Best Hotel 2005 | Harbor Beach Marriott Resort & Spa | Besttropical | South Florida
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Best Hotel

Harbor Beach Marriott Resort & Spa

There are 637 guest rooms at this beachfront hotel, but you probably won't spend much time in yours. No, you'll be hanging out at 3030, its swank bar, or eating freshly cooked chocolate waffles at Riva, the award-winning restaurant. The massive $18 brunch is just enough fuel for your tour along A1A on a rented Segway. Oh, you'd prefer to rent a metal detector and fish for buried treasure in the sand? No problem; that's just $20 an hour. Or you can take surfing, scuba, or sailing lessons. Or rent a poolside cabana, complete with television. Other activities include fingerpainting, ceramics, water aerobics, and "bowling in paradise." Your room, should you choose to hang out in it, is PlayStation-equipped, offers "adult movies" on pay-per-view, and comes with a fully stocked mini bar. Eat, sleep, drink, shit, piss, screw -- anything you want, you can do at the Harbor Beach Marriott.

Best Local Girl Gone Bad

Elizabeth Fago

Not long after Palm Beach County landed the honor of becoming the new home of the Scripps Research Institute, Jeb Bush supporter Elizabeth Fago became chairwoman of the board that would oversee state funding to the project. Fago even gave a million bucks to Scripps as a show of support. But soon, Fago's two decades of problems were revealed; there was $100,000 owed to the IRS and a failed marriage to a major drug dealer. Turns out two states were also investigating her business, Home Quality Management, a chain of nursing homes headquartered in Palm Beach Gardens, for improprieties. Her company was even charged in 2004 with abuse, neglect, and Medicaid fraud by New Mexico's attorney general. The negative news forced Fago to make a hasty exit from the Scripps board's audit committee, which she chaired. But Fago, who has given more than $120,000 to Republican causes, was apparently not so embarrassed that she needed to walk away altogether. Still the top dog, the woman who has faced more than 35 lawsuits for unpaid bills in recent years helps oversee the expenditure of $310 million in state money.

Best Charity

Chief Sitting Bull Organic Garden

Nobody's sure why, but Lake Worth has become the Haight-Ashbury of South Florida. It's a place where free-thinkers and hippie types have settled, run for office, and staged regular public protests. The center of this alternative universe in consumer-driven SoFla is Chief Sitting Bull Organic Garden. Taking up three lots behind a convenience store, the garden is run by a dozen regulars who have plotted out a spot for themselves and grow everything from bananas to radishes. This year's crop will be the best yet, says regular gardener and former Lake Worth mayoral candidate Panagioti Tsolkas. (The bumper crop comes thanks in part to a donation of horse manure that got things going, so to speak.) Aside from the veggies, the garden has served as the location for free movie showings and the occasional piñata contest for neighborhood kids. Without gates or get-out signs, the place works on the honor system. So far, it has survived five years with no greater losses than a few gardening tools and an occasional watermelon. Regular volunteers get their own corner of the garden, but lest you think otherwise, be warned: Plants of the five-bladed-leaf variety are prohibited.

Best Sign

Harry's Open Door

The sign outside this dive bar is often a source of entertainment on that boring ride along Dixie Highway from West Palm Beach to Lake Worth. Its finest bit of humor came last year:

"Celebrating 30 years without some stupid slogan."

Best Bumper Sticker

There's not a helluva lot to smile about when you're sitting in Fort Lauderdale's molasses-slow traffic during winter. The tourists and snowbirds swarm the city the way cattle egrets fill a barnyard at feeding time. Simple errands become lost days. So double-thanks to the gray-haired fellow recently driving his bright-yellow Land Rover through downtown with these two messages plastered on his back bumper: All of us are not here on vacation. If it's the season, can we shoot them?

Best New Building in Broward

Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport's new parking garage

Hands down, the most common directions requested on the street in east-central Broward County have been, "Do you know how to get to [random rental car return address]?" Truly it was a logistical nightmare, asking out-of-towners late for flights to Easter-egg-hunt for their rental agencies. And there were tons of out-of-towners. In 2004, Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport moved almost 21 million passengers, double the total of a decade ago. According to basic arithmetic, that shakes out to roughly 10.5 million spare lunatics speeding around unfamiliar streets in unfamiliar cars. With the January opening of that sparkling blue-and-silver, nine-story monolith near Terminal 1, shuttle rides to rental lots are almost forgotten. Ten car rental agencies are a three wood from the curb, and 5,500 extra parking spots await your (nonrental) vehicle in the cast-in-place concrete hive, which was designed by Miami architectural firm Spillis Candela DMJM. Goes to show, $247 million still buys a lot of garage.

