Miami VOGUE : No more vice. instead of Drug dealers, South Beach now lures the hip and the gorgeous to its revitalized Art Deco district.

“South Beach is a human paella,” confides Tara Solomon, edging her black velvet-encased torso close so that she can be heard above the drag queens, models, photographers and terrific blues singer at the jammed “Martini Night” open-to-the-public party she throws every Tuesday in the Park Central Hotel--the same Art Deco hotel where novelist Anne Rice’s Vampire Lestat slept when he wasn’t slinking around sucking blood out of the neighborhood’s old people.

“In South Beach, everybody can coexist. People come here and reinvent themselves,” Tara says, then looks around. “Excuse me. I’ve gotta make the rounds.”

You don’t get dubbed South Beach’s “Queen of the Night” without schmoozing. So entrenched is the 30ish Tara--”Just say I’m 17”--in the scene that the Miami Herald hired her to write a gossip column. And is there stuff to write!

South Beach is only the hottest place in America for those whose immediate purpose in life is to look gorgeous and to skate on their roller-blades, those whose eyeballs would click skyward in disbelief at a question a colleague admitted he wanted to ask when someone gushed that Versace is renovating a Venetian villa on South Beach’s Ocean Drive: “What’s a Versace?” (It’s pronounced Ver-SA-chi.)

Sheesh ! Italy’s Gianni Versace, who makes South Beach’s deco Marlin Hotel his home-away-from-home, is only one of the world’s major fashion designers who frequent the Art Deco district of Miami Beach. His “South Beach Stories” picture book may just depose that other picture book, the sex one by Madonna.

Madonna is another South Beach fan. She was at the same street “tea dance” a friend and I attended on a recent Sunday afternoon. It was a Meals-on-Wheels event to benefit AIDS patients, and it featured drag queens lip-syncing atop a truck and a Mardi Gras-type crowd going crazy and buying drinks from a stand operated by the brand-new Aqua Restaurant. “Fourteen hundred Ocean Drive, serving breakfast lunch and dinner!” shouted the cafe’s co-owner when I said I was taking notes for a story.

“I went out of town for a week and four new clubs opened,” said a South Beach resident. They hate the SoBe nickname brought in by New Yorkers wanting it to be Soho South. Nope. Miami’s South Beach inhabits its own little universe, not unlike L.A’s Venice Beach.

And Tara Solomon knows everybody who counts. Half of them are here tonight. Her tousled dark curls stay mysteriously erect in a mile-high pouf, and her reflective mirror-ball earrings catch the sole pink spotlight in the dark nightclub about the time I notice a double of Jaye Davidson--of “The Crying Game” fame--sharing a table with a youthful Robert Redford look-alike in a three-piece suit. Swigging Evian is a white guy with granny glasses on his yuppie face, which contrasts arrestingly with the tattoos on his biceps and miniature dreadlocks covering his scalp.

Tara jumps up and squeals, “Meow! Meow! Meow!” She hugs a dude in a silver cowboy hat and black-and-white cowhide shirt, whom she introduces as “Kitty Meow.”

“I perform at every club on the beach,” Mr. Meow says. “I do Eartha Kitt in my own little way.” He beams a winsome Ben Vereen smile.

“I don’t quite understand all this,” I confess to Tara.

“I don’t either,” she says. And she laughs with conspiratorial glee.

I feel so boring.

That glorious Sunday afternoon of the “tea dance,” as I dodged scores of sleek skaters along the beach, I instantly knew South Beach and I weren’t an exact match. I don’t know how to roller-blade. I didn’t bring a fuchsia bikini (the thought makes me giggle). Or lime Spandex shorts. Not to mention buns of steel.

But I couldn’t stop smiling. It was all so weird, a kind of upscale--but more attractive--version of L.A.’s Venice Beach. Also watching the ripe young bodies in motion were old men in wheelchairs and women with wrinkled-parchment faces, people who still go to 50-cent Sunday night dances on the beach, who still live in this neighborhood with “Dentures repaired while you wait” signs next to body shops, a neighborhood the elderly crowd shared mainly with drug dealers not so long ago.

These low-rise Art Deco and Moderne buildings were erected mainly in the 1930s and ‘40s--after a hurricane flattened the beach in 1926. America loved the little hotels until World War II. After the war came the 1950s and ‘60s heydays of the massive Fontainebleau, Doral and Eden Roc hotels, which lie 20 or so blocks up the beach on Collins Avenue. South Beach disintegrated.

