THE ROAD TO NOWHERE?

Miami Herald, The (FL)
April 27, 1986
Author: JOEL ACHENBACH Herald Staff Writer

The only way to find Al Holzman, the new manager of the embryonic Lincoln Road Management Program, is by going into the old Barnett Building and finding the rear elevator, which is through a back exit, across a short alley and beyond a sign reading, T REA ELEV O . Four floors up, behind wooden double doors, is Al Holzman's suite. A phone sits on the carpet. Instead of a secretary there is an answering machine. On the desk is the detritus of a new operation: a Pepsi cup with seven ink pens, a stack of empty drawers, a bottle of Windex. Hugging the wall is a dusty couch, retrieved from a warehouse. The boardroom has a long table, some chairs and, on an easel, a slate, clean.

"I need help here," says the lone figure in the suite, Holzman, an avuncular man with a nervous edge on his Brooklyn accent. His job is simple, and maybe impossible -- to turn around the Lincoln Road Mall. Recapture the past glory. Do something right.

"We got landscaping problems, we got electrical problems, we got parking problems, all kinds of things. There's traffic out there. But they're not buyers. They're not the Aventura shoppers. The elderly. They're very budget-minded. They don't spend much and that's our problem. C'mon, I'll show you."

Holzman goes down to the mall and takes a right, directly into Woolworth's. He walks up behind the lunch counter, 52 red stools facing the sinks and the steam trays and the glass cases of pie.

"Check the ages," Holzman says. "These are light eaters. They don't spend a lot of money. Watch what the people are eating. Just look at the ages we have here!"

A tiny woman with a kind but shrunken face suddenly appears at his elbow.

"Do you work here?" she asks.

"No," he says.

"I need help."

"You're looking for teen-age fashions, ma'am?"

"Yes," she says, not registering the humor. "Hat pins."

"We're doing a little survey here," Holzman tells her. "How old are you?"

"What?"

"How old are you?"

"What?"

"HOW OLD ARE YOU?"

"Oh. Pshhhh. I'm old enough to die. I'm ready."

By day, when the serious selling is done, Lincoln Road looks like the kind of shopping section Hollywood might think up. Down the middle of the wide walks run big plots of grass and a row of palm trees. Rich ladies step sedately out of limousines and sporty ladies hop out of bright roadsters. The clothes worn along the street are carefree and the dogs led along it are often offensively well-bred.

Miami Beach has fallen down sadly in describing Lincoln Road. It calls this expensive street "The Fifth Avenue of the South." This is a lukewarm name for one of the world's great luxury lanes. Here in nine short blocks is an array of elegant shops which, in miniature, combines New York's Fifth Avenue, Chicago's Michigan Boulevard, London's once-blessed Bond Street and Paris' once-precious Rue de la Paix.

That was Life Magazine. Feb. 24, 1941.

Years later, in the February 1954 issue of Esquire, writer Booton Herndon said of Lincoln Road: "Here you will find the loveliest ladies in the world, every single one of them on display and making absolutely no bones about it, either, bless them."

About the same time, columnist Walter Winchell wrote, "It's the street of dreams for the little secretary, the glamorous gal of the chorus and the wealthy matron."

In 1960 the middle eight blocks of Lincoln Road were closed to traffic, creating the first outdoor pedestrian mall in the United States. Morris Lipp, the cigar-chomping city manager of Miami Beach said of the genesis of Lincoln Road Mall: "They did it because they had that certain spirit -- that certain feeling for their city. For what is a city without spirit -- dead.

"That's one thing they'll never say about Miami Beach."

That was 1960.

In the past four or five years, Lincoln Road Mall has become a period piece -- a reenactment of the Great Depression, with some of the original cast, the poorest and feeblest of the elderly, the very oldest of the old. They are stranded by physical and financial immobility. They have watched the wealthier members of their generation flee to the suburbs, and then they watched their favorite stores flee as well. More than a fourth of the shops -- 46 to be exact -- are now vacant, for rent.

"It's no more Lincoln Road. It's Cemetery Road," says Alice Davidson, 83, a Miami Beach native who walks the mall daily when her crooked hip doesn't hurt. "I know when people came here from Palm Beach in their Rolls-Royces," she adds, steadying herself with a hand cart.

