by Amy Chillag

On a recent Sunday afternoon on Hollywood beach’s Broadwalk, tattooed, weathered-skin biker couples walk by a family of Nordic-Germanic blondes. Kids weave in and out of everyone in those low-grounded tricycle rentals. All are passing in front of the T-shirt shops, the low-rise motels, the storefront restaurants — Greek, Polish, pizza — and practically everyone has a soft-serve ice cream cone in their hands.

It’s a typically great day on Hollywood beach.

Strolling down the side streets, one spies motel/apartment buildings with water-themed names like The Silver Spray, Anchors Aweigh, Ocean Mist, Waveland Motel and The Dolphin. The more than 60 of them remain much as they were 50 years ago. There’s a certain charm in that, one could argue, especially in the age of new is better.

But it’s the future of Hollywood beach that is less certain. Talk of and debates over redevelopment have occupied the area’s residents, business owners, beachgoers and politicians for years. Unlike Fort Lauderdale beach to the north, which openly has sought to dip into the deep pockets of moneyed foreign tourists, condominium developers and upscale business owners since disavowing its spring break image many years ago, Hollywood has yet to abandon its reputation for being decidedly south of posh.

And it’s that reputation that chagrins the city’s leaders to no end.

“I’m tired of The Miami Herald and others writing it down as honky-tonk — a place to go to guzzle cheap beer,” says Hollywood Mayor Mara Guilianti. “The guidebooks don’t even mention Hollywood. Now, I can’t imagine that any average resident of the city wants their beach to be a place that is printed and acknowledged as being a place to go and guzzle cheap beer. I would like to bring back the charm that I believe [city founder] Joe Young intended.”

Guilianti hopes to achieve that makeover, in part, with the aid of the city’s first-ever master plan, which was made public earlier this month and the approval of which will be voted on in July by the mayor and city commissioners.

The city hired Keith and Schnars, a Fort Lauderdale-based planning, engineering and surveying firm, to lead the process of information-gathering and eventually writing of this master plan along with the architectural and planning firm Bermello-Ajamil. For the past year and a half, the consulting teams, along with city staff, have met with city residents to solicit their ideas of what they would like to see happen in their neighborhoods. The plan addresses capital improvements such as lighting and street work, zoning code issues, economic growth goals and overall planning issues and provides a list of policies and recommendations.

“This is the first city in South Florida to do it,” Guilianti says. “We were given a grant by the state. We’re sort of a guinea pig.”

Among Keith and Schnars’ past and current clients are Florida’s Department of Transportation, the South Florida Water Management District and the city of Fort Lauderdale.

Whether you agree with the mayor or not that the beach has lost its charm, there are several problems most beach businesses and residents agree isn’t charming: overflowing dumpsters; restaurant workers who pour grease onto Surf Road; motels with deteriorating facades; and the type of tenants many casually refer to as “riffraff,” which some of the cheaper motels draw.

“Look at some of the people we get [in central beach]. They’re hard-living, hard-drinking, drug-tough people — rough around the edges,” says Steve Welsch, a resident of Hollywood’s North Beach.

“In the summertime, we have drug addicts, prostitutes, crack addicts, hobo types, transients and we have a lot of trouble,” adds Eileen Miller, who appears visibly exhausted with her unsuccessful business. For 20 years, Miller and her husband, Robert, have owned The Mermaid, a circa-1950 motel/apartment building on Pierce Street, and The Swan one block north. “The police come down on me for renting to these types of people,” she says.

“Whatever other hotels are doing around us, it’s really bad. In the past two years, it’s been really bad with prostitutes, drugs and everything,” says Pauline Carola, owner of the Stardust Motel for the past 25 years. “In the middle of the night, everything happens here on the beach.”

Hollywood police assigned to the beach say the area isn’t as crime-ridden as these business owners claim. Last year, police say, overall crime was down some 15 to 20 percent. They say they’ve received only one prostitution complaint so far this year but have made no prostitution arrests and only a single drug arrest. “They arrested a guy for having a joint,” says Hollywood police Lt. Ken Haberland.

“You may or may not have problems with street-level stuff, but I just don’t see it happening,” Haberland says.

Relinquishing riffraff

Even so, Eileen Miller is taking some of the blame for the beach’s “rough around the edges” image. She says she can’t turn away this “riffraff” element because she needs the money. She partially blames her tough times, and an income level she describes as “rotten” for many years, on a shrinking tourist base that began when the Canadian dollar started to lose strength, making the exchange rate unfavorable.

