'Not what happens around here anymore'

MARGATE, N.J. - Twenty or 30 years ago, they were part of the throngs of teenagers and 20-somethings who populated the rock-all-night, party-every-day world of a back-bay section of this beach town known as the Barbary Coast.

Now that they've grown up and gone upscale, so has that neighborhood, which runs along Amherst Avenue toward the bay.

Expensive condos with manicured little yards and swanky restaurants have replaced the gritty shot-and-a-beer bars, smoky dance clubs, and ramshackle 20-kids-to-a-rental cottages that attracted hordes of young people from the city looking to blow off some steam at the Jersey Shore on a hot summer night.

"The scene here is now an Escalade with a dog on the backseat and a kayak on the roof headed home after having a nice dinner," said Karen Sherman, who with her partner, Carmen Rone, has had a front-row seat to the goings-on in Margate after opening their restaurant, Tomatoes, seven years ago.

That's why the stabbing death of 37-year-old British tourist a week ago was such an aberration, locals and regular visitors said.

"It's just not what happens around here anymore," said George Wilson, 58, a retired accountant who was once part of the "pirate packs" who, back in the day, frequented the Barbary Coast.

"You never even hear of any fights or problems here anymore. Everybody has grown up, settled down, and comes out on a Friday or Saturday night to eat dinner and have a few drinks with old friends," said Wilson, of Langhorne, who recently bought a condo to be near his old stomping grounds at Gable's bar, which is no longer there. "Most of us are home in time for the 11 o'clock news."

Over the years, Margate has morphed from a classless party town with a decaying giant pachyderm known as Lucy as its mascot to an all-class-encompassing new-money, old-money mini South Beach, where women wear jewelry and makeup to the beach and the many-times made-over elephant has become a kind of symbolic beacon to the plastic-surgery mavens who sport couture when they go get their nails done.

Instead of carousing in rabble-rousing packs, these weekend warriors walk the dog with the spouse and kids and have an ice cream cone on the corner. Or tease their hair and dress up in five-inch heels and Dolce & Gabbana to grab a spicy tuna roll and sip Ketel One and tonic.

Police say it appears that a late-night bar fight may have led to last Sunday's death of Lavern Paul Ritch, a fitness instructor and swim coach from Wales who had been visiting Margate with friends from Cherry Hill.

Ritch, who was something of a celebrity in his homeland after appearing on the ITV game show Gladiators and making the short list of Britain's most eligible bachelors five years ago, had been in the United States on a two-week vacation.

The group apparently had spent the day Saturday at the beach, dined at Tomatoes that evening, and then stopped for drinks at a couple of nightspots on Amherst Avenue.

Around 2 a.m. Sunday, Ritch, who police have called a Good Samaritan, involved himself in an altercation between a man police have not identified and a man who apparently had been chasing the unidentified man.

Ritch was stabbed in the chest at Washington and Monmouth Avenues, about a block from Tomatoes. He was taken to AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center in Atlantic City and was pronounced dead there. The wound had penetrated his heart, according to Atlantic County Medical Examiner Hydow Park.

Investigators from the Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office major crimes unit say the man who was chased working with them to help find Ritch's killer. In the meantime, authorities have issued a composite sketch and a grainy surveillance video of the suspect. No weapon has been recovered, and police have not said what may have sparked the bar fight.

In the meantime, Sherman and others said, life along the once-infamous Barbary Coast section is going on pretty much as usual for a summer weekend despite the cloud cast by the killing. The bands Deep Purple, Rare Earth, Soul Survivors and others are scheduled to open the Margate Pop Festival tonight near where Ritch was slain.

"People said we were crazy when we opened up this place," Sherman recalled Friday night as the crowds packed the dining rooms and bar at Tomatoes. "They said no one here would want what we were offering. But the crowd grew up."