THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 28, 1996 TAG: 9607280093
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: 231 lines
At the height of a strong year for tourism, Virginia Beach officials and business owners are struggling with a complex mix of social conditions that some fear could hurt the city's reputation among the vacationers whose dollars made the resort strip what it is today.
That, precisely, is at the core of their concerns: What has the strip become - especially late at night - and will its changing nature choke the flow of revenue that has kept it a vibrant, popular summer resort?
The answers to those questions do not come easily. They are wrapped in a web of troubling phenomena - racial and cultural suspicions, generational conflict, and the overall coarsening of public behavior - that affect any juncture of American society where crowds of people gather: the mall, the cinema, the sports stadium or the Boardwalk on a sultry summer's evening.
``When I leave my store at night,'' said one longtime Atlantic Avenue merchant who would speak only if his name was withheld, ``I have to make my way through 70, 80, 90 people just to get to my car. Sometimes they shout at me, push
me. As for tourists, they're prisoners in their hotel rooms at night.
``Every day I have a couple tell me they're never coming back.''
Similar sentiments in a letter to the editor from an Ohio tourist, and the media attention that followed its publication, have forced the issue in a series of City Hall meetings over the past 10 days.
The tourist, Ted E. Lee of Reynoldsburg, Ohio, complained of ``gangs of pre-teen and teenage youths that now roam Atlantic Avenue using filthy language; male and female youths grabbing and groping each other in public, bumping and pushing into pedestrians and not even caring.''
City officials admit that the crowds are a problem on weekend nights, but they disagree strongly that the street scene is dangerous, or even as disquieting as some merchants and tourists have described it.
And they are frustrated, they say, that the laws do not grant them much power to control how people behave in public.
``This is not a police problem, this is a societal problem,'' said C. Oral Lambert, chief of staff for the city administration. ``And it's not only in Virginia Beach. All large venues struggle with public behavior.
``It's not against the law,'' he said, ``to be a creep or a crud.''
The strip's core commercial area - roughly Atlantic and Pacific avenues from 17th to 25th streets - has always swayed to different rhythms from day to night. But over the past two years, Oceanfront entrepreneurs say, the contrast has sharpened markedly.
By day the Oceanfront has a well-oiled, good-timey mood. An expensive renovation has given the strip an open and inviting feel. An aggressive advertising campaign, hoteliers say, is pulling in a wider net of visitors, some of them lured from popular mid-Atlantic haunts like Myrtle Beach or the Jersey shore.
But by night - especially on Fridays and Saturdays - the rhythm changes to a pulsing, roiling, youth-driven beat. It is edgy, urban and ethnic. Its players run the cultural yardstick from tattooed, skin-pierced white metal-rockers and runaways to local black kids who have made the Oceanfront the essential scene, the place to go and be noticed on long summer nights.
Mixing easily with the young crowds Friday night, though, were great numbers of tourists who seemed little bothered by the sidewalk scene as they strolled the streets and the Boardwalk, often with small children in tow, late into a pleasant, breezy night.
Their numbers, and the casual manner in which they lounged on beachfront benches or ambled along licking ice-cream cones, gave little credence to the image of their being ``prisoners in their rooms.''
There is nothing new about the young, the bored and the boisterous gathering at the Oceanfront at night. What does trouble the merchants and city officials, though, are the no-boundaries attitudes toward the color of the language, the volume of the music, and the sexually charged horseplay that mark the latest generation's idea of a fun night at the beach.
``People today have to one degree or another a lot less respect,'' said Rick Anoia, who owns the beachfront Windjammer Hotel and chairs the Resort Leadership Council. Though few of his guests have complained of the resort-strip scene, he said, it is clear that the tone on the sidewalks has changed.
``As a youth - and I'm only 38 - when I would come down to the Oceanfront you never heard people shouting obscenities, people bumping into you as you walked down the sidewalk.
