South Beach workers prepare for another spring break. What will this year bring?
Brian Ovelar has been working security at Palace — the iconic LGBTQ bar on Ocean Drive known for its high-energy drag brunches — since he moved to Miami from Argentina about six months ago.
The job can be stressful on an average weekday, as boisterous crowds pack the bar’s patio and passersby gather to watch from the street. But this weekend will mark the start of Ovelar’s first spring break in South Beach, when college kids and other tourists flock to the Ocean Drive strip and crowds typically swell by orders of magnitude.
Recently, Ovelar said, the Palace security team convened a meeting to prepare for what’s to come.
“You have to do more preparation, be more attentive to your job,” Ovelar, 29, told the Miami Herald during a shift on Monday. “More than ever.”
As workers prepare for the rush, Miami Beach officials are taking numerous steps to try to control crowds and mitigate the hard-partying atmosphere. A slew of events is scheduled on or near Ocean Drive during each weekend in March, some of which will lead to the road being closed to cars. And the city will increase the number of police officers throughout South Beach.
“A very enhanced police presence and programming — that defines more of what’s happening than just who’s showing up looking to drink hard,” said Mayor Dan Gelber.
Spring break, which typically spans the month of March, has been a major source of tension in Miami Beach over the past few years — with city officials imposing curfews and shutting down causeways into the city to control crowds, police clashing with visitors and facing criticism for their treatment of Black tourists, and residents clamoring for the party to stay far away from their neighborhoods.
For workers in the area, it can be a mixed blessing.
A valet worker for Associated Parking Systems, who declined to give his name, said traffic getting into Miami Beach will be a “headache” as spring break crowds grow larger in the second half of March. But his job, he said, will be “nothing special.”
“You’ve just got to be careful as a worker,” he said. “The last two weekends of March should be a little crazy.”
A street vendor who sells Miami Beach-branded clothing on Ocean Drive, who also requested anonymity, said spring break can actually hurt his business.
“Normally March is very slow,” he said, “because the students chase out all the tourists who are buying.”
Mike Palma, the executive vice president of Mango’s Tropical Cafe nightclub, said March is usually a lucrative month because of the overall influx of tourists to South Florida. But the spring breakers who pack Ocean Drive don’t often frequent Mango’s, he said, due in part to its cover charge.
“We don’t really get a large spring break [crowd] inside Mango’s,” Palma said. “Everything you see on social media, it’s usually in the streets or in [Lummus] Park.”
Will programming change the vibe?
Events are planned for each weekend in March, mostly on the beach and in Lummus Park to the east of Ocean Drive, along with some on the street. Last year, city officials announced they were branding March 2023 as “fitness month,” featuring various events related to health, sports, art and music using $3.2 million in city funds.
Gelber said he hopes the events will give a more organized feel to the area, but acknowledged there are no guarantees. Last year, when there was similar programming in place, spring break was relatively calm until two separate shooting incidents injured five people on Ocean Drive during the third weekend in March and prompted the city to declare a state of emergency and impose a midnight curfew.
“You never know whether you’re just adding an organized overlay over chaos,” Gelber said. “But [programming] does organize your busiest areas.”
The programming will start this weekend with a movie screening of “The Birdcage” in Lummus Park on Friday evening, a music festival featuring performances by first responders throughout the day Saturday at 6th Street and Ocean Drive, and a party produced by the National LGBTQ Task Force on the beach Sunday afternoon.
The following weekend will feature a four-day international beach volleyball tournament at a pop-up stadium in Lummus Park, a Friday concert by salsa singer Tito Nieves to promote the World Baseball Classic at Marlins Park, and a free Saturday night concert at 6th Street and Ocean Drive with a DJ set by Anderson .Paak and a performance by guitarist Nile Rodgers and his band CHIC.
The third weekend in March, often one of the rowdiest for spring break, will bring Carnaval Miami — a popular street festival run by the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana — to Ocean Drive from 7th to 12th streets over three days under the name “Art on the Drive.”
There will also be fitness-related events throughout the month, including a “fitness festival” along the beachfront on March 25 and 26.
Beefed-up enforcement
Miami Beach police will have extended hours and increased staffing throughout March, according to a memo last week from City Manager Alina Hudak.
“Residents, business owners and visitors can expect to see a heightened police presence along the causeways, Fifth Street Corridor, Washington Avenue, Collins Avenue, Ocean Drive and the beach,” Hudak wrote.
During the last two weekends of the month, police will use a mobile license-plate reader along 5th Street as cars enter Miami Beach from the MacArthur Causeway.
Gelber said recently that he wants police on horseback to patrol Ocean Drive. It wasn’t immediately clear if the city plans to bring in horses and officers trained to use them from other jurisdictions this March.
The city’s police tactics in dealing with majority-Black spring break crowds have been controversial in the past. In 2020, the Miami-Dade County chapter of the NAACP called on then-city manager Jimmy Morales and police Chief Richard Clements to resign after viral videos showed police in riot gear firing pepper-ball bullets into a crowd and making violent arrests of Black beachgoers.
The following year, police charged a man with inciting a riot for playing music from a speaker as officers moved crowds off Ocean Drive and into a residential neighborhood after an imposed curfew.
In response to that year’s unruly spring break, city commissioners passed a new ordinance that led to police arresting over a dozen people, almost all of them Black and in the process of video recording police officers. All of the cases were dropped and police now rarely enforce the ordinance, which has faced legal challenges.
In addition to its beefed-up policing, the city will double its lifeguard staffing “as needed” in South Beach this March, enhance its code enforcement staffing, conduct nightly fire inspections on weekends and implement a $20 flat rate in city parking garages in the entertainment district.
Parts of Ocean Drive will also be closed to cars, according to city spokesperson Melissa Berthier. This weekend, 5th to 8th streets will be closed from Saturday at 7 a.m. to Sunday at 7 a.m. The same streets will be closed the second weekend in March from 7 a.m. Friday to 7 a.m. Sunday. And Ocean Drive will be closed to cars from 5th to 13th streets from 4 a.m. Friday, March 17, until 7 a.m. Monday, March 20.
Meanwhile, city officials will promote the planned weekend events and continue a marketing campaign they launched last year, with the slogan: “Take care of our city and it will take care of you.”
Joshua Wallack, the chief operating officer for Mango’s Tropical Cafe, said he expects the atmosphere this March to be “more controlled” than in the past few years, in part because sky-high hotel costs may send some college students to less expensive parts of Florida.
“Hopefully there are no major incidents,” he said. “But you can’t predict everything.”
This story was originally published March 1, 2023 at 5:30 AM.
