Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
BREAKING A HABIT
Fort Lauderdale out to make students’ spring frolic more mild than wild
Like a clean and quiet hotel room before a bachelor party, Fort Lauderdale beach is preparing for a spring break invasion.
Cattle fencing lines both sides of State Road A1A to keep students from darting — or stumbling — into traffic. Electronic message signs and posters warn visitors that alcohol isn’t allowed on the beach. A police tent stands at the beach end of Las Olas Boulevard, a shady headquarters for the eventual armed presence.
College students are expected to arrive en masse any day now. And the city on Monday is expected to begin a crackdown aimed at curbing the rowdy messiness the last few years of spring break have brought. Well-mannered visitors are welcome, city leaders said. Party animals who litter and brawl are not.
“It just won’t be tolerated,” Greater Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce President Dan Lindblade said, describing open drug dealing and fistfights in recent years. “If that’s what kids want, they definitely shouldn’t be coming here. The spring break days of the past aren’t that way anymore.”
Under a temporary law passed
by Fort Lauderdale commissioners in February, a slate of rules can be invoked when crowds of 5,000 or more are expected: no coolers, no rafts, no densely packed mobs of people, no tents or tables (unless you’re the police), no blaring music.
The rules will apply along a limited section of Fort Lauderdale beach, north and south of Las Olas and the historic Elbo Room bar, where spring breakers congregate.
Fort Lauderdale police spokeswoman Detective Tracy Figone said the city is still preparing to use the emergency law.
“Our goal is to finish all the necessary steps by this week so we can officially start enforcement Monday,” Figone said in an email.
City Manager Lee Feldman said in February that the goal is not to arrest students; police will ask students to take coolers or alcohol back to their cars or rooms, he said. Signs will alert students to the new rules, and announcements will be sent to the media and posted on social media, the city says.
At the beach Thursday, visitors young and old bathed in the sun, and the beer-guzzling throngs from college were not yet around in large numbers. One group of college students drew the ire of an ocean rescue lifeguard when he spotted their hookah and a buried bottle of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. But up and down the beach, the scene was relatively placid.
“When they arrive,” Lindblade said, “you always know they’re there.”
Several big colleges in Florida have spring break over the next two weeks. And Fort Lauderdale is the nation’s second-most popular spring break destination this year, according to travel club AAA.
Emily Freel, 22, and her friend Raven Braswell, 21, said they’ve had a relaxing week on break from Adrian College in Michigan.
“It’s lovely,” Braswell, a criminal justice senior, said. “I kind of want to live here.”
That’s exactly why Tim Schiavone, owner of The World Famous Parrot Lounge, thinks the city should let spring breakers be.
Schiavone said he came to Fort Lauderdale on vacation at age 22 and never left. He’s 66 now.
Schiavone was quoted in a New York Times story in 1986 bemoaning the city’s first efforts to stomp out a raucous, raunchy spring break tradition. Back then, crowds swelled to 350,000 over the six-week period. And that year, a student from Illinois fell from the 16th floor of the Pier 66 hotel and died.
Today’s spring break is much more tame, the crowds a fraction of the size. But an increase in students, arrests and trash last year led business and tourism leaders to complain.
Schiavone said he hasn’t changed his positive attitude about college students.
“I’m not endorsing all hell breaking loose,” he said. “We’re in the business of hospitality. I don’t think we have to get so wound up over it that we act like we’re being invaded.”
The only city commissioner to oppose the crackdown was Robert McKinzie, who said he feared that the ban on coolers might not be evenly enforced. “Who wants an attack on their cooler?” McKinzie asked. “As a black man, I’ve been stopped for no apparent reason. I can remember in my earlier days here at the commission, leaving at 2 o’clock in the morning, being stopped by my own police officers. I was driving a Porsche. … Now I have my cooler and I’m on the beach and someone can’t govern accordingly, and my cooler is singled out and not Bruce’s cooler,” he said of a white colleague.
City Attorney Cynthia Everett echoed the concerns about enforcement, saying the city already has laws on the books that it could use.
City law prohibits alcoholic beverages — and bottles and glass containers of any kind — on the beach. Drinking alcohol outdoors is allowed on the west side of State Road A1A, where the bars and restaurants are.
City activist Lee “Count” Chudson, 72, urged a delicate approach so as not to depress commerce in a resort town. He said the measures were proposed by “old farts” who “don’t have dates on Saturday night.”
“Government is surgery,” he said. “It’s not a butcher shop.”