MAKING A SPLASH

摘要

Its twin art deco towers rise 16 stories, glimmering white and yellow against a blue Florida sky and the emerald Atlantic surf. But when Miami Beach residents talk about the Royal Palm resort, a 422-room hotel that was slated to open late last month, they focus on a different color. The Royal Palm is known as "the black hotel." Miami Beach, as everyone knows, is a racially strafed city. Segregated until the mid-1960s, pocked by riots in the 1980s, boycotted in 1990 by would-be African-American tourists because it spurned Nelson Mandela (thanks to his support of Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat), Miami Beach was hard-pressed to make amends. So in 1996 the city set aside a one-acre strip of public land, the site of a historic 1930s hotel, for a black developer. When R. Donahue Peebles won the contract in 1996 for the $10 million plot, everyone assumed he was getting a sweetheart deal.