Cypress Gardens is the latest tourist attraction bailed out by the state. But many ask if it is money well spent.
By JULIE HAUSERMAN
Published September 15, 2003
TALLAHASSEE - The Southern belles were at the end of their ropes.
It isn't easy to sit on the floor of the Capitol wearing a giant hoop skirt. The governor and the politicians droned on. Finally, it was time to talk about the future of their shuttered workplace, Cypress Gardens.
Its fans pleaded last month for the state's help to revive the park, closed since April. The belles cheered when the Cabinet voted in their favor, putting Cypress Gardens on the list of environmental land the state should buy.
But now, some people wonder if the state's limited land-preservation money should go to bail out another failed tourist attraction that couldn't make it in modern Florida.
It's a growing list: Silver Springs, Rainbow Springs, Wakulla Springs, Homosassa Springs, Weeki Wachee Springs.
And now Cypress Gardens, home of the belles, water skiing troupes, a Florida-shaped swimming pool, and an 18-foot high floral topiary Easter bunny.
"This is a new twist," said John Ryan, an activist with the Polk County chapter of the Sierra Club. "Cypress Gardens has no known special environmental attributes. Golf courses have as much environmental resources as Cypress Gardens does, and nobody's proposing to preserve old golf courses."
The state's $300-million-a-year Florida Forever conservation program requires the state to use any property it buys for public purposes. So the state isn't proposing to buy Cypress Gardens outright. Instead, the Trust for Public Land, a private group, might buy it, then act as a intermediary to preserve the park.
The state would buy the development rights, and someone else would buy the park and run it.
The current owners, a group of former employees, are rumored to have plans to build houses where the gardens are, but they would need to rezone the land to do it. Yet, supporters got Gov. Jeb Bush and the Cabinet to quickly add the gardens to the land-buying list, even though the deadline had passed.
Most Florida Forever money buys environmentally significant land. But the program also buys cultural or historical property. That's how Cypress Gardens qualified. How much will it cost? No one's saying yet. Appraisals are in the works.
"It's going to be a big chunk of money, and whatever chunk of money they spend to buy a theme park is not going to be used to preserve something that's pristine and undamaged," said Eric Draper of Florida Audubon.
Draper says that's not what the Florida Forever program intended.
"You could protect panthers and manatees and black bears and springs, which are probably the most endangered natural resources in our state," Draper said. "Instead, we're buying a fairly insignificant little landscape that's fairly artificial."
It is one of Florida's oldest attractions, a remnant of the days when tourists stopped at Dog Land near Chiefland, Africa USA near Boca Raton, Phosphate Valley Exposition in Bartow and the Atomic Tunnel near Daytona Beach (a Cold War nuclear fallout shelter where the promoter charged people to look inside. "Watch for the happy walking fish!" an old poster says.)
Of 130 major roadside attractions that sprang up between 1929 and 1971, fewer than 30 were still operating at the end of 1998, writes Ken Breslauer, author of Roadside Paradise, a catalog of old attractions.
Africa USA, for example, went bust after inspectors found an African red tick outbreak, forcing an animal quarantine. The promoter sold the property for $1-million to a Rhode Island developer, who built a subdivision. For years, Breslauer writes, monkeys, peacocks and other wild animals roamed the Camino Gardens suburb.
Other parks died when highways bypassed them or Walt Disney World opened, wowing visitors with special effects that made the roadside attractions seem hokey.
"A lot of these sites, I think it is important for the state to step in and save them," Breslauer said. "There's probably no site that's played a bigger role in tourism other than Cypress Gardens."
It opened in 1936, after Florida tourism promoter Dick Pope dredged wetlands on Lake Eloise in Polk County, about 35 miles south of Orlando.
He hired $1-a-day workers during the Depression to turn the original cypress forest - "worthless!" says a promotional video - into meticulous lawns with exotic plants from around the world. The belles were brought in after a freeze left brown leaves in its wake; the idea was to hide the bad-looking plants behind pretty girls in hoop skirts.
The gardens have a storied business history, too. Two companies, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Busch Entertainment Corp., tried to revive the park but eventually sold it.
Claiming a loss of $6-million, a management group that took over the park in 1995 said in April that it had run out of money. About 530 workers, including the belles, were out of luck. The workers sued, saying they didn't get adequate notice.
The state stepped in after Bush got thousands of e-mails from Cypress Gardens fans. Other theme park operators and developers are circling, hoping to buy the park and revive it.
One wants to add amusement rides. One wants to turn it into "The Smithsonian of the South" with museum exhibits.
It's hard to know what would bring people back to the Gardens. In recent years, 94 percent of the visitors were elderly people who remembered the old movies filmed there, with Esther Williams gliding in the Florida-shaped pool. Today, the Florida pool is filled with algae.
"I think there's always a big question: Why is it failing?" said Joy Hampp, general manager of Marineland, south of St. Augustine, which opened in 1938, went into bankruptcy recently and reopened with a new theme: focusing less on elaborate shows and more on marine education.
"If something's not working, should the state come in? On the one hand, it's a part of Florida history," Hampp said. "On the other hand, I don't know if that's as much of a priority as other things in the state."
John Ryan, of the Polk County Sierra Club, says his group decided not to oppose the Cypress Gardens purchase as long as it goes through the same hoops that environmental projects face.
"Back in the 1940s and '50s, a lot of things were done to that property that wouldn't be allowed now," he said. "But, in the scheme of things, a purchase by the state is probably better than a land development."
