Art Deco Rivival : Miami Beach Comes Back Into Vogue

Go figure it, Harry says. After all these years--after the streets went mean and business got lousy and even the best of his girls wore down like lipstick--Miami Beach is making a comeback.

Too late for him, of course. Harry is 79, and last year he sold The Place Pigalle. He is done with it, done with all the boozy faces and smoky air and ladies peeling down to their God-givens.

Oh, was this a Place Pigalle! It was what Harry Ridge liked to call a cabaret and the vice squad liked to call a strip-and-clip joint. It was big when the Beach was big, when this was America’s feistiest sun deck and even the squarest tourists wanted a naughty night out and a bottle of bubbly.

‘Mean, Nasty Birds’

They’d come to gawk at the likes of Siska. She had two tropical birds that flew across the club and pecked off her clothes. “Mean, nasty birds,” Harry remembers. “They’d peck right into her sometimes.”

And there was the one who called herself Lady Godiva, who trotted in from the alley on a horse: “She’d ride around the stage and talk, you know, that Lady Godiva stuff about England.”

But that was all 15, 20, 30 years ago, before the good days became the good, old days--as old as a city with a median age of 66. Would new blood ever pump through here again, Harry wondered. And what would be the elixir?

Go figure, now that the cure has finally come it isn’t what the city big shots prescribed at all--casino gambling and more luxury high rises. Instead young people have fallen in love with leftovers from the 1930s--the Art Deco buildings that once had the wrecking ball hanging over them like a noose on a gallows.

Harry himself always thought they were nothing but stucco fleabags with weird curlicue designs: Deco, schmeco. “Who knew from art deco?” he says.

But tacky one day, trendy the next. In just the last two years, investors have poured more than $150 million into fixing things up in the few miles of the island known as South Beach.

Zig Zag Moderne

There are nearly 800 of the old buildings still there, some Mediterranean in design, some Streamline, some Zig Zag Moderne, some a mix--all dubbed with the shorthand label Art Deco.

They are carefree-looking places with colors like wedding cakes and curved decks like ocean liners. There are portholes in the walls and eyebrows over the windows. A few wear a crown of spires like a Buck Rogers spaceship.

The Place Pigalle, just a sniff of salt air from the ocean, is no Deco gem, but it is in South Beach. This could be Monopoly, the way entire streets are changing hands. Harry was happy to turn over the key.

Change is all over. Retirement hotels are becoming apartments for yuppies. Abandoned shells of kosher restaurants have reopened for pasta primavera. It is easier to get a good Brie amandine here now than a bottle of seltzer!

“In a year and a half, this will be the hottest place in the United States to bar hop,” says Gerry Sanchez, a New York developer who has a dozen projects going.

Tony Goldman, another big player from New York, says, “I see an international vibe here, chic, unpretentious and relaxed.”

Already, some of the places that used to collect $300 a month for a room and a hot plate are getting $75 a night for a room freshly painted in pastels sweet enough for ice cream.

Fashion Slaves

These days, the renters are fashion slaves in designer denim instead of Phillip Lamhut in plaid shorts and stevedore cap. “I lived 10 years too long is my problem,” says Lamhut, 91. “I didn’t die soon enough to make space.”

Half a century ago, these buildings went up with the Phillip Lamhuts of the world in mind--a world mostly Jewish and New York. Not many resorts were open to Jews then. Even here, they were restricted to the city’s southern end.

The places people stayed in had small, simple rooms, affordable to the working class. It was only the outside walls that fought off the Great Depression blues. Mermaids swam in the etched glass and sun goddesses smiled in the bas-relief.

Twenty years later, the buildings already seemed like crazy old geezers. Developers hiked north up the beach, and new hotels climbed up huge and showy with names to match, like the Fontainebleau and Sans Souci and Marco Polo.

It was 1956 when Harry Ridge, retired from the grocery business in Long Island, bought The Place Pigalle. Inside and out, it was class. Murals covered the walls. “They were French scenes, you know, like over in France,” says Sheri Champagne, who took off her clothes there for 20 years.

Painted Madames Peeked

So good it was, that Harry--a friendly ball of a man--never did much to change things. Even the bathrooms had murals. Painted madames peeked at you while you did your business.

For entertainment, Harry gave his customers more than strippers. There were dogs that jumped rope and acrobats who did flips on roller skates. Lee Sohn, the Korean singer, crooned “Tiny Bubbles” just like Don Ho, then melted your heart with “The Impossible Dream.”

Comedy, there was Pearl Williams, the sauciest old broad in town, who called her jokes venereal material. There was calypso, too. With bongos thumping, Princess Kitty and Sweet Richard did the limbo under a reed pole. He breathed fire and played with a knife. “A wild man,” Harry says. “You’d watch him eat, he’d eat with his hands.”

