Early results of last April's census are out, and the news is grim. South Florida's heretofore bullish population growth has slowed and may stop. In a Sun-Sentinel article published yesterday, authoritative-sounding people blamed the economy. A lack of jobs, said the consensus, is repelling prospective Floridians in droves. We might as well believe them, because really: What, besides a lack of money, would keep someone away from this place?
This is the Sunshine State, after all, and nowhere along its 1,300 miles
of coastline or within its 400 towns and cities will one find more
agreeable environs than those of West Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade.
Here, life gets better by the year. I remember what Fort Lauderdale
looked like when I first arrived, 21 years ago. It wasn't pretty. Fort
Lauderdale was jarringly idiosyncratic, full of bohemians, elegant old
ladies, and Catholics with boats. To have a cocktail atop Pier 66 was
the height of sophistication. (You still could have a cocktail up there,
back then; the rotating lounge wasn't closed to the public until the
Hyatt takeover, years later.) Las Olas hadn't yet acquired the
glammed-up strip-mall ambiance that would so endear it to the
aesthetically enlightened members of the creative class, those migrant
souls whose entrepreneurship would keep SoFla's economies afloat through
the most difficult years of the aughts. Some of the menus along Las
Olas were still plotted by chefs and cooks rather than by
restaurateuring investors, which led to all kinds of confusion. What,
praytell, was one to make of a business like the Chemist Shoppe, where
one could fill a prescription, buy one's eyeglasses or a walking stick,
and belly up to the soda counter for a hand-whipped ice cream? The
categorical blurriness was confusing, its charms elusive. Certainly, it
wasn't the kind of thing you could explain to a multinational in search
of a new headquarters.
There were few multinationals on the horizon, then. The city's skyline, modest even now, was downright stubby, dominated by the Sun-Sentinel, which loomed over the city's lesser edifices, egging them on to sprout new floors, new lights, to grow up, to metropolize.
It's
hard to believe it now, but the city managed to get by, for a time,
without Riverfront. Where Riverfront now stands was an empty lot,
bordered by a grocery store called Pantry Pride, a railroad track, a
river, and by SW Second Street, which contained God knows what. (The
Museum of Discovery and Science existed, in embryo, in an old house by
the shore of the New River.) In the weedy tangle that would become
Riverfront stood a single stone doorway, beckoning us from nothing to
nothing, waiting for a reason to exist. (When Riverfront finally
arrived, they couldn't find a use for the door; last time I checked, it
was still there, by the tracks, lonesome as ever.)
Two decades
ago, there weren't so many places to live. Davie was the end of the
world. Where Weston now stands, inviting us down its broad and artfully
planned boulevards, there was the carnivorous chaos of the swamp. Even
east of I-95, there weren't so many homes. Victoria Park, Wilton Manors,
and Sailboat Bend were wasted on space-gobbling old Florida homes made
of heavy stucco, with roofs covered in heavy rust-red tiles. The homes
were antiquated, inefficient. You could tour a dozen of their kitchens
and find not a single stainless-steel appliance.
The bars along
A1A were gritty, full of bands whose memberships were composed of those
dedicated spring-breakers who had come to party in summers past and
forgot to go home. Then as now, the revelers drank more than was
strictly necessary, but then the revelers tended to be a little older, a
little poorer, and committed to their decadence in a way that precluded
the subsequent acquisition of post-grad degrees. They were not, in
other words, the people around whom you wanted your sorority girl to
party.
Florida was a hellhole, is what I am saying. Unformed,
bereft of a unified identity. It's a wonder that such an undeveloped
economy, such a foetal nothingish culture, could have substantiated the
population boom our cities enjoyed for so many happy, busy years. And it
is a cruel irony that now -- just as the place finally reaches some
stage of development that young strivers may appraise and say, yes, now there's a
place with its shit together -- the well has run dry and the migrants
have moved on. The economy must be to blame. Because what could be
better than this?
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