Mayor’s South Beach alcohol restriction tested over Memorial Day weekend
Just before 2 a.m. on Ocean Drive, the booze stopped flowing inside Mango’s Tropical Cafe and customers celebrating the start of a long holiday weekend were asked to go home. But outside, a loosely organized street party carried on.
Those who chose to make the South Beach strip their dance floor last Thursday morning — bringing their own speakers and alcohol — weren’t sobered by a new law banning alcohol sales after 2 a.m. in the city’s entertainment district.
Workers at Mango’s, however, went home with $300 less each night over the busy Memorial Day weekend, said owner David Wallack, who videotaped the crowds outside his Ocean Drive club to illustrate his displeasure with the Miami Beach mayor’s war on South Beach nightlife.
“By 2:15 a.m., we’re dark and totally empty inside,” Wallack said. “The same street party is going on with boom boxes and open liquor and smoking pot everywhere and twerking.”
South Beach’s new 2 a.m. last call — a departure from the area’s long-standing 5 a.m. cutoff for drink sales — faced its first big test over Memorial Day weekend, an often rowdy, always busy period that frequently challenges the city’s ability to balance the needs of residents and its world famous nightlife.
The biggest test for the earlier cutoff is expected to come in November, if the city commission votes to put the now-temporary policy on the ballot for permanent ratification. At any point in between, it may be decided by the courts after the popular Ocean Drive bar the Clevelander sued the city.
The new last call, which went into effect May 22, is part of an effort by Mayor Dan Gelber to redo what he has called the city’s “anything goes” party scene. Club owners in the district have blasted the legislation as harmful to hospitality workers and impotent to contain the festival-like party on the street — and the crime Gelber says it breeds. A pre-midnight Monday shooting capped the long weekend.
“It’s totally meaningless to the crime in the street,” Wallack said.
Gelber has said “there have to be long-term solutions” to a problem that has some taxpayers — and voters — at wits’ end.
“We can’t use tape and paper clips to fix this,” Gelber, who is running for reelection, said in an interview prior to Memorial Day weekend. “I think we have to change the character of the entertainment district totally.”
Gelber has long said the 2 a.m. rollback alone won’t fix South Beach’s problems. He is campaigning on bringing “law and order” to South Beach and says the city must recreate the entertainment district as an area with more options for residential and office uses. His plan includes a recently approved crackdown on noise and zoning changes to encourage redevelopment, but he said limiting alcohol sales is a key part of the plan.
“It’s one of the more important items,” he said Wednesday of the new last call. “It’s not a silver bullet but it’s certainly vital.”
Last Call
Among the changes proposed for the district, Gelber also wants to increase the number of police there. Gelber will present the proposal at a June 23 commission meeting, his office said Friday.
“I think we need a huge influx of policing,” he said. “I’m convinced that our number of police are not commensurate with the task for a city that expands from [a population of] 90,000 to 300,000 in hours.”
The 2 a.m. last call was annoying to Memorial Day weekend revelers who gathered next to the Tropics Hotel and Hostel on Collins Avenue last Saturday night. “It’s f---ed up,” said 20-year-old Maryland student Faith Williams. “I was planning to stay up all night. It doesn’t matter anyway because people find their own drinks.”
As she spoke, a friend passed around an oversized 1.75-liter bottle of Jack Daniels. Between shots, they complained about the high prices of alcohol at the bars.
“It’s got to be later than 2 a.m.,” said Natalie Roman, 22, of Philadelphia. “Everybody’s trying to get lit.”
Still, neither the new 2 a.m. alcohol cutoff nor the presence of scores of police officers assisting with crowd control could stop a shooting that erupted Monday evening at First Street and Ocean Drive near the posh Prime 112 steakhouse, injuring two people, including one critically. The spray of gunfire also sent bullets flying toward the Continuum on South Beach condo tower in the South of Fifth neighborhood, according to an email from the condo master association president to Miami Beach Police Chief Rick Clements.
“Our South of Fifth community has been warning that what has been normal for too long in the [entertainment district] will transverse to South of Fifth,” wrote Keith Marks, president of the Continuum on South Beach Master Association. “This is not a isolated occurrence or just boys being boys.”
Marks asked for extra foot patrols in the area and off-duty police stationed outside businesses that open late, but didn’t mention alcohol sales. In an interview Thursday, he said adding more police is “much more effective” than restricting alcohol sales in the South of Fifth area because crime can happen at any time of day.
Because the shooting happened before 2 a.m. and outside of the boundary where the new law is in place, critics seized on the incident as evidence that stopping early-morning liquor sales won’t curb chaos in South Beach.
Gelber said he didn’t expect the new last call to immediately reduce crime, adding that shootings are “very hard to deter.” However, he said police told him the entertainment district “felt more manageable” in the last two weeks under the earlier alcohol-sales cutoff.
“Obviously not everything that happens happens after 2 a.m., but the point is though that we have to project out that we’re not a hard-party area,” he said.
Another vote coming?
If the new law is placed on the November ballot by the Miami Beach City Commission, it will be the second time since 2017 that voters will decide whether to limit alcohol sales on Ocean Drive. Four years ago, voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to stop sales on Ocean Drive after 2 a.m.
But unlike 2017, hospitality workers haven’t protested outside City Hall. This year, it’s the residents — including those living in the condo towers, apartments and homes surrounding South Beach’s bars and clubs — who waved signs outside the government office, protesting the nightlife industry during spring break.
Former Mayor Philip Levine, who spearheaded adding the 2017 ballot question, said the philosophical pendulum balancing resident and nightlife interests appears to be swinging in favor of residents. He said he feels confident that, this year, voters will make the 2 a.m. ban permanent.
“I’ve never seen anger like I’m hearing from residents of Miami Beach,” Levine said. The city, he said, has to decide “are we the city of spring break or are we the city of Art Basel.”
But not everyone is on board.
Stephane Chiche, a South Beach resident, said crime in the entertainment district tends to happen in the street and not in bars or clubs.
“People don’t just come out of bars drunk and start shooting,” he said.
Karim Sabet, a Miami Beach resident and local Realtor, said Ocean Drive is in need of an overhaul to make it a place where more locals want to visit.
But, he said, the city should focus on bringing investment to South Beach and quality entertainment, like the Hyundai Air & Sea Show, instead of cutting alcohol sales.
“It feels very much like we’re trying to change something by changing the clothes, not the person,” he said.
The bottom line
Sabet, who said he will vote this November, said the city should provide residents a “factual based” analysis showing how the 2 a.m. rollback impacted crime.
In early May, the Miami Herald requested data from Miami Beach Police on citywide calls for service, arrests and reported crime dating back to 2017, but as of Thursday, the data had not been made available.
“Show me a drop in crime and I’m on your side,” Sabet said.
During the thick of Memorial Day weekend, as she served beers to people watching a Saturday NBA playoff game, Lost Weekend bartender Waleska Tejeda said the only thing the 2 a.m. rollback was eating into was her tips. She estimated that she’s losing $350-400 a night because of fewer customers coming in after 2 a.m. at the Española Way bar.
“It’s really pissed me off. They’re taking away my money,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s all politics.”
This article has been updated to clarify that Mayor Dan Gelber intends to present a proposal to increase the size of the Miami Beach Police Department during a normally scheduled June 23 city commission meeting.
This story was originally published June 4, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
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