“Miami Beach is where neon goes to die” (Lenny Bruce)

“Miami Beach is where neon goes to die” is a popular quotation by comedian Lenny Bruce, first recorded in the Saturday Review of May 20, 1972. The slight problem is that Lenny Bruce died August 3, 1966. The quote may be genuine, but needs better verification.
 
Miami Beach was well known as “God’s Waiting Room” and the place of “newlyweds and nearly deads” and New York City’s “Sixth Borough.” It had a growing Jewish population in the 1960s, and Lenny Bruce (a Jewish comedian from New York) would have been familiar with the city.
 
Miami Beach’s “Motel Row” was glittering with neon lights.
 
 
Bartleby.com
Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, compiled by James B. Simpson.  1988.
 
NUMBER: 3434
AUTHOR: Lenny Bruce
QUOTATION: Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.
ATTRIBUTION: Quoted by Barbara Gordon Saturday Review 20 May 72
SUBJECTS: The World: Travel: The Eye of the Traveler
BIOGRAPHY: Columbia Encyclopedia.
 
Wikipedia
Lenny Bruce (October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966), born Leonard Alfred Schneider, was a controversial American stand-up comedian, writer, social critic and satirist of the 1950s and 1960s.
 
3 July 1972, Stevens Point (WI) Daily Journal, pg. 5:
The Miami Beach Scene
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. (AP)—Out of the sand rise 400 glittering giants of glass and concrete that soak up $600 million a year from sun-loving tourists who holiday in Miami Beach.
 
“Motel Row” is a towering strip of neon and good times that has made this resort island famous.
 
But close by the nightclubs and “extravaganza revues” on Collins Avenue are the bingo parlors and shuffleboard courts of South Beach where the old folks gather.
(...)
Tourism accounts for 85 cents of every dollar in the Miami Beach economy.