Fort Lauderdale Says No
By the mid-1980s the Strip was taking crowds estimated in the hundreds of thousands, and the city decided it no longer wanted them. Mayor Robert Dressler went on national television in 1985 to say so. What followed was ordinance rather than rhetoric, open-container bans, parking restrictions, aggressive enforcement, and the students went elsewhere, which was precisely the point.
Part of Spring Break
13 moments in this segment.
- - Fort Lauderdale sells its beach. A promotional travelogue made by Guided Tours and sponsored by the City of Fort Lauderdale, showing the beach, the hotels and a marlin fishing tournament. It is the city's own picture of itself in the years its beach was filling with students every March.
- - Fort Lauderdale and Miami, 1966. Stock footage of Fort Lauderdale and Miami shot in 1966, six years after Where the Boys Are drew national attention to the city. The archive dates the material to that year.
- - Police and students clash in Fort Lauderdale. Newsfilm of officers and students confronting each other on the Fort Lauderdale beachfront in March 1967. Disorder of this kind shaped the city's long argument with the season.
- - A stay at the Statler Hilton. Home movie footage of Fort Lauderdale in 1969: the beachfront seen from the Statler Hilton, a drive through town and a stop by Pier 66. Ordinary tourist film of the strip in the years after the boom began.
- - Fort Lauderdale in the seventies. Six minutes of amateur footage of Fort Lauderdale during spring break in the 1970s, shot along the beachfront. Only the decade is given.
- - Riding the Strip on a double-decker. Fifteen minutes shot from a bar's double-decker bus running A1A in 1982, the length of Fort Lauderdale's Strip in its busiest years. Storefronts, motels and traffic, filmed without commentary.
- - Network news on the 1985 Strip. A television news report on spring break in Fort Lauderdale in spring 1985, filmed by Estel Dillon and reported by Steve Handelsman. It was shot in the season that preceded the city's decision to break with the crowd.
- - The Strip in its last big year. More than forty minutes filmed along A1A in Fort Lauderdale in 1985 by Tyrone Schiavone of the Parrot Lounge. An estimated 350,000 students came that spring on press accounts, and the city moved to end the season the following year.
- - Fort Lauderdale, spring 1986. Amateur footage of spring break on the Fort Lauderdale beachfront in 1986. It catches the strip in the season after the city began enforcing the restrictions that would push the crowds out over the following years.
- - The Strip a year after the wall. Footage along A1A in Fort Lauderdale in 1987, filmed by the owner of a bar on the Strip. He shot it, by his own account, the year after the city walled off the beachfront and set about ending spring break.
- - A resident remembers the Strip. Long-time Fort Lauderdale resident Wil Shriner recalls the spring breaks of the 1960s and 1970s and the bars that anchored them, among them Crazy Gregs, the Button and the Elbo Room. The interview was recorded for a project collecting spring break recollections and photographs.
- - The Elbow Room, open since 1938. A short look at the Elbow Room on Fort Lauderdale beach, in business since 1938 -- the same year the College Coaches' Swim Forum first drew teams to the city. One of the few physical survivals from the era.
- - How Fort Lauderdale lost spring break. A long documentary account of Fort Lauderdale from its founding as a Second Seminole War stockade in 1838 through its years as the country's spring break capital and the decision to end them. It is the fullest single narrative of the city's rise and rejection of the crowd.
