A Place in the Sun

To Miami Beach, Fla. last week came the biggest horde of vacationers ever seen in a winter resort. The influx swamped the railroads; five extra Christmas-vacation trains put on by the Seaboard Air Line Railroad and the Atlantic Coast Line were still not enough, although three extra trains had been ample last year. Eastern Air Lines stepped up flights to 200 daily, with capacity for moving 13,800 sun seekers a day in and out of Miami, estimated an 18% traffic rise over last year.

The descending horde, pointing to a record 1,750,000 visitors v. 1,500,000 last year, soothed the doubt nagging at every Miami Beach hotelkeeper: had the Beach overbuilt? The answer: not yet, despite the $120 million spent on new hotels in the past five years, bringing the total along the seven-mile strip of sandy beach to 380 hotels and more than 30,000 rooms.

The biggest rush, as usual, was to "this year's hotel": the $17 million, 475-room Americana, which opened on Dec. 1. A reservation at the Americana at $68 a day for a Lanai (one bedroom, two baths, a living room, a galley kitchen) or $32 a day (meals extra, of course) for one of the ordinary picture-windowed bedrooms was the Miami Beach equivalent of an invitation to the royal enclosure at Ascot.

Built and operated by the Tisch Hotel chain (the Traymore and Ambassador in Atlantic City, NJ.; the Belmont Plaza in Manhattan), the Americana offers such inducements as a huge, cone-shaped $300,000 terrarium in the center of the lobby (filled with orchids and rare fungi) and four restaurants with the help dressed to fit the decor, e.g., waitresses in Rose Marie operetta costumes for the Dominion of Canada Coffee House, waiters in Argentine cowboy pants for the Gaucho Steak House.

Also Free Wieners. Those who could not get into the Americana (booked solid through January) could try "last year's hotel," the $8,000,000, 350-room Eden Roc, or the $14 million, 565-room Fontainebleau with its $200-a-day suites and two swimming pools which dates all the way back to 1954. Even the "old hotels" like the Casablanca (built in 1951) and the Sherry Frontenac (1948), and even the 30-year-old Roney Plaza of J. Myer Schine,* whose room prices are right up in the top $32-to-$42-a-day bracket, were packing them in.

Many of the age-tarnished hotels were ensuring themselves rush business by switching from the European to the American plan. To sweeten the deal, some even threw in free wiener roasts, sightseeing trips and lessons in dancing the cha cha cha.

Next Year's Hotel. With another better-than-ever season ahead, hotelmen already have a new worry: Where can they get land for more hotels? Hotels now jam every inch of the commercially available beach front; the rest, about one mile of beach front, is zoned for private estates. To build the Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc, waivers had to be secured allowing private-land to be put to commercial use; for its site the Americana had to go six miles north of Lincoln Road--the Beach's main stem--to Bal Harbour, which is, strictly speaking, outside Miami Beach.

Last week the Miami Beach city council was considering a proposal to hold the zoning line, prohibit hotel building north of the Eden Roc. Established hotelkeepers, fearful of competition, argued for the ban; merchants, fearful of atrophy, argued against. As the argument raged, Hotelman Sam Cohen (Casablanca, Sherry Frontenac) announced his own solution: to save time, he was tearing down the old Macfadden-Deauville, put up in 1925 at a cost of $500,000, replacing it with the new Deauville at a cost of $25 million.

* Convicted last week of criminal contempt for violating a 1949 antitrust judgment requiring him to sell 39 of his more than 100 movie houses. A Buffalo District Court ruled that instead of a bona fide sale, Schine Enterprises "sold" the theaters to its affiliated companies.

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