Bipedal Stories

I exited the Lord Balfour Hotel on Ocean Drive. I walked north. To my right, the blue-green Atlantic sparkled in the 10 a.m. sun.

To my left, cleaning crews scrubbed the previous night’s revels from sidewalk cafes outside Ocean Drive’s Art Deco hotels.

At 12th street, I entered the lobby of the Tides Hotel. I was looking for a Wall Street Journal. A deck of The New York Times fanned across the reception desk. The concierge, a pretty woman with dark hair in a blue suit, smiled at me. I nodded. No Journal.

The lobby was mostly empty, three Swedes on a sofa, sipping mimosas. The wallpaper was copper and gold, luminescent in the subtropical light. The wainscotting was polished coral.

In the early 20th century, Carl Fisher, an Indiana entrepreneur, developed South Beach as a winter retreat for the beautiful people. By the 1980s, it had gone to seed, a scruffy backdrop for the fluorescently attired Crockett and Tubbs on Miami Vice. Today, the glam is back, exemplified most famously by the Versace Mansion.

Medium-sized Art Deco hotels change hands at $90 million. The sidewalks are a bouillibasse of Latins and Anglos, Europeans and Chinese. We’re here for the sun, a drink, a few days’ respite from the brutal winter at home.

I walked north to 17th Street, an outdoor mall/plaza/shopping mecca. Young hostesses called to me from the doorways of their cafes, their English inflected with Scandanavian affricates. “Breakfast?” “Bottomless margarita.”

At a sporting goods store, I bought a swimsuit. I ate a nondescript salad at an overpriced coffee house. I returned to the hotel, suited up, and crossed Ocean Drive to the beach. The mid-March subtropical sun burned the northeastern gloom from my brain.

I awoke the next morning to a warm rain, a strong wind blowing in off the Atlantic. After coffee, a morning with the Journal, and a 3 mile stroll through the pavered path that winds along the Atlantic, I drove to Miami to wander around Coral Gables. Not much there. That evening, I repaired to Puerto Sagua, a down-at-the-heels Cuban diner on South Beach’s Collins Avenue, for my last meal in the subtropics.

I met a group of runners from Brooklyn, in town for the Miami Marathon. We traded stories about the Apple. I checked my watch, headed back to the hotel. Time to pack and catch my flight back to the cold.