The tourists don't come around here anymore, although the skeletal remains of small businesses, razed hotels and closed parks hint at their once prolific passage through Key Biscayne.

Miamians, who for decades flocked to the island paradise in droves for a Sunday getaway from the trials of the bustling mainland, now go elsewhere for their seaside escapes.

Luxury oceanfront condos, at one time the stamp of arrival for the world's wealthiest, are being abandoned more quickly than they were ever purchased in their prime. The last place home owners want to be is Key Biscayne, but they can't leave because they just can't get rid of their worthless property.

This bleak picture is not some perverted millennial prophecy. These images are those of a Key Biscayne without a beach.

As Sandra Goldstein, the Village beach renourishment volunteer who walks the beach daily, so aptly put its, "Why would you come out here if you didn't have the beach?"

James DeCocq, assistant to the Village Manager and Goldstein's partner in launching the campaign to restore the Key's eroding beaches, agreed. "If we lose the beach, what's going to happen to our vacation spots?" DeCocq explained. "There are too many other places in Florida that have beaches. Who wants to vacation here if there's no beach. I sure wouldn't."

Officials claim that beaches, Florida's number one tourist attraction, bring in more than $40 billion to the state and provide more than a million jobs for Florida cities, including Key Biscayne. Suffice it to say that most of the thousands of people who live on and visit the island paradise would not be here were it not for its four-and-a-half miles of sugar crystal sand steadily lapped by warm, soft, aquamarine waves all year long.

Sales pitch

Those who sell property on Key Biscayne know this for a fact and rely on it as their primary pitch: people like Christopher Blackman, vice-president of marketing and sales for The Ocean Club, a newly built luxury condominium which sells its units from $300,000-2 million.

"People ask me, 'What's the difference between here and Williams Island [a North Miami Beach luxury high-rise community]?' I ask everyone, 'How's their beach?' and they say, 'They don't have a beach,' and I say, 'Yes,'" Blackman explained.

Blackman said The Ocean Club can thank the beach for its success in passing the 300-unit, $185-million sales mark in just under 20 months. "[The beach] gives us a great edge on all of those kind of projects that are similar to ours such as Santa Maria and Williams Island," Blackman said. "There's no way we could have done that if it wasn't: a) on the beach and b) on Key Biscayne."

Edgardo Defortuna, president and co-owner of Fortune International Realty, the exclusive listing agent for the Grand Bay Villas, the Ocean Club's chief competitor in the luxury housing market, agreed. He said the beach is "practically part of our sales speech" in selling Key Biscayne properties.

"Of our Key Biscayne sales, at least 50 percent are properties on the beach," said Defortuna, whose company generated $150 million in property sales on the island last year. "Even when we sell Mackles [small, original Key Biscayne houses built in the 1950s], we pitch the beach because most Mackles have Beach Club membership."

Defortuna echoed Blackman's sentiments about the competitive edge the beach offers the island's real estate industry.

"Putting a price on what the beach adds to property value is very difficult," he said, "but it's a very important consideration. If somebody decides to buy property in this area, if it weren't for the beach, we'd probably be competing with other areas that have views comparable to Key Biscayne but don't have the beach."

Goldstein and DeCocq say there is no doubt about that. "Every ad I see for the Ocean Club and Grand Bay shows the beach," DeCocq explained. "They don't show the interior of the island. They don't show the great shopping complexes. They show the beach. The Sonesta [Beach Resort] has an ad right now out on the radio and all they talk about is all the great water sports they offer."

Goldstein, who earns her livelihood as a realtor and works to recruit her colleagues to the cause of beach preservation, agreed. "They're selling properties on the fantasy of the beach but they need to make sure the beach is still going to be there," she cautioned.

"Once I realized my bread and butter was tied into the beach," Goldstein continued, "I began to pay attention. There's a lot of people whose livelihood is tied to the beach and they don't even know it."

Tourist magnet

Another industry whose lifeblood is Key Biscayne's beach is tourism. With more than three miles of beachfront park and two hotels and several guest residences on the island, tourism brings several million dollars to the Key each year.

Fran Vaccaro of the Key Biscayne Chamber of Commerce said the beach is why most out-of-towners visit the Key.

"The beach is always the number one or number two reason for people coming to Key Biscayne," Vaccaro explained. "Safety is the other one. And it's not just tourists. It's residents alike.

"People come in here [the Chamber office] on a daily basis and ask us, 'Where's the lighthouse? Where's the beach? What's the best beach to go to? Where can we boat? Where can we jet ski?' And the next thing they want to know is where can they eat."

Debbie Castillo, director of marketing for the 292-room Sonesta Beach Resort, which earned $23 million in total revenue last year, said the hotel's beachfront location is part of her marketing strategy.

"That's one of the things we are marketing to our customers, whether they are coming for vacations or conventions," Castillo explained. "The beach is important because that's part of the atmosphere customers who chose us want to create to set the tone for their meeting or trip. At a beach resort you have the versatility to be both formal and relaxed. Another metropolitan area doesn't have the luxury of that versatility."

Jim King, manager of Crandon Park, said the beach isn't just part of what brought approximately half a million people to the park last year.

"That is our number one attraction. The beach is the park," King said, adding that he is "sure we'd have a drop in visitation" if the beach were to suffer severe erosion.

But tourism is not the only industry that benefits from Crandon's beach. The film and entertainment production industry, relatively new to Florida, conducted more than 700 shoots last year in the park, generating almost $95,600 in location fees for the park, according to Jeff Peel, director of the Miami-Dade Office of Film, Television and Print.

"It's one of the greatest looking beaches in the world," Peel explained, "with beautiful, light sand and palm trees and uninterrupted seascapes where you don't see civilization. You can pretend you're on a desert island if you're shooting at Crandon. "And," he added, "it's 10 minutes from Miami so you can fly into Miami and at the same time you can get your desert beach shot without having to fly to some remote corner of the world."

Peel said while it is difficult to determine the amount of money those shoots bring to the local economy, in 1995 his office did research and discovered that filming associated with the park generated $35 million in local business that year.

In fact, most successful businesses on Key Biscayne prosper as a direct result of the beach's allure. Vaccaro said Key businesses are directly impacted by the quality of the beach.

"The businesses of Key Biscayne would shut down if the beach eroded," she explained. "We would all leave. It would change the dynamics of our island completely. It would change who we are. We are the beach."

Then, she added, "I would move. I wouldn't live here."

But not everyone agrees that the beach is the only reason people come to the Key to live and play. John Hinson, Ocean Club developer, said people are also attracted to the island's "small town serenity" and security as well as its unique views of the ocean, bay and the downtown Miami skyline, which are particularly visible from his complex's three 18-story towers.

"Oceanfront property is very special in the real estate development market," Hinson explained, "because people want to live on the ocean. They like to live on the ocean, to look at the ocean, to walk on the beach and to feel the ocean breeze."

Part II

Part III

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