According to beach travel agent Jackie Lessard of Voyage Galaxy, which primarily caters to a French-Canadian clientele, Canadians who came here last winter only got 43 cents for their Canadian dollar — one of the worst exchange rates ever. “They have to bring at least $10,000 [Canadian] with them when they come for six months, but they receive only $6,400,” Lessard says. “They have $3,600 they throw away in the garbage.”

Lessard says older Canadians with health problems, however small, haven’t been able to come down because they would lose their insurance coverage. She says they have to wait six months after having a minor heart attack or after being diagnosed with diabetes, for example, before they are able to travel without losing their insurance.

Those who do come, however, arrive prepared to haggle. “We only get Canadian tourists in the winter who tell you what they’re going to pay,” Miller says.

But Miller appears to be in the minority. According to local realtors, Hollywood beach motels are getting bought up and renovated at an unprecedented rate.

One example is The Riptide, a cute, bungalow-type motel on the Broadwalk that recently erected a tiki hut in its front courtyard. It’s just one of the dozens of improvements the two brothers who co-own The Riptide have made to the property in the two years since they bought it.

“This was probably one of the worst ones in the area,” says George Quintana, who says he bought the motel as an investment. “This place did need cleaning up. They had bad people living in here.”

Quintana is a handsome thirtysomething who speaks animatedly about the work he’s doing at The Riptide. He lives in Miami Lakes but commutes to Hollywood every day to manage his motel, which was built about 1948. He used to own an automotive center in Hialeah but says he prefers the work he’s in now. “I wanted to get away from the stress of 11 employees. There’s less stress [with this],” he says.

Quintana says he understands the pressures of wanting to lower rates during the off-season, but says he’d rather keep the rates high and fill just a few rooms than rent to the type of clientele that patronizes establishments like The Mermaid. In fact, his rates are quite high — $99 a night during the season, at which time he says he’s at a “98.5 percent occupancy rate.”

Admittedly, The Riptide’s rooms offer a terrific view of blue ocean and sand, but Quintana invested his money upfront. “We gutted it, painted it, cleaned it, gave it new furniture. Other than that, it’s the same property,” he says. “I have people who want to rent $200 a week. I can’t do that. I’m trying to keep the riffraff out.”

He’s not alone. Alon Eshet, also in his 30s, is an interior construction designer who’s created a tropical paradise atmosphere out of what he says used to be “a dump.” Eshet owns By the Sea, what is now a colorful, eccentric one-story motel just off A1A on Arizona Street near the Hollywood Boulevard bridge. He’s painted a mural in blue tones along the building’s long facade. He’s also built and marketed a spa complete with waterfalls and bamboo window coverings. Eshet claims an occupancy rate of 100 percent throughout the season.

He, too, speaks excitedly about Hollywood beach’s future. But as Miller herself admits, these guys have gone to the expense of renovating their motels, something she hasn’t done.

“It’s difficult for people to improve because they don’t make money. It’s a Catch-22,” Eshet says. “In my case, I’m adding extra liabilities and hoping it will pay off in the end.”

Beach refurbishing

The city hopes the master plan will offer some solutions to help upgrade these old motels and increase the tourist base at the same time. Along with a stronger code enforcement system and capital improvements such as new lighting, tree planting and cleaning up the streets, the plan’s authors suggest building a couple of “increased” scale hotels and retail shops on city-owned and private property that now stands vacant.

Renovations are moving ahead on the former Howard Johnson hotel between Carolina and Taft streets.  Courtyard by Marriott will take over and the Outback Steakhouse is planned for the spot where the Howard Johnson’s Restaurant currently is. Rosita Rad with the Hollywood Chamber’s Tourism office says both are expected to open before next winter.

Meanwhile, renovations started some time ago on the old Hollywood Beach Hotel, which is currently the Ramada Inn Hollywood Beach Resort. The resort hoisted the Ramada flag several months ago and, according to Rad, is booking rooms to international clients. The hotel’s bottom floors occupy the site of the failed Oceanwalk shops, which went on the market 12 years ago, after only a year in operation. At the time, the city had hoped the mall would lift the beach’s sagging economy.

Lou Manesiotis, a 35-year realtor with Hollywood Beach Realty, recalls the mall’s demise. “The retail opened up with only mom and pops. Opened with Just Socks and Giggles. They weren’t really tourist draws,” he says.

Now, the plan’s authors and the city are using terms like “economic engine” to suggest the development of an anchor hotel/retail shops project at the city-owned Johnson Street property across from the Hollywood Bandshell. They envision a hotel with enough density to flow tourists into the beach’s retail district.