Then a preservationist named Barbara Capitman drove everybody nuts in the 1970s and early ‘80s, convincing others it was vital to save these 1,000 or so buildings. A German photographer heralded the architecture and Miami light to his colleagues, and superstar fashion photographer Bruce Weber shot a Calvin Klein underwear ad atop the Breakwater Hotel. “Miami Vice” was TV’s pastel hit of the mid-1980s. More photographers and models, as well as European tourists and designers, began to descend in the late 1980s. It was a bargain--if a bit dicey.

The floods of tourism began about four years ago. I was here 2 1/2 years ago, and activity has exploded since then. There are fewer elderly people living in the area. And most buildings are now painted the colors of 1950s automobiles, which are parked permanently outside. Oh, yes, I’d like that lavender Packard, please.

“I think it’s vonderful , it’s beautiful, the young people,” said Anna Citrin, 94, pushing her grocery cart down the street. “They make me feel young, too, when I see them.”

And there’s so much to see--especially during the Sunday afternoon madness. A skinny 70-ish man in a tan polyester suit makes music with an ethnic mixture of hip young guys, everybody laughing and singing and dancing and punching hand-made drums. Please place $1 under the tomato in their straw hat.

In front of a community center nearby, a friend of a Haitian street artist--quite good, really--tries the soft sell for his pal: “No one can pay the price it’s really worth, but by buying a piece of art, you tell the artist you appreciate his worth in this corrupt world . . .”

At the tea dance, a young man shouts, “Fabulous!” No one tells him that the moment’s words are “fierce!”--snap your fingers when you say it--and “smoking.” As in red hot.

Down the beach, dozens of roller-bladers skate in circles to blaring rock music, while a crowd gathers around, pretending not to notice the weekend photographers in their faces. South Beach is photographic candy.

Everybody preens. Posing comes right after roller-blading in priorities. Or maybe it’s after people-watching from Ocean Drive’s shoulder-to shoulder sidewalk cafes, which face 10 blocks of grassy park and rough-sand beach from Fifth to 15th Street (where Ocean Drive disappears and Collins Avenue becomes the beachfront street).

“Sometimes it feels like we’re all living in a Coke commercial. Everyone is so beautiful. It’s surreal,” says Greg Brier, 30, co-owner of the smoking--this week anyway--ReBar bar, and the Beacon Hotel’s American Bistro, which used to be called 720 Ocean Drive before Brier brought in a new chef from New York’s chichi China Grill. A former New York investment banker, Brier is, of course, drop-dead gorgeous: too-blue eyes, dimples, blond hair that he keeps finger-brushing back from his model’s face. He and his wife moved here five years ago “when it literally was crack heaven . . .(now) I see older, more affluent people this year, and more children--not just models.”

And still lots of Europeans. There are so many that tips are added to many restaurant bills. “Europeans don’t tip,” whispered a waiter. (Actually, service charges are automatically included on meal tabs in Europe.)

And now all those celebrities are visiting: John Kennedy Jr. (yes, with actress Daryl Hannah); Robert DeNiro (dating a saleswoman from the Meet Me in Miami shop on Collins Avenue); director Spike Lee; actors Dennis Hopper and Timothy Hutton; singers Prince and Bon Jovi; the unable-to-label Grace Jones and virtually every top designer and model in the world. “Vampire Chronicles” writer Anne Rice and her poet-painter husband, Stan, own a condo in a tall pink building at the beach’s tip. Gloria and Emilio Estafan opened Larios On the Beach Restaurant and bought the Cordoza Hotel. Sean Penn is a partner in a club called Bash.

Hotel and restaurant prices are zipping on up as more trendy hotels open, but waiters are still laid back and almost unfailingly polite. But as in all places trendy, the big question is: When will South Beach peak? Just watch faces of investors twitch and blanch at the question.

“Everybody asks,” said Brier. “But I don’t think (it has yet). Europeans and New Yorkers discovered it first, and now L.A. is coming. When Middle America finds out, people here will make money, but the trendoids may stay away.” Craig Robbins, 29, partner in DACRA Development Corp., which co-owns the super-smoking Marlin, Cavalier and Leslie Hotels with record producer Chris Blackwell’s Island Trading Co., says he thinks the music and fashion industry is too entrenched for the buzz to hiss out. “Wherever you have a critical mass of creative people, it will last. Only a certain type of person comes here. It’s not for the person from Iowa who’s going to the Marriott in Orlando . . . But imagine working in this place. It’s beautiful.”

Tara Solomon isn’t worried a bit. I don’t think we’ll peak for five years,” she says. “Then we’ll go for five years. And by that time, hopefully I’ll be married and living as a countess in a foreign land.”