"There's nothing here," says Lee Saul, born in the Bronx, retired in Miami Beach. "I have to go up to 163rd Street or Aventura. There's nothing here. Really dead. You won't find one person after 5 o'clock. Nobody's walking around except characters."

A few steps away, Walter Hinkle, 41, of Miami, is in a rage: "Guy down there throwing up. There's all these mental cases walking around. This is the manifestation of Hell as Dante imagined it."

Things don't work right on the mall. The power goes out at the Barnett Bank, darkness at noon, locked-out pensioners pounding on the glass. Seeing-eye doors don't see. Police surveillance cameras, would-be deterrents to crime, tilt in strange directions, some skyward as though looking for incoming rockets. A newspaper box sells The Miami Beach Sun Reporter -- but the edition is three months old, the last yellowed copies of a proud paper that didn't make it. At night, the streetlights sometimes blink dark. At the Lincoln Theatre, maybe a dozen people watch a first-run movie in a room the size of a blimp hangar. No one is at the door or behind the concession stand; in from the street slips a decrepit woman in a heavy coat, seeking refuge.

The best stores left. Saks Fifth Avenue is gone. Bonwit Teller is gone. Adrian Thal Furs is gone. Peck & Peck is gone. Leighton's is gone. Nettleton's is gone. Lane Bryant is gone. Pierre Vacca is gone. Elizabeth Arden is gone. Milgrims is gone. Greenleaf & Crosby is gone. F.A.O. Schwartz is gone. Florsheim's, one of the last "name" stores, is still around, but it will close down when its lease expires in August. The 30s Cafe, a valiant effort at resuscitating the glamour of the mall, is foundering.

Enough of the bad news. There also is the good -- business is better this year than last, according to many shop owners.

More importantly, Lincoln Road Mall is still Lincoln Road Mall -- charming, funky, architecturally unique. It doesn't fit the pattern of a normal mall, it's too weird, an anti-Dadeland.

Here you will find a store called Diamonds and Chicken Soup, a collection of kitschy jewelry and clothing that the owner, Marcy Chariff, describes as a "Jewish American Princess' dream." Here you will find Moseley's, 48 years in one spot, where a tablecloth can run you two grand. Here you will find an occult bookstore that sells boxes of strange roots and herbs, handy for witchcraft. Here you will find, at all hours of the day and night, a collection of artists who have moved into abandoned storefronts and converted them to studios, transforming the western end of the mall into an art district.

One of the leading pastimes here seems to be finding someone on whom to blame the mall's misfortunes. The leading candidates are:

* Greedy and stupid landlords, who rented to rip-off stores during the heyday of the Latin tourist in the late 1970s.

* The dollar, for gaining strength and devaluing foreign currency, chasing away those same Latin tourists by 1982.

* Snooty store owners who abandoned the mall for the suburbs and the Bal Harbour Shops.

* Jimmy Carter, for permitting the immigration of Mariel refugees, thousands of whom crowded into the low-rent housing in South Beach and transformed the neighborhood.

* City politicians, who poured money into the 41st Street shopping area, permitted flea markets and other competing events at the convention center, and put the annual art festival not on the mall but in the middle of Collins Avenue in the condo district.

Saks Fifth Avenue abandoned ship in 1979, despite heavy Latin tourism. The mall launched a "revitalization" campaign as far back as 1974. Before that was the panic that accompanied the opening of Disney World near Orlando. The malling of the road in 1960 was itself a defensive response to the growing popularity of suburban "shopping centers." One could even date the start of the decline at 1947, when Bonwit Teller left.

The least dramatic but probably most accurate explanation for what happened is simply that time marched on. The death of a place is easier to understand, if not easier to take, when there is a catastrophic event, a rain of V2s perhaps, an entire city catching on fire, an earthquake, a famine. People can say, That was before. But it didn't happen that way on the Beach. Time eroded the Road the way a stream eats away at solid rock, too slow for the naked eye, but leaving a gorge nonetheless. One day there were roadsters and limousines and well-heeled ladies, chauffeurs toting ribbon-wrapped packages and tourists shuffling in awe. The next day someone was gone. The next day someone else. Now the great mall is like a sun-baked tombstone for all the missing and the dead. The official cause of death was demographics, killer of so many cities.

