Fort Lauderdale, Florida, most recently achieved international fame as the chosen home of Gianni Versace. While it might have its attractions for wealthy designers and the boat-owning super-rich, who can park their floating mansions alongside their villas on its many canals, it has few for the casual visitor.
Ostentation and brash consumption are all-pervasive, along with an overwhelming sense of artificiality. But from time to time evidence of the town's excluded underbelly pokes through the surface image of sun, sand and sex.
OK, it has beaches. But so does much of the Atlantic coast of the US, many attached to towns with genuine architecture, a real history and rooted indigenous inhabitants.
Fort Lauderdale has fake architecture, no evidence whatsoever of a history, and appears to be occupied entirely by tourists and an itinerant population of svelte shop assistants and restaurant staff from all over the United States, Europe and Latin America. And, as in many other US cities, the taxi drivers seem to all come from Africa.
Yes, it does have a river flowing through it, and a number of palmfringed canals. But, unless you have a large boat, this compares poorly with, for example, Savannah. The riverside walk is much less lively, as the town seems never to have faced the river and most roads are based on through car traffic.
The car is king here, and the traffic can be horrendous. Fort Lauderdale is part of the urban area of greater Miami, and one mishap on a motorway can snarl things up for hours. There is virtually no public transport, and the only way to get to the town from the airport or any of the hotels off the seafront is by taxi. There are water-taxis on the river, but these are more a tourist facility than a practical mode of transport.
Life on the river is much less varied than in other riverside towns. One large, expensive boat follows another up or down it, while in Savannah commercial traffic combined with a visiting tall ship from Ecuador and tourist-oriented paddle steamers.
Fort Lauderdale elevates artificiality to an art-form. This is a literal statement of fact among the many galleries on the main thoroughfare, Las Olas Boulevard, one, Heritage House Galleries, offered to "bring up to 20 hand-painted Masterpiece Recreations to your home or office".
Inside, huge gilded frames contained hand-painted fakes. You could buy a fake of a well-known painting by Leonardo da Vinci or, if your taste ran to something more modern, a fake Picasso. They would cost a mere $7,000 or $8,000, much less than an original, but rather more than many struggling artists can command for their original work.
HOW would you explain them to your guests? Allow them to think that you had bid several million dollars against the major galleries in the world in order to acquire them? Or admit, indeed, boast, that this was a real hand-painted copy?
The art-lover would not fare much better in neighbouring galleries. One was offering garish pastiches of the styles of well-known painters and schools, like Monet and Henry Moore. But they were in over-bright, primary colours. Other shops displayed in-your-face jade and gold jewellery.
Las Olas Boulevard, which contains most of these galleries, is touted as the vibrant centre of the town. It is about three miles long, running at right-angles to the beach. The buildings with the shops and cafes are low, in a fake Spanish colonial style, with some containing an art deco overlay. But they are surrounded by streets of high-rise buildings, so the whole street seems to have been uprooted from a Hollywood film set and plonked down.
Along the seafront young and not-so-young men on bicycles, roller blades or accompanied by dogs displayed semi-clothed, well-muscled bodies. Groups of young women with carefully sculpted bodies also paraded along the seafront, presumably hoping to be talent-spotted by a model-agency or film director. Identical girls waited on tables in the seafront restaurants at night.
Occasionally you get a glimpse of an angry-looking mole on a face or neck, showing that its owner is suffering from Kaposi's sarcoma, one of the symptoms of AIDS.
From time to time you see people clearly suffering from poverty. Beside the river a young black man wearing a builder's hard hat and grubby clothes sat on a bench. After a while he took a can of Guinness out of his bag. He slowly opened it and then, throwing his head back, carefully emptied it over his hair, rubbing it into his long dread-locks. He repeated the procedure with a second can.
Away from the central, fashionable axis of the town there is more a sense of real life. At the northern end of the beach, where there are no expensive restaurants and few scantily-clad tanned and fit bodies, you can find children and adults of normal physique.
There were plenty of families in the Holiday Inn hotel there, and behind it the Blue Fish cafe offered good seafood in diner-type surroundings. Outside several dozen motorbikes were parked, and their leather and denim-clad owners were inside listening to 1960s music on the juke box. It was what a tourist to the US would expect to find.