Best New Building in Palm Beach

The 1916 Courthouse

The best new building in Palm Beach is 89 years old. And it's been on life support for 13 years. That's how long local preservationists have been struggling to save the 1916 County Courthouse on the corner of Banyan Boulevard and Dixie Highway. The neoclassical building was practically buried in 1972, when it disappeared inside an ugly "New Brutalist" wraparound expansion; Corinthian columns and gewgaws were chipped away, carted off, and in some cases scattered to the four winds (West Palm Judge Marvin Mounts scored the courthouse steps, which he kept in his garden). Still, the original building remained mostly intact beneath it all -- you could spot the old roof if you happened to be an airborne seagull. Last year, the Palm Beach Historical Society and the Palm Beach County Commission -- which kicked in $18.5 million for the project -- finally went ahead with plans for the great striptease: That nasty concrete shell has now been stripped away. The courthouse will be restored, columns, pediments, and all, to house county offices and an 8,000-square-foot History Museum. Stop by and see what the lady looks like in her skivvies. For an old broad, she ain't bad.

Best Architectural Eyesore

The Waverly at Las Olas Condominiums

Picture this: You're driving north on U.S. 1 just south of the Henry E. Kinney Tunnel. Along with the little buzz you get from knowing that you're about to drive under a river, you have a pretty respectable view of the ever-changing downtown Fort Lauderdale skyline. Then you emerge from the tunnel, and there it is, a sight only slightly less sinister than Godzilla: the Waverly at Las Olas Condominiums. Even the website makes it sound like the monstrosity that it is: "From the pulsating downtown boulevards emerges a new landmark..." For those of us who have watched in horror as this architectural abomination has taken shape, it really is as if the streets have regurgitated something unsightly onto the northeast corner of Broward Boulevard and Federal Highway. Promotional materials for the complex of pricey units, which started out as rental apartments but quickly went condo, declare that it has a "Post Modern architectural theme with Victorian elements." That's just a fancy way of saying it's a little bit of this, a little bit of that, and ultimately not much of anything but a big ol' mess. Where to begin? From the needlessly busy color scheme to the hodgepodge of architectural elements (which the builders keep piling on), the Waverly is pretentious urban ugliness at its worst. And get this: It's not even at Las Olas but a full two blocks away from the trendy boulevard whose name it has desperately borrowed.

Best Place to See an Alligator

Miccosukee Service Plaza

Relatives from Albany or Indianapolis or Pennsyltucky are visiting, and they ain't never seen an alligator, 'cept on TV. So you load 'em up in the car and drive all the way to Shark Valley and pay your $10 and start walking down that road where it's hot as hell and the bugs are out for blood. And you don't see any alligators, not a single one. The lady in the hat and the beige shirt with the nametag says it's the dry season, or some such nonsense, and that wildlife viewing is better at other times of the year. Blah blah blah. Dejected, you drive away, wondering where in this godforsaken swamp is a guaranteed real live alligator to show off to some out-of-towners. We advise a trip to the only gas station on 76-mile-long Alligator Alley, the Miccosukee Service Plaza, located at the I-75 turnoff to Government Road, exit 49. There, just south of the parking lot in a chainlink-enclosed pond, dwells Wally, who is about as regular as Old Faithful. Unfortunately, folks have probably been feeding ol' Wally, which is a bad idea. You won't be that dumb, will you?

Best Candidate for Urban Renewal

Downtown Dania Beach

The two-mile drive west from A1A along Dania Beach Boulevard -- mostly between two towering rows of unbroken treeline, with nary a strip mall in sight -- is one of the more relaxing in Broward County. Then, just past the jai-alai fronton, you encounter Federal Highway, Dania's boon and bane. By far the most visible strip in the town, the stretch of Federal between the town's northern border and Sterling Road is regularly plugged with traffic. Why? Well, there's the nearby airport, Interstate 595, a dead end on A1A, and a lack of roadways connecting Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale. It's a glut of humans and cars -- yet storefronts up and down the strip are shuttered or in mild disrepair. Why? For starters, the buildings are pressed this close to the highway, and a great many of the businesses are dives, antiques shops, and the like. The city has offered money for business improvement loans in the downtown corridor, and the expected windfall of slot machines at Dania Jai-Alai will no doubt alter the landscape. But some new pink paint and gambling traffic aren't going to fix the infrastructure problems of Broward's oldest, funkiest town. Money must be invested, buildings redesigned to accommodate pedestrian traffic, and other things as fun as Jaxson's Ice Cream Parlor and Restaurant opened. Otherwise, Dania Beach will remain an eyesore suffering in what ought to be a providential location.

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