South Beach: Life imitates art, quite vicely

updated 1:44 p.m. ET July 25, 2006

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. - South Beach was once a place where crime kept residents indoors at night and retirees lined porches. Forlorn hotels stood mostly vacant, and a popular outdoor mall was reduced to a desolate strip where bums slept.

Those were the days before "Miami Vice." The TV show's popularity from 1984 through 1989 coincided with the early days of the rebirth of Miami Beach's southern end, and helped it along. Today, South Beach is known for trendy restaurants and nightclubs, brightly painted hotels packed with tourists, upscale fashion and expensive restaurants.

The new "Miami Vice" movie, which opens July 28, is set in the present, not the past. But the film is bound to remind some viewers that South Beach was a very different place when the original "Miami Vice" was on the air.

Back then, as detectives Crockett and Tubbs zipped their Ferrari along Ocean Drive or drove speedboats in Biscayne Bay, the restoration of the local Art Deco district had barely begun. Designers were just discovering the area as a backdrop for high fashion, and a party scene was emerging as club impresarios and restaurateurs relocated from the Northeast.

"It felt like pioneer country," said Mark Soyka, who opened News Cafe on Ocean Drive in 1988. "We used to be proud to say we live in Casablanca -- people think it's dangerous but we're OK because we know the way around."

A few decades earlier, in the 1940s and '50s, Miami Beach was a popular, even high-end, resort. Then, in the 1960s, it began attracting more retirees from the Northeast. The most prominent eateries were delicatessens, and evening entertainment consisted of hotel cabaret shows.

AP Don Johnson ("Sonny" Crocket), right, and Philip Michael Thomas ("Ricardo Tubbs") appear in a scene from the 1980s television police drama "Miami Vice."

"It was just a nice, pleasant, middle-class kind of neighborhood," said M. Barron Stofik, a former Miami Beach resident and author of "Saving South Beach."

But by the late 1970s, things deteriorated. Tourist attractions elsewhere, like Disney World, sapped Miami Beach's momentum, wealthy residents moved to condominiums farther north, and South Beach began to founder.

"Compared to today, it was like a ghost town," said Dennis Wilhelm, who works for an architectural firm and is a member of the Miami Design Preservation League.

Crime exploded in the Miami area in the early 1980s. Cocaine cowboys held shootouts in the streets, and a crack epidemic fueled muggings and purse-snatchings.

Parking was easy because so few cars came through the area, and the few nice restaurants catered mainly to older residents. Lincoln Road Mall was mostly deserted save for a busy Woolworth's and some artists' workshops.

Soyka, who moved here from New York in 1985, said the area looked "like the end of the world, with crack addicts hiding and sleeping in the abandoned buildings. Business owners lived with that for so long they didn't realize the potential of these little buildings sitting right there."

Those "little buildings" comprised the world's largest collection of Art Deco architecture, and in 1979, the area was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The recognition ensured that the buildings -- with their curved edges and corners, porthole windows, and stepped walls and roof lines -- would not be demolished, no matter how rundown the area became. Preservationists rejoiced, and keen-eyed entrepreneurs began buying them up with an eye toward restoration.

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