By SAM SMITH, Guardian Staff Reporter

samsmith@nasguard.com

As night descends on Downtown Nassau, the street vendors and shop keepers who give the city its daylight vibrancy make a conscious rush to leave the dock before the dark arrives.

Novelty shops draw down their steel curtains, liquor stores shelve their duty-free goods and the last of the carriage horses return to stable hours before last light in the hurried closure.

It's common to hear locals advising tourists to stay between the nightclub at Senor Frog's (part of the Hilton) and the cruise terminal at Prince George Dock five blocks away; but even some of the faces that light up the day choose not to linger at night because robbers, drug dealers and panhandlers come out.

On Friday evening, between the time the shops closed and the nightclubs opened, two men attempted to take advantage of Starbucks' later hours through an attempted robbery.

A security guard managed to fend off the would-be robbers, so the business lost no money, but the valuable Nassau waterfront lost a few more hours of business Saturday evening, as the coffee shop closed early that night, shift manager Desra Major not wanting to take any chances after Friday's experience.

When staff heard the scuffle between the guard and the two robbers, she said, a cashier called 919 but police took several minutes longer to respond than she anticipated along the tourist-heavy strip.

United-States-travel-warning is a dirty word to tourism officials, who assure that crime in Downtown Nassau is nowhere nearly bad enough for the U.S. to issue such a warning to American travelers, which would put major strain on U.S.-Bahamian relations.

But it doesn't take a travel warning to scare away, literally, boatloads of money.

Woodes Rogers Walk, the road that runs along the Prince George Waterfront, has seen more than 1.5 million cruise visitors every year since 2000, according to the Ministry of Tourism.

The Ministry also reported that cruise arrivals to Nassau have been decreasing from a 2004 high of almost two million and will likely continue to decline with cruise companies having scheduled five fewer regular calls to the Nassau port.

Cruise companies have opted to sail elsewhere, presumably for the same reasons their negotiators have been citing for years: crime, dirt and conditions of the port.

Carinval Cruise Lines Ltd., the world's largest cruise company, recently designed and built its own cruise terminal at Grand Turk in Turks and Caicos, which cruisecritic.com described as "a destination in its own right, with retail shops, a recreation area right on the beach and a huge pool."

While construction was ongoing in the small island chain that begins just 30 miles from southwestern Bahamas, the company was still griping about conditions at the Prince George Dock in Nassau, according to a shore excursion operator whose company works closely with cruise lines.

During Friday night's most recent addition to the list of cruise ship grievances, Starbucks' security guard, Alfonso Rolle, said one of the robbers (allegedly) reached for a gun before changing his mind and dashing into a pick-up truck waiting around the corner. Another employee ducked out back and noticed that heavy traffic on Bay Street had the getaway truck boxed in – it was stuck on a one way street waiting for the light to turn green.

"They still couldn't catch them," Major said, shaking her head. "It could have been tragic – someone could have gotten hurt."

Major's larger concern is the lack of police presence that gave the would-be robbers the feeling they could make such a brazen move in an area where undercover police are known to be stationed.

"They're there all day, what they need to do is be out here from when the sun go down," Major said.

Her concerns echo repeated calls from the Nassau Tourism and Development Board, a group of Nassau business owners and managers, which has been lobbying for an increased police presence in Downtown Nassau for more than a year.

The policing district for Downtown Nassau comes under the Central Division, headed by Superintendent David Deveaux, who intimated in an interview with The Guardian several weeks ago that he wanted to have more police on the ground in the city's busiest district.

At the time, Deveaux said the number of officers in the Downtown district was insufficient, acknowledging the drug dealers who walk the streets offering marijuana and cocaine in broad daylight and street vendors who harass tourists with beaded bracelets that they slip over a visitor's wrist and demand a "donation."

Deveaux said, "We will have more foot patrol officers on Bay Street with their helmets on, their tunics on, their belts on, their shoes on. People need to see them – know that we're down there."