If you're smart, you arrive in Fort Lauderdale for your cruise a day ahead of time. Why take the chance you'll be snowbound or have your flight canceled? Get there early. But if you arrive around noon you'll have 24 hours before you board, and it's no fun sitting around the hotel wondering if you overpacked — which you did.
Why not get out and see what the city offers? No, not an art museum. Everyone has one of those. No, not shopping — do you really think their Macy's and P.F. Chang's are significantly different from the ones at Southdale? Something you can't see at home, that's the idea. Something only Florida would have.
Here are three suggestions.
The Bonnet House
Ever wonder what Florida was like before all the money moved in and the towers went up? Head to the Bonnet House. Mind the monkeys.
Back story: Hugh Taylor Birch, a Wisconsin native who fell in love with the Sunshine State, bought a vast tract of land at the end of the 19th century. He gave some to his daughter in 1919 as a wedding present when she married Frederic Clay Bartlett, a hardware-wholesaler scion. Bartlett was a successful artist in great demand for his architectural paintings; if you had a new college building you wanted gussied up with some instant history, he was your guy.
He designed the Bonnet House himself, rejecting the usual faux-Spanish style for faux-Caribbean plantation. Four thick walls made of concrete blocks — painted, not stuccoed — surround a courtyard, with big rooms devoted to various pursuits. A big studio full of Bartlett's work; a dining room with an impressive amount of hugely expensive china; sitting rooms for various moods. It's described as a "whimsical" embodiment of the artist's personality, as well as the ideas that his second and third wives brought to the project.
Your experience may vary, but at some point during the hagiographic tour-guide description of the artworks and design decisions, you may be struck by a nagging idea that only grows and blossoms: This art really isn't all that good.
Oh, Bartlett was a fine painter, in his early years. His portrait work in his studio is astonishing. But he toured Europe too much, you suspect, and was swayed by the new styles sweeping the continent. Strict representationalism was out; looser, less technically demanding styles were in, and he was smitten. It's hard not to look at his early work — meticulously realistic, or romantically pre-Raphaelite — and find his subsequent work ... regrettable.
So the whole house is a testament to his vision, which included things like faux marble finishes everywhere, walls with shells embedded in the cement, dried fish on the walls, "eclectic" rooms that combine antique-store discoveries with monkey statues. His third wife's tastes are also apparent, and while they're better — she turned out to be a better modern painter than he did — the overall impression you get is "Times Change, and Then Stuff Looks Weird."
As a collection of art, it's OK; as a time capsule of quotidian Florida details and the way moneyed people lived before the Jet Age, it's fascinating. Everything is just how they left it, and you truly get a picture of how the rich lived in their winter homes.
Oh, right: monkeys. There are monkeys on the grounds, and you're welcome to wander.
Swimming Hall of Fame
You don't have to be a swimming fan to enjoy it!
But, man, does it help.
It has two wings: an older section that resembles an overstuffed thrift store, with clippings, posters, dioramas of Famous Swimmers, and lots of stuff that looks as if nothing was added since 1982. If you don't know the history of swimming, it can be daunting: Who? Why should I care? But it's a great place to realize that swimming does have a history.
There's one thing in the older wing that makes it worth the trip, but we'll get back to that.
The newer wing doesn't celebrate specific swimmers as much as the general idea of swimming. Reproductions of ancient depictions of swimming. Swimwear through history. Famous TV swim-related things: Hey, it's Lloyd Bridges' suit from "Sea Hunt"! There's a statue of Johnny Weissmuller, who played that famous swimmer, Tarzan.
As with the newer wing, it helps to like swimming. A lot. But a few things appeal to people with antiquarian interests: some 19th-century engravings on the rise of swimming as a pastime in Europe, and lots of medals. The latter fills case after case, and nearly every style of the 20th century is represented. You have never seen so many bas-reliefs of people in tight shorts who are crouching.
Back to the highlight of the other building — it's really the best thing about the Hall of Fame, and it's doomed. The wall of a staircase is covered with caricatures of people whose connection to swimming ranges from the direct to the tangential. (FDR is there, and he's not the first guy you think of when the subject of aquatic sports comes up.)
It's the work of W.L. Prescott, a woefully underappreciated artist who died in 1981. The Hall of Fame, the attendant told me, is raising money to move to California, and she didn't know if the mural would be saved. It deserves to be saved — at the very least, to be remembered.
A scrap of old Ft. Lauderdale
The money poured into this town is remarkable to the casual visitor; the canals are packed with huge boats and expensive towers rise along the beach with expensive restaurants and boutiques. You walk along the main street by the beach, and think: billions of dollars, basking in the brilliant sun.
But on the other side of the broad road is the beach, the intermediary between Florida and the growling sea, and it's an egalitarian expanse. The beaches have their own micro-cultures. Those outside the expensive hostels might have more bulbous Germans in Speedos. Sebastian is the gay beach; there are no signs, but a rainbow umbrella might be your clue. Anyone can plop anywhere, though.
At the far north end of Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard, before Birch Park, there's a few blocks that feel like they're from a looser, funkier era. A tattoo place, some stores selling sunscreen and tatty-motto T-shirts, bars with robust sunset crowds. There's a fantastic hotel, the Sonesta; it used to be a rote chain joint, but it was overhauled into a shiny white hip hostel with magnificent views of the sea. Best of all: It's around the corner from a greasy dive.
The Primanti Brothers. It's open 24 hours a day. Pizza and subs. A counter with stools. The food, well, it'll do. What makes it special is the sense that this corner, this block, this little collection of beachfront businesses — this was the norm once. It'll be gone 10 years down the line when someone builds the Next Big Something. But for now, sitting at a wobbly table on the sidewalk on a warm evening? It's 1992, or 1985, or 1977.
It's Florida. Which means it'll always be about the beach and the sun. That's enough for the first few trips, but after your fourth cruise or 10th, don't you want to see if there's something else to enjoy?
You should. There is.
James Lileks • 612-673-7858