In the 40s and 50s Miami Beach was a rich city. By 1970 the average household in the Beach had about as much income as its counterparts in other areas of Dade County. But today the Beach home makes about half as much -- $13,000 compared to the county average of $22,000. The numbers reflect the sad fact that Miami Beach has become a city of the widowed.

City planners point to a study that shows a recent decline in the average age of Beach residents, from 65 to about 54. Some of the age shift is due to the influx of impoverished refugees. But there are also those ubiquitous Y-people. A 1984 report by Public Demographics Inc. broke down the Miami Beach yuppie population into separate sub-categories, with code names like "Young Influentials," "Money and Brains," and "New Homesteaders." There are about 9,000 of them in this city of 98,000 people. Five years ago, city planners estimate, there were less than half that many.

And so Lincoln Road Mall looks to the future, even as the ghosts bear it ceaselessly into the past.

A lot of schemes are floating around.

The city for years has had a notion to cover the eastern half of the mall, from Meridian to Washington avenues, with a rainproof skin. This was done successfully at the 163rd Street Mall. But property owners have always been dubious about the enclosure. "That was stupid. What good is covering it if you don't have people?" says legendary Miami Beach Realtor Edward Osher, 82 and still brokering mall properties.

Two years ago some of the property owners proposed tearing up the mall, and bringing back traffic down Lincoln Road. "I don't like to call it 'tearing up the mall,' I like to call it, 'reintroducing the road,' " says antique store owner Sherna Brody. But in 1984 city voters decided they didn't want any reintroductions, and the idea seems to have faded away. So has any chance of the Metrorail helping out. Early plans showed it lancing across the mall on an elevated track. Just like New York.

The latest inspired idea is to change the name of the mall. It would be called Lincoln Marti Boulevard. This is the brainstorm of a group calling itself Omega World Enterprises, which wants to bring a greater Latin flavor to the mall, similar to Calle Ocho. Stunned, the Lincoln Road Management and Development Advisory Board voted 7 to 1 on April 8 to reject the plan. Maybe next time, the board said.

Al Holzman has stepped into the middle of this muddle. He's supposed to incite harmony among merchants and property owners, oversee cosmetic changes, think up advertising campaigns, and set up a special taxing district on the mall, to fund improvements. The other great hope within City Hall centers around the convention center, which will double in size in the next two years. Maybe a big hotel will decide to build next door. Maybe not.

"Basically, the Road is as dead as a doornail. There's been every vague kind of verbal method to bring back the Road, and nothing has happened," says Harley Willner, head of the Miami Beach Board of Realtors. "We've had many rumors, many conversations, but the question is, who will invest dollars?"

City Manager Rob Parkins complains, "Financial institutions have tended to red-line the Beach as a place that they don't want to invest in."

Miami Beach is one of the few cities in South Florida where property values are going down rather than up. Yet land prices remain too high to attract outside money.

A building in the 900 block of Lincoln Road Mall sold for $409,000 last month. Ten years ago it sold for $310,000. Herald real estate analyst Charles Kimball says, "Anywhere else in Dade County the price would have doubled in that time."

If you ask the store owners and some of the pedestrians on the mall, there may be only one solution to the depression that has settled on the Fifth Avenue of the South: gambling.

The salvational powers of gambling are a matter of guesswork, of course. Obviously, gambling might not pass in November. Even if it did, it might not pass in a subsequent Dade County election. Even then, if it did pass, no one knows whether casino companies would invest in Miami Beach or where the casino hotels would be located. And if casinos do land on the Beach, would money spill over to Lincoln Road Mall? Will tourists grab their winnings and immediately rush out to Woolworth's?

The fact is that the mall's future may be as something other than a "mall," in the classic suburban sense. It is too enchanting a place to stay fallow forever. Most likely the retail stores will continue to become concentrated east of Meridian Avenue, while the western half of the mall will see offices, art studios, clubs, possibly even apartments.