The Johnson Street property, according to city historian Pat Smith, was first used in 1924, when city founder Joseph Young had a municipal pool built there along with a U-shaped building containing dressing rooms and, later, cabanas. An adjacent building contained a few small shops, Smith recalls. “Originally, they had many competitions, swim meets, canoes in the middle of the pool. There were all kinds of activities,” Smith says.

The site was known as the Casino, not because there was ever an actual casino, but because that was the term people used for this kind of public facility. In the 1950s, the Casino building was replaced with shops facing the Broadwalk. That building existed on the site until two years ago, when it was demolished after it had been deemed unsafe.

“Right now, the reason there are so many T-shirt shops and fast-food restaurants, and so many people feeling they have to put their stuff out on racks, is people tell me they just don’t get anyone who can spend any money there,” Mayor Guilianti says.

“The reason I’ve supported the Casino [property] being able to be a high-rise hotel is we need middle-class vacationers in large enough number on that beach to make the restaurants survive and to assist with the upgrading with some of those shops,” she says.

Diamond in the rough

But it could be awhile before any kind of project breaks ground at Johnson Street.

Plans for the land have stopped completely following the city’s revoking of a lease agreement with Gus Boulis, the SunCruz casino and Miami Subs founder who was murdered in a mob-style hit earlier this year in Fort Lauderdale. Boulis originally got the contract to build an upscale, 17-story, 312-room Hilton hotel known as The Diamond on the Beach. Commissioners killed the project after Boulis repeatedly asked for an extension in the deadline to secure financing. He was having difficulty getting the money at the time because of legal problems related to SunCruz. Boulis finally managed to get financing, commissioners say, at the 11th hour but the lease was canceled anyway. Boulis’ estate is suing the city for canceling the contract.

“We are on a trial docket for October. Diamond is going to amend their complaint so that it’s clear they are seeking both money and the right to build the motel,” says city attorney Dan Abbott, “although the judge has ruled they are not entitled to that.”

Bottom line, according to another informed source, “this could last a long time absent a settlement.” As well, the city can’t issue a new Request for Proposals for a project on the site until this lawsuit is settled. The city could end up paying Boulis’ estate $1 million, which is the cap on damages if the judge decides the city indeed is at fault for canceling the lease — something opponents of a big hotel are quick to point out.

Hotel supporters say the bigger the project, the more property tax dollars will end up in the city’s coffers. Those dollars, they say, will pay for improvements for the rest of the beach — improvements that wouldn’t otherwise be realized if the Johnson Street property is used for something smaller.

“Anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000 is expected to be brought into the tax increment financing fund. Based on the type of property they’re going to build there, they calculate the size of the hotel, the value of the development on the site and give that a price,” says Richard Sala, director of the Hollywood Beach Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA). Sala says those figures are based on a 300-room, 17-story hotel from a high-end chain such as Hilton or Windham.

The CRA was formed back in 1997 for the express purpose of cleaning up “blight” on the beach and encouraging redevelopment through a special tax-financing district. The taxes paid on the increase in assessed value on any property in the district get reinvested only in the beach district, not citywide. It’s this money Sala hopes will get budgeted for capital improvements and to help renovate these old motels.

One of the city’s biggest supporters of a large anchor hotel plan is Audrey Joynt, president of the Hollywood Beach Business Organization, a paid-membership group that represents more than a dozen beach businesses, including Angelo’s, Ocean Alley, Martha’s and Sugar Reef.

Speaking from her cedar-wood home on Carolina Street across from the Howard Johnson motel, Joynt and her husband, Joe, are unwavering in their vision. “We want to make Hollywood’s central beach a resort,” she says. “We don’t want it to be a cheap place to stay for the summer. We want a place where people come to vacation.

“We want to see the Johnson Street property with an anchor hotel, not a five-story hotel. We want a first-class anchor hotel, and nothing less than that will really make Hollywood Beach what it needs to be.”

Although businesses on the beach did well by most accounts this past winter, Joynt says it was an anomaly. It’s a point she makes without any statistics — no one has kept any record charting beach business’ profits through the years, including the Chamber of Commerce, which only recently began focusing on the beach’s marketing needs. According to Rosita Rad, hired only a year ago, “the tourism office has evolved into being an official tourism office in the last couple of years. It hasn’t been as directed in terms of its marketing plan. There’s really been no tracking [of business profits].”

