‘Extremely frustrating.’ Workers feel the pinch as spring break curfew subdues South Beach
As the lights switched on and workers started stacking chairs inside Mango’s Tropical Cafe at midnight Friday, server Yubeisy Deleon said the city’s new spring break curfew in South Beach wasn’t only sending tourists home early.
Deleon, a 15-year employee at the Ocean Drive club, said she would leave her job early, too, without the roughly $500 she said she typically makes on a Friday night in March. She usually works until 4:30 a.m., and banks on the early-morning hours of her shift to earn tips from bottle service.
“Our checks are going to be light,” Deleon said in Spanish. “We’re not going to have enough money to pay our bills.”
The festive music along Ocean Drive was replaced with stern warnings from police delivered over a loudspeaker, instructing guests to go home. The overflowing crowds from a week ago, when police were forced to briefly shut down Ocean Drive to traffic, were much thinner Friday.
A group of TikTok dancers provided some of the only entertainment of the night, as they filmed group dance videos to a crowd of onlookers on Eighth Street and Ocean Drive — that is, before a group of police asked them to shut their boombox off.
But just because the businesses were shutting down early in South Beach didn’t mean tourists were calling it a night.
Al Tavano, 22, from Montreal, nursed an over-sized rum runner at a sidewalk cafe table as the curfew loomed. He had just learned about it an hour earlier, and quickly made plans to go to Wynwood. He said he understood why the city imposed the curfew after two shootings on back-to-back nights last weekend injured five people.
“That sucks, but it was crazy last week,” he said.
Sipping on a Tito’s vodka and lemonade as police told him to clear the street, 35-year-old Las Vegas tourist Adrian Valadez said he would be celebrating his birthday at the Fountainbleau. He asked an officer what street he should walk to wait for an Uber and strolled along the sidewalk with his drink in his hand. He, too, said it was sensible to stop the party to avoid further violence but he would just spend his money somewhere else.
“LIV is never losing,” Valadez said, referring to the nightclub at the Mid Beach hotel, well north of the South Beach curfew zone.
A 22-year-old Baltimore tourist, who gave her name as Khala H., said she was hoping to bask in the early-morning spring break fun. Instead, she was planning to visit a strip club or nightclub outside of Miami Beach. She was between King of Diamonds, G5ive and Taboo.
“South Beach is not the only thing that’s open, I can go other places,” she said. “It just sucks for the businesses that are here because they won’t get the money.”
A judge on Friday upheld the city’s curfew after two South Beach businesses, Papi Steak restaurant and Treehouse nightclub, sued to overturn it.
READ MORE: Judge backs Miami Beach’s midnight curfew during spring break, rejecting legal challenges
In an opinion column Friday, Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber said he understood imposing a curfew would impinge upon people’s livelihoods, but it was the city’s last resort to deal with “unprecedented” gun violence in South Beach.
“It can hurt businesses and, obviously, is an imposition on people’s liberty,” he said. “But we can’t balance lost revenue or, frankly, anything against our obligation to keep people safe.”
Hours before the midnight curfew took effect, Rick Silverberg was forced to close down his liquor store in the posh South of Fifth neighborhood at 6 p.m. as part of the city’s emergency order. Apart from the winter holiday season, March is his biggest sales month of the year. And the hours between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. are the busiest for most liquor stores, as people get off work and get ready for the evening.
Located outside of the entertainment district, the Portofino Wine Bank hasn’t seen any spring break crowds, Silverberg said. He said it was unfair that the city singled out liquor stores to shut down earlier, and he thinks businesses that are forced to close down early should file a claim with the city to make some of their lost revenues back.
He estimated it would cost about $30,000 in revenues over three days. It wouldn’t stop customers from ordering bottles of alcohol from the city of Miami via Uber Eats, he said.
“It’s extremely frustrating and it makes no sense to me,” he said.
David Wallack, owner of Mango’s, said revenue at his club Thursday was down 66% compared to 2019, most of which he said goes toward paying staff.
“I’m going to lose. Every owner is going to lose,” he said. “But owners can handle that better than our staff can.”
Wallack said he understood the city’s decision to impose a curfew, but he believes next year there needs to be better preparation for St. Patrick’s Day weekend, which he said is typically a challenging week for police. On top of the midnight shutdown, he said, Ocean Drive felt “subdued” Friday evening due to extra restrictions on parking and vehicular access to the South Beach entertainment district.
“The horse left the barn a week ago and we missed it,” he said. “Now we have to pay the piper for making that mistake.”
This story was originally published March 26, 2022 at 7:39 AM.
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