When South Beach Wasn’t Glam
The film “The Last Resort” is more than a love letter to a bygone era.
By Janet O’Grady
When a traveler thinks South Beach (SoBe), they think mojitos; luxury shopping; celebrity chef restaurants; 24/7 nightlife; Art Basel; and sunny beaches with perfectly tanned perfect young bodies.
Hard to imagine that these trendy streets were once filled with “old people.” That from the 1940s until the early 1980s the area was almost like a Las Vegas East for Jewish retirees. That Yiddish was heard more often than Spanish.
The film The Last Resort is a love letter to this now gone Jewish retirement oasis. But more than nostalgia, it celebrates the power of the camera to capture a moment in time through the work of two Miami born photographers. After graduate school at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Andy Sweet and Gary Monroe returned home in 1977 to a rapidly changing city. They committed to the “Miami Beach Photographic Project,” and also obsessively documented South Beach’s older Jewish residents. Monroe shot black-and-white in a formal style, which was more usual in those days, while Sweet boldly used color. His images were more instinctive, ranging from everyday street scenes to more off beat portraits reminiscent of Diane Arbus.
The genuine connection of these two young men with their elders — not something we see often these days—is moving. Sweet’s sister Ellen says that at the time she just couldn’t understand how her 20-something handsome brother would rather spend his Saturday nights taking photos of retirees, when he could be partying with or dating people his own age. “I thought it was weird.”
“I’m very drawn to stories about specific subcultures,” says filmmaker Dennis Scholl. A lawyer, prominent art collector, and CEO of the Art Center/South Florida, Scholl produced the film with fellow Miami native Karreem Tabsch.
Vintage photos and film clips provide an fascination overview the development of Miami around 1910 from farmland to tourist destination. Miami, we also learn, was rife with anti-semiticism. Some hotels restricted guests to Gentiles Only. “Always a view, never a Jew,” read one ad.
Adjacent South Beach was a more modest enclave than Miami. After WWII its affordable beachfront hotels and small apartments attracted a new community — immigrants who’d escaped the shtetls of eastern Europe, the Czarist pogroms, the Nazi Holocaust. Others were former garment workers and civil servants from NYC with modest pensions — snowbirds from wicked winters. Nicknamed “Little Jerusalem,” sunny SoBe became a Jewish Paradise on Earth, with abundant synagogues and kosher butchers.
Locals dubbed the residents “porch sitters in God’s Waiting Room.” But life wasn’t all sedentary. Photos show suntanned bubbes in pastel print dresses and cat eye sunglasses preening poolside. A man poses almost campy in his cabana by the beach. All dressed up for New Year’s eve, these seniors dance and party.
“The ocean was therapeutic,” Monroe told the The New York Jewish Week years later. “The streets were lively with activity. Everything was in walking distance. Social agency and neighbors met their needs. For Shabbat, card rooms were converted to shuls.”
“This is a story of a moment in time when a community grew and became densely populated,” says Scholl. “They ruled the city. Many had union backgrounds so they understood the power of voting in a block. Politicians had to deal with them.”
In the years to follow, poignant changes swept through SoBe, starting in 1980 with the Mariel boatlift and its 125,000 refugees. While the vast majority of immigrants were good people, the film explains how Castro also took advantage and sent criminals and the mentally ill. During the Miami drug wars, cocaine and drug-related crime became rampant. So did fear. By 1981 Miami was called the “murder capital of America.” The seniors of SoBe became afraid to do their evening swims and walks. Life became lonely.
The 1980s brought another cultural game changer with Miami Vice. The city captured a global imagination, as it morphed into the slick glamourous image of Miami depicted on the show.
Gentrification followed in SoBe. “My wife Debra and I bought and renovated properties, so we were in the thick of it,” recalls Scholl. With its run down Art Deco buildings restored and designated a Historic District, SoBe’s real estate prices skyrocketed.
By then many of the retirees of SoBe had died. By the 1990s, the age of South Beach’s population had dropped about 40 years.
In 1982 photographer Sweet was murdered at age 28. His negatives heartbreakingly lost, his devastated family felt unable to deal with his legacy. But one day, years later, the partner of Sweet’s sister surprisingly discovered a stash of the photographer’s faded test prints. With photoshop, he restored colors to the prints, and they were exhibited. The legendary photographer Mary Ellen Mark wrote of Sweet that had he lived, “He definitely would have gone on to make many more wonderful images and to become a real photographic force.”
After seeing The Last Resort, I will experience trendy South Beach with new eyes on my next visit. The moment in time that these photographers captured reminds me of a quote from the great Diane Arbus on photos being “the proof that something was there and no longer is. Like a stain. And the stillness of them is boggling. You can turn away but when you come back they’ll still be there looking at you.”
The Last Resort opens in NYC December 21 at Quad Cinema and Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, and in select theatres around the country.
