How Now, Pow Wow?

For that one night an idealized version of Ocean Drive was presented for the tourist industry's consumption. It was all Art Deco and good food and hunks and babes, unsullied by surly teenagers or unsophisticated suburbanites. Even some of the volleyball players on the beach were hired muscleboys.

This was South Beach as theme park, SoBe World, sanitized for tourists. And it played very well. It might also have been the last tribute to a South Beach that could soon disappear -- and a foretaste of the future. A short way down the street in South Pointe is the land earmarked for a proposed hotel-casino complex that threatens Ocean Drive's Art Deco charm. The chief organizer of the Monday party, hotel mogul Tony Goldman, is well aware of the dangers: "The flavor of a megaresort facility is completely contrary to the values of what South Beach is all about." With a massive crush of gamblers the beachfront strip is likely to become just an isolated bubble, a quaint little open-air mall of hipness, perfectly preserved, and utterly lifeless.

For now, though, tourism chieftains had good reason to feel proud of their handiwork. Mayco Villafa*a, communications director of the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau, was probably right when he observed, "Pow Wow was an excellent vehicle to showcase the city and diminish the negative perceptions among those representing the tourism industry." Nonetheless in some markets those perceptions will still remain strong for a while longer, no matter how successful Pow Wow was. As Lisa Paul, director of long-haul travel for Germany's automobile club, ADAC, noted on the convention floor, "Even if we can get a room for $20, there's no demand for Miami.