Twenty years ago, South Beach was a tired seaside village best known for Scarface drug deals and flocks of retired people rocking on the front porches of decrepit hotels.

But a fight to save the old buildings helped fuel a renaissance. Preservationists, artists, photographers, designers, performers and other avant-garde types smitten with the promise of a forgotten but architecturally unique corner of America joined forces to turn the place around. By 1987, a handful of funky restaurants, clubs and refurbished hotels began to draw cool crowds.

Today, South Beach, the one square mile extending from Government Cut to 21st Street, has evolved from a Bohemian playground where one could have dinner and drinks for $7 to a world-class tourism hot spot where a Kobe burger costs $30 and a top-shelf cocktail is about $20.

The small-town edginess is history. But now the place boasts financial and cultural maturity. Money has brought more money. Fame more fame.

Each December, South Beach hosts North America's most important contemporary-art fair. Art Basel Miami Beach has helped deepen the local art scene as more and more galleries, like France's Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, and private museums, like the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, pop up on the mainland to cater to the international art community that now descends annually.

Basel has turned its international high-roller following sweet on buying into the glamorous new condo towers shadowing the Art Deco district, like Apogee, where units set you back between $3 million and $20 million. The South Beach Wine & Food Festival every February lures culinary superstars, from the Food Network's Rachael Ray to avant-garde Spanish chef Ferran Adría, and highlights a maturing local restaurant scene.

There's a growing roster of upscale hotels, with the W, the Mondrian and the Gansevoort slated to join the Setai, the Ritz-Carlton, the Regent and others that make $600 rooms commonplace.

And, in the works, superstar architecture: Toward the east end of Lincoln Road, a new Frank Gehry-designed rehearsal/performance space for the New World Symphony, a world-class training orchestra born in Miami Beach in 1987. Near the west end, a sculptural parking garage by the cutting-edge duo Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron of Switzerland. And at 16th and Drexel, a residential/commercial project by Mexico's Enrique Norten.

Factoring even economic ups and downs, it seems clear that South Beach now has a foothold as a cosmopolitan, cultural mecca. High-stakes art, architecture and artifice define things today. But there was simpler magic at play when the revival began.

''The energy was palpable. There's something about seeing the potential of a place and being part of creating it,'' says South Beach pioneer Louis Canales, who moved down from New York in 1986 and promoted many of the early nightclubs. He helped lure his New York fashion friends and several magazine writers and editors, who went home and heralded ``America's New Riviera.''

``Back then, South Beach was not about things,'' Canales says. ``It was about ideas.''

ARTISTIC CATALYST

It was the Beach that fueled the ideas of Carlos Betancourt, then a struggling artist with a $300-a-month studio on tumbleweedy Lincoln Road. Today, his works reside in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

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