Art collector Mitchell Wolfson Jr. recently bought the architecturally marvelous Sterling Building, and hopes to open stores, offices and a women-only dining club. Another private group of visionaries wants to turn the Lincoln Theatre into a disco similar to New York's Area. The city is diverting significant amounts of federal Community Development Block Grant money to the mall, including $75,000 for Holzman and his program, $121,000 for street improvements, and, most promisingly, $735,000 for the renovation of the Colony Theater, a long-empty vaudeville and movie house on the west tip of the mall. By autumn it will have become a 500-seat performing arts center, designed for community theater, children's shows and an occasional film.

"Lincoln Road has its problems," says Stuart Rogel, the city's Economic Development Director. "People can't make money there. They can't make money because they have no customers. There are no customers because there are no attractions. Now we've started to put the attractions in place."

And then there are the artists.

They hit town about a year ago, as invigorating as a blood transfusion. More than 50 have now moved into empty storefronts. Painters. Photographers. Sculptors. Performance artists. Young people. That's half the ticket these days in Miami Beach: They're not rich but at least they're young. The artists were brought to the mall by the tireless Ellie Schneiderman, an artist herself, and together the group has founded the South Florida Art Center, which is a number of storefronts scattered around the mall and up and down the alleyways, just like the old shoe stores used to be. Miami-Dade Community College has decided to teach art classes in the 1000 block. Federal grant money helps make the rents affordable for the artists.

In February, the City Commission (the same commission that stuck the most recent art festival in the middle of Collins Avenue) designated the western half of the mall as the official Art District of Miami Beach.

Such transformation is known in the real estate language as "Adaptive Reuse."

"Where is it written," asks Al Holzman, "that the future of Lincoln Road must be totally retail?"

The Lincoln Road Art District is not so much about buying art as making it. The artists tend to be kind of scarce, in and out at all hours, mostly out. Realtors are skeptical of the long-term value of the art studios. A real renaissance could come about not because of the art district, but at its expense, forcing up the rents and forcing out the artists just as they were forced out of Coconut Grove.

If not an overwhelming economic windfall for Lincoln Road, the artists are at the very least creating psychological momentum. On March 10, Ellie Schneiderman and the gang managed to do what might have seemed impossible a couple years earlier -- drew more than a 100 people to a black-tie party in the center of the mall. It was under a tent. Sixty-five bucks a plate. A birthday party for the South Florida Art Center. All the local art people were there.

"This place is changing rapidly," photographer Jay Good said as he took pictures at the bash. "A year ago the major tenant on this end of the mall had been For Rent."

A block north of the mall is Hyperspace, a wild yellow-and- red gingerbread-style art gallery tucked into a dismal back alley like a bright hanky on a gray suit. There is a room called The House Party. There is a Leisure Center. And there is the Light Gallery.

Victor Farinas, owner and artist in residence, explained, "We play the Jetsons and Gumby, Beach Party movies. We're having a Godzilla Festival that begins this Friday. We're trying to find ways to create a new experience with the art thing."

Adaptive Reuse, meet the Art Thing.

Gertrude Teich remains in her corset shop after 30 years on the mall. She is vivacious at 75, a flaming redhead with a quick laugh. Girdles and other undergarments don't sell like they used to, but she doesn't mind, she doesn't want to turn in yet.

An old woman comes into the shop and hands Gertrude a raggedy piece of clothing, saying, "Can you do something with this?"

Gertrude looks at the queer garment.

"What is this supposed to be?" Gertrude asks.

"What?"

"What is this supposed to be?"

"A brassiere."

"A brassiere?"

"A brassiere."

"I can't do anything with this."

"No?"

"What country do you come from?"

"Warsaw."

"And this is what they make there?"

"Eh?"

"This is a job for a cop. Do you know what a cop is? An officer of the law. Nothing can be done with this. We in America make bras that fit. This can never be made to fit."

"What should I do with this?"

"Throw it in the garbage."

The old woman seems resigned to this. It turns out her name is Gertrude, too. Gertrude Weisbart. She starts to talk about her husband. Dead, a year ago.

"He was a tailor. He made beautiful things. I'm just sorry he's not living anymore. I had breakfast with him every day, and he was very funny," the second Gertrude says, her crying invisible but not inaudible.

"All good things must come to an end," says the first Gertrude. "You can't live in the past."

Edition: FINAL
Section: TROPIC
Page: 14
Copyright (c) 1986 The Miami Herald