``I don't think people necessarily are scared. The big concerns I have are that people don't have the same respect today, and that causes the family, most families, to feel somewhat insecure.
``As a parent, the last thing I want my 8-year-old son to do is say some of the things I hear out there. . . . I would not bring my own kids down there and have them hear the kind of things you hear now.''
The F-word, its coarser cousin, the MF-word, and every other combination of once-forbidden speech are common currency in this generation. The words tumble off the tongue as easily as a quarter into a Coke machine, but they still tweak the sensibilities of the older, family-oriented crowd.
It's something the authorities say they are helpless to control.
``That four-letter word,'' Oral Lambert said, ``people wonder why we don't arrest people for using it. But if said in a certain way, just speaking foul language is not necessarily a violation of the law.''
City Attorney Leslie L. Lilley explained: ``We cannot prosecute people for using the F-word. . . . Only if the intent is to promote a confrontation, if the intent is to raise it to the level of fighting words.''
Nor, he said, can the police disperse a crowd simply because they, or the merchants or the tourists, are troubled by it. ``There is the right of free assembly,'' Lilley said. ``The expectation for the right of free assembly cannot be made illegal simply because it may be annoying to some persons.''
``From my personal view,'' Lambert said, ``there is a generational values gap. There are some things younger people do that older people find offensive that are not really meant to be offensive. It's just accepted in their circle.
``With the language, the dress, they can have aggressive physical presences. It's not that they're going to attack anybody or be vicious, it's just the boisterous way people act.
``There is the perception on the part of many that we have the authority to take action when in fact we probably do not have the authority.''
Race is a painful topic in Virginia Beach. You can see tension tighten the facial muscles of city officials when the race card is turned face-up. They are six to eight years past the Labor Day tumult of 1988 to 1990 - the kids in the street today were in grade school then - but there is still an element of walking on eggshells when the issue arises.
And that contributes to the debate. Some merchants mutter privately that the police cut the crowds of young black revelers too much slack for fear of reigniting hostilities. The kids sense that, these merchants say, and push their behavior to the limit.
``They are so worried about us looking like a racist town,'' said Rick Kowalewitch, owner of R.K. Surf Boutique on 16th Street, ``that they are unwilling to deal with a really big problem. . . . It was bad down here on the Fourth of July. Ask 'em to tell you the truth about it.''
Police Capt. E.F. Buzzy, the 2nd Precinct commander who oversees Oceanfront enforcement, forcefully denies that his officers take race into account in keeping the peace.
``We are fair and equitable 365 days a year,'' Buzzy said. ``I emphasize three principles to those officers: Be fair, firm and friendly to the people you encounter.''
Buzzy offered statistics from April 15 through June 30 that show that the greatest number of people arrested or issued summonses in the tourist area share two characteristics: they are young and local.
Of the 5,248 people cited - more than half of them for traffic violations - 71 percent were aged 18 to 25, and 65 percent were from Hampton Roads. Sixty-eight percent were white and 31 percent black. Just 27 of the arrests involved felonies.
``We show no preferences to race or any other category you could summon,'' Buzzy said. ``There is no favoritism shown to anyone.
``You have to be sensitive to the rights of people down there who are not creating difficulties. Guys go there to meet girls, girls go to meet guys. This is a nice place to be, a fun place.
``They have a right to be there, white or black. And I'm sworn by the Constitution to give them that right.''
Lambert, Buzzy and other city officials who addressed the issue with journalists last week confirmed that the mix of people at the Beach changes dramatically on weekend nights.
``After midnight,'' Lambert said, ``that 70-30 (daytime) white ratio becomes 80-20 black.
``But I've been down there at night, and I can walk through these throngs of young black people and nothing will happen to me. They might say, `What are you doing here, you old fogey?' But nobody even touches me.''
Whenever racial numbers get significantly out of balance, he said, whoever is in the minority is likely to feel uncomfortable.
