BELLE GLADE, Fla. — The rooming houses of downtown Belle Glade stand together like a sprawling prison with misshapen cellblocks. One squat building after another, they form a skyline of poverty: crowded together, crumbling and filled with prisoners of indifference.
On one balcony, a young woman is pointing into the closet-sized kitchen she shares with 20 neighbors. The gas stove doesn't light. Water won't pour from the sink. The walls are thick with black scum. Roaches dart across the floor.
"The water," she despairs. "They won't fix the water."
In Belle Glade, no one is surprised. Smells of urine and rot drift from doorways and stairwells. Apartments are so small and so deadeningly hot that residents fill balconies and gather in parking lots and mill around street corners.
Passing through, you see hundreds of numbed faces looking out toward the street, like a save-the-people photograph from a Third World country.
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Exactly 46.2 miles away, in the very same county, is the pink marble doorway at Maison Maurice, a jewelry store that has thrived for 35 years in the picture-perfect shopping district of Palm Beach.
Palm Beach calls itself the world's richest society.
Here, on aptly named Worth Avenue, is a market for the moneyed: Cartier, Tiffany, Valentino, Gucci, Saks and dozens more. The stucco store faces are a spotless white and the windows smudge-free. Palm trees along the sidewalk are perfectly spaced and primped to look good and grow strong.
At Maison Maurice, proprietor Maurice Harary is fingering pearls, searching for perfection to string into a necklace. He is surrounded by jewels, in a room with a chandelier and Oriental rugs.
In Palm Beach, not even the recession has hurt much, Harary says. His
average sale for a ring or bracelet still brings $2,000 to $3,000 - and plenty of people spend more.
"In Palm Beach," he says knowingly, "they still have their functions."
As for Belle Glade and its problems, Harary says pleasantly, "This is not a factor for us." He visited Belle Glade long ago, but "this is not a factor," he says again. "They are not our customers."
At the eastern end of U.S. 98 lies the 14-mile-long barrier island known to the world as Palm Beach. The ocean washes up against the town's sandy shores, and the view from the beach is stunning: azure-blue water, unobstructed, hugging an endless horizon.
