Weeki Wachee, city of mermaids : a history of one of Florida's oldest roadside attractions
In the postwar explosion of domestic tourism, when Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and Tampa offered the ideal vacation for American families, Weeki Wachee was a kitschy detour just off the grueling two-lane West Coast highway. In a sparsely inhabited part of the state, who could miss the roadside mermaids that flagged travelers down? The exotic fantasyland was a city of mythical mermaids and mermen living in a breathtaking natural spring. They combined the allure of pinup girls with the wholesome talents of variety entertainers to create a daily schedule of underwater acts ranging from eating bananas and performing ballet to staging watery musicals. For sixty years, the mermaids and their aquatic talents have attracted crowds of vacationers, film crews and celebrities. In Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids, Lu Vickers and Sara Dionne reveal the remarkable history of a park that began as a local curiosity and became an international attraction. Book cover
Print Book, English, ©2007
University Press of Florida, Gainesville, ©2007
History
xvi, 295 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 19 x 27 cm.
9780813030418, 0813030412
71237360
Florida : a watery dreamscape
The human fish
Wakulla : fit palace for Neptune
Transforming myth into kitsch
The forties and fifties : Weeki Wachee's glamour shot
The sixties : from Elvis to Don Knotts
The seventies : the era of the mouse
The eighties : the age of acquisition
The nineties : from the encyclopedia of bad taste to the tails of yesteryear
The merlinnium : a return to the sublime