You Can't (Shouldn't) Go Home Again!

2 Thoughts for the day: 1) "If there is one basic element in our Constitution, it is civilized control of the military"--Harry Truman
2) Another president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, warned against the rise of 'the military industry complex'.

I got up at the ungodly hour of 8:30 AM to take Allen to the Miami airport--it so discombobulated me that 11 hours later I drank a glass of white vinegar thinking it was a glass of water!

In any case, after dropping him off, I decided to go across the Bay to Miami Beach (for those who don't know, Miami Beach & Miami are two different cities!)--I had spent some of my misspent (and best) younger years in Miami Beach in the late 50s and off and on again in the 60s.
The Beach was absolutely wild in those days--people saved up 50 weeks a year to come on a 2 week vacation and do things they wouldn't do at home--a resident could have 26--2 weeks affairs a year! Everything was out in the open: gambling, sex, nudity, wild bars and clubs, etc.--they think 'South Beach' is something today but it is tame compared to 40 years ago. I had not been there since the 80s.

I thought I would drive around and seek out some of my old haunts--the places I played and/or lived---A MISTAKE!!!!

Piccolo's, the restaurant where I learned to be a waiter, is no more--now a condo--the hotel where I lived in 1956 and paid $25 a week has been refurbished and now probably charges $25 a bottle of water--5th street was widened so the apartment building that my aunt managed and where she got me an apartment had been demolished--in fact the 4 corners of 5th and Washington are completely unrecognizable not to mention the 6th street beach--Ocean Drive (where middle income families use to stay) and hotels that catered to gay clientele before it was fashionable is now lined with ultra expensive (mostly empty) restaurants and though many of the hotels have the same names they have been 'art-deccoed' to a point that they never looked this way.

21st and Collins Avenue where the gay crowd hung out on the right side of the beach (and anchored by the Sea Gull Hotel--now an Days Inn) and families on the left side has been all torn up--the Martha Raye 5 O'clock Club and the X-rated theatre where PeeWee Herman was arrested are gone.

The most disappointing thing though was the missing mural painted on the side of the Fountain Bleu hotel just before you turned left onto 41st Street (also know as Arther Godfrey Road) that was so realistic you could feel as if you could drive through it--I know I have a picture somewhere of it--but it was one of the landmarks that are gone and missed--Wolfie's, Pumpernik's, Rascals, Chandler's Steak House, The Pixie Bar (one of 3 bars in a row--the Pixie being a gay men's bar--the Nite Owl a lesbian bar and the 3rd bar, a straight bar, boasted about their 100 record jukebox played only Sinatra) is now a condo--the first hotel I had a job in, The Saxony, is still there and looks the same but the other hotel I worked at the Caribbean was just torn down to be made into another condo!

And the people walking around didn't like HOT!

The feel, the smell, the look of Miami Beach, at least up to 72nd street, is different--it all smells new--it doesn't have that comfortable, laid back feeling that was such a part of it--or is it memories playing tricks on me??

Allen took this picture before we left for the airport today--at least my eyes are open--I was driving!--not bad for getting up in the middle of the night.