GUIDEBOOK

All Deco-ed Out on Miami’s South Beach

Getting there: American and United offer daily nonstop service from Los Angeles to Miami. Direct or connecting flights are offered by USAir, Delta, Continental, Northwest and TWA. Lowest round-trip fare, with 14-day advance purchase, is $358 through midweek; after that, cost jumps to $530.

A taxi from the Miami airport to South Beach costs $26-$30; a shuttle costs $10.

Safety: There has been a frenzy of publicity about Miami tourism given that six tourists have been murdered here since December. Most of the trouble has centered around visitors who have been stopped in rental cars at or near the airport. But I felt safe on busy Ocean Drive in South Beach, and walked purposefully late at night on emptier streets a couple of blocks over from the beach, being careful to look around me as I would in any big city at night. No one needs a car in South Beach, but when I rented one from Avis in late April to drive to Key Largo, I noticed that the license plates already had been changed (rentals were previously identified by plates bearing the letters Y or Z) and Avis stickers had been removed from windows. City officials, who are taking additional steps to protect tourists, warn people never to stop if someone bumps a car from behind or waves to signal that something is wrong with your car.

Weather: Summer in Miami, where temperatures are generally in the upper 80s/lower 90s and humidity is high, is considered the off-season. But although Easterners flee to Miami during their dreary Northern winters, Europeans come year-round.

Where to stay:

The Marlin Hotel (1200 Collins Ave., Miami, Fla. 33139; telephone 305-673-8770), a block from the beach, has won accolades for its snappy renovation, 11 funky suites (blue cabinets with fish swimming across them, etc.) and Jamaican restaurant, Shabeen. Among the hotel’s prominent guests: Gianni Versace, Bon Jovi, U2. Rates: $200-$310 (no summer discounts). Owned by the same group are the Cavalier (1320 Ocean Drive), an Art Deco jewel with Jamaican-flavored, gold-and-lavender, sponge-painted walls and batik spreads ($150-$160 summer), and the Leslie (1244 Ocean Drive), white bedrooms with bright accent colors and painted on-the-wall “headboards” ($85-$125). Breakfast included. Through June, the Cavalier and the Leslie are offering a “Deco Deal” package where a fourth night is thrown in free for those booking a three-night stay. For either hotel, call (800) 338-9076.

The Raleigh (1775 Collins Ave., 800-848- 1775 or 305-534-6300) is the newest hit, known for its fanciful pool, a block from the convention center and a few blocks from Ocean Drive. The 115 rooms are minimalist chic--Old Masters prints, terrazzo floors and VCRs and CD players. Guests: Robert DeNiro, model Claudia Schiffer. June-September rates: $119-$319 (May rates, $129-329). The nearby Ritz Plaza (1701 Collins Ave., 800- 522-6400) also is newly refurbished. April-Dec. 15 rates: $85-$325.

Park Central (640 Ocean Drive, 305-538- 1611). I liked my white room (601) with a side view of the ocean, Venetian blinds, photos of 1940s bathing beauties and Seafoam green-tile bathroom. Guest: Vampire Lestat (according to novelist Anne Rice). May-September rates: $60-$125.

Century Hotel (140 Ocean Drive, 305-674- 8855) is ultra-hip and minimalist with art, tile floors and mosquito netting. It’s not beach-front, and is a bit remote from the crowds. Guests: John F. Kennedy Jr., Daryl Hannah, Dennis Hopper, Sean Penn, Johnny Depp. May-October rates: $75-$130.

Miami Beach International Travellers Hostel (236 Ninth St., 305-534-0268), 1 1/2 blocks from the beach, is freshly done. Four-bed dorm rooms cost $12 per person; doubles and singles are $28 (air conditioning runs 9 p.m.-8 a.m. only). Miami Beach’s American Youth Hostel (1438 Washington Ave., 305-534- 2988) has similar rates and is a hive of activity, if a bit removed from the beach.

Note: Add an 11.5% tax to hotel rates.

Clubs: Among currently hot clubs are Cassis, Les Bains, Warsaw and Paragon (the last two are primarily gay clubs).

Tours: An Art Deco District walking tour ($6) leaves Saturdays at 10:30 a.m. from the Leslie Hotel; bike tours, 10:30 a.m. Sundays ($10, bike included). Call (305) 672-2014. Historian Paul George and Friends of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida offer various walking tours. We took his excellent Deco District tour ($125 per group, 2 1/2 hours). Call (305) 375-1625.

For more information: Contact the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, 701 Brickell Ave., Miami, Fla. 33131, (800) 283-2707.