Coral Gables' Biltmore Hotel, once a playground to stars like Judy Garland and Bing Crosby and an office away from home for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, became a shabby hulk of its former grandeur.

What remained: Tales traded among neighborhood kids about a ghost in Biltmore's belfry.

Local leaders weren't even sure it was worth keeping.

``There were not three votes on the Coral Gables Commission to save the Biltmore,'' remembers local historian Arva Moore Parks. ``It was finally the late 1970s and Dorothy Thomson changed her vote, and the rest is history.''

That's how much things have changed.

A generation later, recognizing and preserving South Florida's history is taken seriously.

Activists want to renovate yesteryear glories, from Hampton House, the Brownsville boarding home where Martin Luther King Jr. practiced his I Have a Dream speech, to a $3 million sprucing of the damaged Miami Springs mansion of early airline entrepreneur Glenn Curtiss. Tourists clamor to get on a tour to see a now-closed missile base in Everglades National park. Meanwhile, Palmetto Bay has found its most popular website link describes the village's historical homes.

The latest to ``get it'' is singer Jimmy Buffett, who two weeks ago threw his name and fame behind restoration efforts for the long-shuttered Miami Marine Stadium on Virginia Key, the site of the 1985 concert Buffett and his Coral Reefers immortalized on home video.

``It's a symbol of everything that's great about Florida -- boats, music, water and great Florida fun,'' the singer-entrepreneur said in a public-service spot to generate support for the stadium's restoration.

What galvanized the current preservation movement is the demolition earlier this year of the original 1912 church of St. Stephen's Episcopal in Coconut Grove. It unfurled ``a groundswell of disgust,'' said local historian Paul George, who conducts tours of South Florida's historical points of interest.

``There is a deepening interest in preservation, I see it at the grass-roots level because I conduct so many tours,'' George added. ``People are always wanting to show me buildings and asking how they can be preserved.''

On the East Coast, Miami at 113 might still be a frisky puppy compared to 379-year-old Boston. But, as the experts say, what's age got to do with it?

``Your beginning is your beginning,'' Parks says.

Interest in preservation ``has been growing regularly for a lot of years,'' she adds.

It started humbly in the 1970s when pioneers like Barbara Capitman and Ruth Shack became vocal about local historical sites. Capitman even helped save an entire neighborhood -- Miami Beach's once dilapidated Art Deco District, now trendy and on the National Register of Historic Places.

``People in the '70s would say, `I would save something if I had anything worth saving,' '' Parks says. Now ``it's marvelous,'' she said. ``I'm so pleased that I've lived long enough to see it.''

The celebrated sites seem to flourish once attention turns toward them after, in some cases, years of neglect.

The Biltmore, one of four national landmarks designated in Miami-Dade County (the other three are the Ferdinand Magellan Presidential Car No. 1 at the Gold Coast Railroad Museum, Vizcaya Museum & Gardens and downtown Miami's Freedom Tower), recently played host to the Americas Conference, where President Bill Clinton, a frequent guest of the hotel, spoke as United Nations special envoy to Haiti.

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