“We have businesses that are really straining to hold on, I mean by a shoestring just waiting for something to happen here because of the lack of people,” Joynt says.

Joynt says unmanaged dumpsters, the trash on Surf Road and code enforcement violations are some of the beach’s most serious concerns. She says these problems have been brought to the city in the past several months through, in part, her association’s meetings with the code enforcement department.

Hollywood Code Enforcement director Harry Diehl says inspectors make two or three daily visits to the beach. The most common code violations they find are overflowing dumpsters and the improper disposal of dumpster fluids into the drainage system.

“A lot of things people complain about aren’t code violations. They’ll call us because something just doesn’t look nice and I have to explain it’s not in the code. What may be pleasing to someone is not pleasing to another,” Diehl says.

“If paint is peeling and deteriorating — if the building is mildewed or dirty — there are provisions in the code that we could require they be pressure-cleaned or painted, but just faded paint is not a code violation.”

Keeping it on the down low

While many on the beach see code violations as easily rectifiable, the issue of building a large-scale hotel on the Johnson Street property continues to keep residents at odds.

DeSoto Ocean View Inn motel manager and beach resident Steve Welsch says that as much as a large hotel might help pay for capital improvements, it also could have a detrimental effect.

“It doesn’t have to be large — large doesn’t mean more money or better. You want to maximize the site with the very best use. Look at the deal cut with Gus Boulis — it was a crappy deal. They could cut as good a deal with someone else on a smaller project,” Welsch says.

Welsch has become a neighborhood activist who’s fought many battles trying to keep out the high-rises and protect beach’s low-rise, seaside quality. He spent a year fighting to keep SunCruz’s multi-level boat from docking in the Intracoastal down the street from his motel. As the president of the Beach Defense Fund, he also sued the city and developer Gordon Deckelbaum over the Renaissance, a high-rise condominium that far exceeds the one-story motels like the one Welsch has managed for nine years in the North Beach neighborhood. Deckelbaum settled with the Beach Defense Fund for $280,000.

 “The city looks at the larger developments as the quick fix,” Welsch says. “Maybe that’s not how we should be looking at it. Maybe we should be looking at more incremental development on a more human scale, as opposed to one project that encroaches on everything else.”

Opponents to a large-scale hotel say it would ruin the Broadwalk’s villagelike appeal and would generate too much traffic.

“What’s the difference between a 20-story hotel and a 12-story? Seventy-five rooms? Is 75 rooms going to make that big of a difference for central beach?” asks Emilio Benitez, owner of the Ocean Inn Motel on New Mexico Street and A1A.

Benitez has lived in a two-story condominium on Hollywood Beach for 17 years, and not long ago purchased the Ocean Inn, which he says was fully booked throughout the winter. Now, in the off-season, he’s running at about 80 percent.

Benitez, Welsch and other proponents of a smaller hotel on Johnson Street hired two planners to come up with alternatives to the large-hotel concept.

One plan developed by Bill Christopher of the California-based Urban Concepts calls for a public plaza with a city pool and fountains surrounded by retail shops and restaurants. It also suggests a large video screen that could be used for advertising. The plan didn’t generate much interest among city leaders.

The other plan was developed by the University of Miami’s Maria Fleitas. “It looked kind of like a Mizner Park, but it wasn’t that ritzy, it was more Old Florida in theme,” Welsch says. “It had the tin roofs, the urban landscape — like three stories with apartments, offices and retail and a hotel. So, it really had a nice mix.”

In Welsch’s opinion, the height of any hotel on the Johnson Street property at most should be five or six stories.

The other argument for a large hotel as set forth by some city leaders and supporters is the issue of a trickle-down effect — that an increase in tourists would help everybody from the hotdog vendors to the mom and pop motels.

“When the Diplomat opens, they’re going to do a lot of convention business, but not everyone wants to stay in a $300-a-night hotel room,” says Donna Boucher, owner of the MantaRay Inn on South Ocean Drive since 1992. After passing its opening date by two years with cost overruns in the millions, the 1,000-room Diplomat Hotel on A1A, just north of Hallandale Beach Boulevard in Hollywood, is now planning to open in January 2002.

But Miller, who owns The Mermaid, doesn’t buy the trickle-down argument. She says after 22 years of paying hotel/resort property taxes, she deserves more than trickle-down. In fact, she doesn’t see any way out of her economic doldrums but selling her property to the highest bidder. “All these little properties, that’s their hope. I’ve been approached by people who want to steal the place at a low price,” Miller says.

