Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids: A History of One of Florida's Oldest Roadside Attractions (review)

The scholarly study of how Americans spend their leisure time has accelerated in the past two decades. Some works like Roy Rosenzweig's Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (1985) and Kathy Peiss' Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York (1986) place class at the core of the discussions. Others, like Going Out: the Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1999) by David Nasaw, study the issue of leisure time more broadly. No matter what the focus, academics are recognizing the importance of leisure in the daily lives of average Americans. As well they should. Throughout the twentieth century, as leisure time and incomes rose, there were more opportunities for Americans to spend free time at a baseball game, motion picture, or amusement park. Coupled with this was the development and widespread use of the automobile (over a vastly improved network of federal and state highways and interstates) which allowed Americans more freedom of choice as to how to spend their nonworking hours. The new federal and state routes afforded enterprising entrepreneurs new opportunities to provide roadside attractions for the masses of vacationers and locals seeking an afternoon of fun and frolic. Such was the development of Weeki Wachee, Florida's city of mermaids.

This new book, Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids: A History of One of Florida's Oldest Roadside Attractions, is a serious examination of what many might term a kitschy attraction that developed in the late 1940s. The authors use varied sources, including oral histories, to look at how such an unusual entertainment form emerged and evolved. The picture that emerges is less one of kitsch but rather of a complex marriage of athleticism, new technology, and showmanship presented in a unique venue—that of the underwater theater.

The west coast of Florida, where Weeki Wachee is located (about 60 miles north of Tampa), began to develop following World War II, especially with the construction of route U.S. 19, which runs from Erie, Pennsylvania, to Memphis, Florida. This part of the Sunshine State is blessed with an abundance of clear, deep springs, which make it ideal for the underwater shows. The authors organize the book chronologically, beginning with a discussion of the development of the springs and the reactions of both the Native Americans and the European conquerors that arrived in the sixteenth century in what is now Florida. The Florida land boom, which began in the late nineteenth century on the state's east coast, largely through the efforts of Henry Flagler and Henry Plant (nicely documented in The Architecture of Leisure: The Florida Resort Hotels of Henry Flagler and Henry Plant [2002] by Susan R. Braden), spread to the Gulf Coast as well by the end of World War I. While the Great Depression and World War II brought a temporary end to the land boom, the prosperity following the war revived interest in Florida real estate. It is at this point that the authors turn toward the development of Weeki Wachee and the other nearby springs, Silver Springs, and Wakulla Springs as entertainment venues. The clarity of Florida's natural springs attracted Hollywood, with MGM filming Tarzan movies at Silver Springs, earning it the sobriquet of the "underwater film capital."

Two of the major personalities who evolved underwater theater into an art form, Newt Perry and Hal Smith, enliven the story. Perry, who was nicknamed the "Human Fish" because of his ability to hold his breath under water for inordinate lengths of time, had been "dreaming for years about finding a spring-like Weeki Wachee, a place where he could sink a theater and put on underwater shows" (20). According to Penny Smith Vrooman, Hal's daughter, her father loved the clarity of the springs as well and also dreamed of doing underwater...