``When you're (a white) in the minority there is Afrophobia, no doubt. But there is no basis for it. We are getting no reports of white people being attacked there.
``There are young punks out there, but there's black and white punks.''
Delceno C. Miles, an African-American businesswoman and member of the city's School Board, says the changing scene at the Oceanfront has less to do with race than with the reality that there's little else for young people to do.
``There are a lot of young people out of school for the summer,'' Miles said, ``and they lack any means of entertainment. So they head down to the Oceanfront in the middle of tourist season and probably do all those things that youth demands they do.
``You know what I mean, we were all 18 once.
``I think a lot of what they do and say gets misinterpreted, and that's an understandable reaction. But this transcends race. A lot of these issues transcend race.
``What you have is a lot of young people out looking for a good time. The drinking age is 21; a lot of these kids who are out of school can't go into the clubs that serve alcohol, so they just don't have an outlet for all that energy.
``What I'm saying is we all have to come up with ways to give young people things to do rather than just criticize them when they upset us. They don't get enough of that reinforcement.
``Of course, there are those that are just troublemakers, and maybe that blows my whole theory. But nine out of 10 of them are just looking for something to do. There's always that one that causes trouble and blows it for the other nine who are just looking for a good time.''
The city police, she said, have done a pretty good job of keeping the bad actors sorted out from the good ones.
Lambert and Anoia see it much the same way.
``There is no night life or no street scene anywhere else in Tidewater,'' Lambert said. ``Waterside closes at 9, the malls at 9:30, so they come to Virginia Beach. And, really, just that eight-block area.''
``It's a normal, natural draw,'' said Anoia, the hotelier and resort leadership chairman. ``They can't get into the bars and drink, and that group element, that 14- to 21-year-old group, have nowhere to go other than to stand out on the street.
``It used to be we only worried about three weekends a year'' - Memorial Day, July Fourth and Labor Day. ``But it's not just a three-holiday-weekend problem - it seems to be here all the time now. It's just packed out there every weekend.
``It's just too many people compressed into one area.''
The stakes in this debate are tremendous. More than a million people came to Virginia Beach from June through August last year, and city officials say they spent a quarter of a billion dollars. The need to protect that flow of people and dollars is the one goal that the hoteliers, the barkeeps, the T-shirt merchants, the police and the city administration have in common.
But beyond that, those groups' interests can conflict. ``The hotel owners,'' Lambert said, ``it's OK by them if nobody other than hotel guests ever darkened their door.
``Then there's the barkeeps who sell beer - they're not offended by cruddy-looking people so long as they buy beer. The shopkeepers are not offended by what people look like so long as you're spending money.''
What they all want, though, is peace and safety.
Buzzy fields 90 to 100 officers on the strip on weekend shifts, and they were highly visible Friday night.
Uniformed police on foot, in patrol cars, on motorcycles and horses seemed evident on every block. Undercover officers mingled with the crowd as well.
``We discuss all this constantly with the police,'' Anoia said, ``and our desires to see what they can accomplish. And I think they've done a very good job.
``We've worked very hard on our family image in all aspects at the Oceanfront. But sometimes the ills of society and the ills of the laws allow certain activities to go on that you're sort of unable to control.
``And that's not just a Virginia Beach trend, that's a trend that's occurring all over. We get a lot of reports from other resorts that are going through the same phenomenon.
``We need to stop, though, and look. We need to step back and see just how good it is to some degree. Sometimes we might make problems out to be bigger than they are just because we're down here all the time.''
He has heard from other tourist-town leaders, he said, who look to Virginia Beach as a model in how to address the problems.
``To some of these other resorts,'' he said, ``they think we're the ones who are doing everything right.'' MEMO: Staff writer Kerry Dougherty contributed to this report. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by D. Kevin Elliott/The Virginia-Pilot
[Virginia Beach Oceanfront street scene]
KEYWORDS: VIRGINIA BEACH OCEANFRONT CROWDS TEENAGERS by CNB