Setting aside the arguments surrounding the Johnson Street property, the plan calls for redevelopment of the “infill” areas — all the side streets north and south of Johnson in the central beach district, the commercialized zone between Tyler and Sherman streets north of Hollywood Boulevard that is home to the majority of the beach motels. And it’s in this area that there is mostly agreement on keeping the area low-rise.

Still, the fear exists for some living on the beach as to whether developers will grab hold of these properties, knock them down and put up high-rises or developments they feel will ruin the character of the beach. As it stands now, overbuilding in these areas seems unlikely. First, it doesn’t seem to be on the mayor’s agenda.

“I think it’s very important the smaller properties survive,” Guilianti says. “That’s characterized central beach, the whole setup of central beach, which people refer to as villagelike. I like that atmosphere.”

Also, current zoning code doesn’t allow for buildings higher than five stories in the central beach area. Facing the Broadwalk, the restrictions are tighter at four stories.

But there are exceptions, and those exceptions worry folks like Welsch. Any developer that decides to purchase an old motel and tear it down could ask for additional height and get it. “You’re going to see in several places where you’ll have additional height allowances in certain conditions,” says Sala, of the CRA. “People can always go for a variance. Like the Johnson Street property. They petitioned to have a 17-story building there. That’s in the same area restricted to 50 feet.”

But Sala adds, “There are going to be products in the area that are ridiculous and shouldn’t be that high. I think we should stick to the 50-foot, two-story/three-story type village atmosphere community. Pedestrian-oriented — maybe retail on the bottom levels.”

Also, just as the Diplomat hotel did, if the developer managed to buy several adjacent properties in a process called “assembling,” the zoning could be recategorized under what’s called a “planned development” if the developer’s plan is OK’d by the city.

In such a case, according to Hollywood city planner Hank Graham, the developer also could get additional height variances and ask for less setbacks from the road. “It does provide a lot of additional flexibility to the landowner or developer. They do get some alleviation of some of the regulations and zoning district rules from height, density and things of that nature,” Graham says.

But Manesiotis, of Hollywood Beach Realty, says that’s unlikely to happen. “There aren’t any number of parcels to buy, assemble and take down for redevelopment. The prices the sellers want for these motels to tear them down makes it prohibitive. There’s always somebody holding out for too much money,” he says.

“Say there’s a property worth $500,000 and they found out somebody’s looking to assemble a block. Someone wants $1 million or $1.2 million for that property. That’s a very realistic example.”

Manesiotis says it’s not worth it for a new developer to come into these parts just to build small. “Five stories is totally prohibitive. You won’t see any redevelopment with that. If you want to build 200 rooms, if your site is so small at one and a half acres, you’ll use up the first three floors for parking alone. By the time you build the hotel, you can’t build enough rooms.”

The spirit of the Diamond project lives on in the master plan, which calls for a “hotel/commercial project that will have critical mass to generate substantial impact.” Manesiotis says he bid on that project at the same time Boulis did, but hasn’t said whether he’ll have at it again if and when the city puts out another Request for Proposals. “We need a better tourist base, greater cash flow into the restaurants and businesses, and we’re not getting it from the tourist base now. The hotels are going to be the draw,” Manesiotis says.

But there’s something else in the mix that could preserve some of the low-rise character of central beach — historic designations.

There are dozens of motels on the beach that have been identified as being 50 years or older, but so far, only two or three have been designated historic sites, according to Hollywood principal planner Jenny Tang. Of the rest of the buildings, Tang says, “We haven’t studied which ones will be designated and which ones will not be designated.”

Tang says once a site has been designated historic, it becomes more difficult to demolish it. “To be simple, once it’s been designated, demolition needs to go through a public hearing process. First, it goes through the Hollywood Historic Preservation Board, then it will have to be approved by the City Commission,” Tang says.

“I feel only a handful of the 90 are really going to materialize into something architecturally significant. The main one is the Hollywood Beach Hotel. That’s where I see they should be focusing their energies,” Sala says.

As good as historic preservation might sound to some, it infuriates Eileen Miller. She’s afraid if her properties are labeled historic, she won’t be able to sell her perpetually unprofitable business.

“After you do preserve it, what’s it going to be — a freak show for the people on Johnson Street of postwar architecture? I don’t think so. You can say some of these properties are art deco-ish but they are not significant pieces of property that need to be preserved.

“You can still have a village environment with brand-new buildings. You don’t have to present the junk. You’re presenting places where drug addicts can get cheap rent. They love it here.”