This has no potential. It looks like people with nine jobs put the thing together. There's no high-end advertising; I've seen better high-school newspapers. It doesn't reflect South Florida."
Responds Gauert: "The remarks from Ocean Driveare the first discouraging words, but then again they are competitors."
Wanna buy a piece of hash house history? If you have a million bucks laying around, you can pick up Jack's Hollywood Diner, perhaps Broward County's only vintage stainless steel eatery. (It's the only one we know of, anyway.) Québecois owner Denis Grenier, who bought the 100-seat masterpiece on Federal Highway in Hollywood six years ago for a cool $900,000, says the place was manufactured in 1953 by Mountain View Diners, a New Jersey company that is one of the four bigtime diner producers. The purchase will include not only the diner and its name but a 2200-square-foot building next door. The buyer will be free to change the menu, which now includes both liver and meat loaf meals for $5.25 each, says Grenier. Also included in the purchase: a Stakhanovite 73-year-old chef named Louie. Grenier, a relatively young 63-year-old who says he wants to slow down, says, "Louie's a tough old tiger. He only takes off one day a year."
Get angry about Hugh Rodham. Spew bile over the pardon of Marc Rich. But what really gets our current moving is President Clinton's last-minute pardon of Bill Borders, who was convicted back in the early 1980s of conspiring with then¯ federal judge and now¯U.S. representative from South Florida Alcee Hastingsto solicit a $150,000 bribe. Although both men were indicted, only Borders was convicted. Borders, who is now gravely ill, helped Hastings avoid jail time by refusing to testify at his buddy's trial; Hastings went on to win a seat in Congress, where he has remained for more than eight years. (Congress removed him from his judgeship.) Like everybody else involved with the final Clinton morass, by the way, Hastings says he had nothing to do with the pardon.