Every night, there were 14 to 20 acts. Customers wanted a variety show. After all, The Place was a place for couples. The condos sent people over in buses. People dressed up.

“On New Year’s Eve, we’d have a million balloons up on the ceiling,” Harry says. “Well, I’m saying a million. Maybe it was less. I guarantee there were 2,000 balloons on the ceiling.”

Underneath Was Lace

Roses were delivered to the girls on opening nights. Sheri Champagne wore headpieces and gowns and boas. Rhinestones sparkled against the black stretch satin. Underneath was lace.

Some dancers had choreographers, and none undressed to the nude. Always, the G-string stayed on, that and the pasties. If any half-drunk Romeos groped, they were out the door.

The likes of Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason and Louie Prima sometimes dropped in after their own shows. Walter Winchell sat at the bar. The Beach was hopping back then. Oh, was this a Beach!

Still, to tell the truth, there was sometimes trouble. B-girls flirted with sad sacks at the bar, who were happy to spring for a bottle, then not so happy when the tab came to $100 and change.

But it was trouble of a different kind that eventually killed The Place. Time blew the glitter off the whole city.

Hovered by Mailboxes

The Miami Beach tourists of the ‘60s became the Miami Beach retirees of the ‘70s, many of them hovering by their mailboxes for a Social Security check. Pretty soon, the city had a reputation as “God’s Waiting Room.”

Men like Harry figured that the bad days couldn’t last. The land is too valuable, they said: Maybe the meek shall inherit the Earth, but not beachfront Earth!

But bad did become worse. The old got older still, and so did that Art Deco plaster. Developers wanted to tear down the buildings and put up new, but they couldn’t get the banks to help out. The neighborhood was too far gone.

Then, in 1980, when thousands of Cuban exiles arrived in a giant boatlift, many of them moved to South Beach, where the rents were cheapest. Some were thugs, and the crime was terrible.

Harry’s customers were afraid to walk up Collins Avenue. Those who did come, it was a different bunch. They wanted another type show. “We had to take the G-strings off,” Harry says, cringing.

Something Hopeful

Something else was going on, too, something hopeful, though few of the businessmen noticed. A few people were getting worked up about the charm and beauty of the ‘30s buildings.

“This could be an attraction like Williamsburg,” predicted Barbara Baer Capitman, a pioneer of the local preservationists.

Save the buildings, the activists argued: Nowhere else is there this great a concentration of Art Deco architecture. They lobbied to get the neighborhood placed on the National Register of Historic Places--and the lobbying worked.

The new federal status did not protect every building from the bulldozers, but it did give tax incentives for restoration projects.

Finally, two years ago, outsiders like Sanchez and Goldman started buying property. That perked up the local money men. Each white elephant might be turned into a golden goose, they realized. Now, one in eight of the buildings has had a touch up.

French Cafe

“The old saying says it: We couldn’t see the forest for the trees,” says David Pearlson, president of the hotel association. He is turning the lobby of one of his retirement hotels into a French cafe.

Of course, not everything is as rosy as the new stripes of detail on the facades. There are, as City Manager Rob Parkins says, the “social-conscience issues.” What of those too poor to stay put in the spruced-up buildings?

“They don’t want old people,” says Harry Haber, a retired house painter from the Bronx. He is losing the room he likes, a room with a Frigidaire and a stove. “They’re changing all the rooms.”

And some of the preservationists are unhappy with the preserving itself. A few of the restored buildings have a lot of ‘70s glitz and ‘80s chic to go with the ‘30s Deco.

“The meaning of the district is being twisted away from a neighborhood into a strip for hotels and nightclubs,” Capitman complains.

Building to Sell

But for a guy like Harry Ridge, ready to retire, the change is all to the good. He had a building to sell in a hot neighborhood.

These days, The Place Pigalle is called Million Dollar Baby, and the new owners are going after a younger crowd. The murals are gone. Mirrors cover the walls, even in the bathrooms. “You watch yourself,” Harry says.

Such is life. Live long enough, and the years are like confetti, the memories piling at your feet instead of paper. Then time makes a cartoon of everything.

Go figure it--Sweet Richard, that wild man, he choked on a piece of meat and dropped dead in the street. Lee Sohn, the Korean singer, he went into the roofing business.

Sheri Champagne has rental properties upstate. Pearl Williams is 73. She watches TV late into the night and gripes about all the filth they put on.

Harry’s in the Pink

And Harry himself? Harry’s in the pink with a condo on the ocean. He may beef sometimes that he’s over the hill on a one-way street, but the truth is he’s glad to be around.

Around long enough, it turns out, to see Miami Beach come back. Just the other day he was talking. This Art Deco has really caught on. “They’re doing a big job with this thing,” Harry says. “A big job.”