Endangered attraction

Residents struggle against time, the financial tide and each other to keep Marineland afloat.

By PAUL WILBORN

MARINELAND -- Last week, 15 people lived in this tiny Florida city. As of Sunday, the population had shrunk to five. Still, in the finest human tradition, the locals continue to squabble.

At stake is 150 acres of sand, scrub, dolphin tanks, boat slips and the occasional tiki hut, all commanding a million-dollar view of the Atlantic Ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway halfway between Daytona Beach and St. Augustine.

Everyone here says they love the aging theme park that gave this pseudo-city its name 60 years ago. But in the past month, the shaky marriage of theme park employees, a development company, boaters and one university researcher has broken up, and money is to blame. The dollar figure is $9.7-million, the value of a mysterious 1996 city bond deal that was supposed to save the Marineland attraction.

It didn't. Now almost everybody has a lawyer and a competing plan to keep the 19 dolphins and hundreds of other fish and marine mammals from falling into the hands of bond holders who could sell them off to the highest bidder.

There is only one fact all the people of Marineland agree on -- time is running out.

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Saturday, the narrow Intracoastal Waterway leading out of Marineland was clogged by a steady exodus of powerboats, cabin cruisers and sailboats. On board were the bulk of the city's population, including City Commissioner Doug Wright.

"What you're seeing here," said Wright, a tall, sun-baked grandfather wearing a Marineland cap, "is the literal eviction of a city."

Though he has a house in nearby St. Johns County, Wright claimed residency at the marina across the street from the Marineland park. So did City Commissioner Dennis LaPort. For years, most of Marineland's residents lived on boats at the marina or in a nearby recreational vehicle park.

The only other permanent residents were Jim Netherton, the city's mayor, who lives at a University of Florida cellular research facility at the northern edge of Marineland, and four representatives of an Atlanta developer, who live in prefabricated houses near the old RV park.

Now, both the marina and the RV park are empty, the residents ordered out by Jacoby Development, the Atlanta Wal-Mart builder who picked up a 40-acre chunk of Marineland property after a bankruptcy proceeding in 1998.

Two of the city's six commissioners left when the RV park closed. Now two more are going, though not without a fight. Wright doesn't have to look far to see the person who delivered his eviction order. She's City Commissioner Christine Connell, who works for Jacoby Development.

It's not the eviction that bothers Wright so much. The marina needed major repairs. But he calls the evictions a scheme by Jim Jacoby to clear Marineland of its independent elected officials and voters. He points across the street to the Marineland attraction.

"They want to tear the place down. They want the dolphins and, by privatizing the city, they can do what they want," Wright said.

Connell, sitting across A1A in an abandoned restaurant that has been converted into offices, says that's not what she or developer Jim Jacoby have in mind.

"We've gotten horrendous press as this big bad developer, but that's not who we are," Connell said.

Although no plans have been formally announced or approved, Connell says the land around Marineland will become an "Eco-village." She describes a dolphin therapy center for handicapped children, using four dolphins the company has leased from the attraction. Developers also are talking about a village around a town center, much like Seaside Village in the Florida Panhandle. And a refurbished marina.

Connell, a 38-year-old Florida native, hopes the Marineland park can stay open, but she worries how it will deal with the $9.7-million in bonds that it must repay.

"There's a question of what to do about the attraction," she says. "It's on the verge of bankruptcy."

She doesn't like the plan floated by Wright, LaPort and David Internoscia, the park's general manager. They want to levy Marineland's first-ever property taxes to help pay the bond bill. The only possible taxpayer in the city is Jacoby Development.

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Since it was created in 1938, by industrialist Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, Marineland has been more than an attraction. It continues to be a metaphor for a state where raw beauty and crass commerce collide. Where even the grandest visions require a huckster at the gate, hawking the product.

Whitney envisioned an underwater movie studio, and he built it. Hollywood came, shooting scenes for Tarzan movies, B-grade horror films like Revenge of the Creature, and some episodes of the television program, Sea Hunt, which ran from 1957 to 1961.

But Whitney quickly opened the tanks to curious tourists and incorporated the land on both sides of A1A into a city so Marineland could appear on Florida maps and road signs and he could collect taxes on cigarettes and booze sold at his Dolphin Restaurant.

In the years after World War II, American parents packed up their baby boomers and made vacation pilgrimages to see trained dolphins leap from the water in unison, bounce balls off their snouts and swipe fish dangling from the teeth of tanned trainers. For almost three decades, Marineland was Florida's top tourist attraction until a mouse moved to Orlando and everything changed.

By the time Ronald Reagan was in his second term, an aging Whitney sold his equally aging creation. The new group of investors, in keeping with the times, saw the deal as a real estate investment and envisioned money by the tankful. But the park's paint was chipping and its customers were going other places. The developers did little to change that.

Ten years later, another group of developers arrived with a plan. Since Marineland was a city, why not float tax-free municipal bonds to buy the land and restore the park?

A handpicked City Commission, outnumbered by lawyers, bond counsels and investment bankers, approved the plan. But two years later, the company was bankrupt, the $9.7-million was gone and Marineland was still as faded as an old Polaroid.

Only this time, the park owed almost $900,000 a year to the bond holders.

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In a state where theme parks are calculated corporate creations, Marineland is an old mom-and-pop store.

There's a shell parking lot, divided by untended palm trees, dead fronds withering around their trunks like shedded skin. A fudge shop sells lemonade and ice cream. A woman under a thatched-roof tiki hut makes burgers.

When it's busy, general manager David Internoscia, wearing shorts and smoking a cigarette, steps in to help cook.

Internoscia is a retired accountant from New Jersey hired last year to put the park's finances in order. The numbers didn't work. Internoscia closed the park, kept a handful of key employees and tried to shore up the finances and the concrete.

Last winter, local volunteers applied gallons of white and aqua blue paint. The chipped concrete in the tanks was patched. The grounds were replanted. The park reopened in March and Internoscia says it has made money every week. Enough to pay the bills, but not the debt service.

Still, he's optimistic.

"I took on a mission," he said. "I want to save Marineland."

Not for himself, he maintains, but for the people who remember the place and want to bring their kids here.

Vivian Bowlus came to Marineland in the back seat of her parents' car 25 years ago. Now she has brought her children, Felicia and Christian, to see the dolphins jump.

"I wasn't expecting much," she says. "But this is sweet. The three of us got in here for $20. And we're seeing some good dolphin shows."

From a narrow, underground hallway, the kids peered through scratched plastic portholes as Joe Mayernick dove among the sea turtles, rays and giant grouper. Later, from a grandstand overlooking a rectangular pool, they saw Mayernick toss a rubber ball toward a dolphin, which caught it while swimming backward.

Mayernick, who has been here since 1986, works in all the shows. He also helps maintain the pumps that bring in filtered sea water to fill the tanks. And after the shows, he pushes a bleach-coated broom over the concrete walkways near the tanks.

"You do a little bit of everything around here," he said.

Mayernick, 34, is tall, with the lean muscles of a surfer. His brown hair is pulled into a long braid in back. His eyes are as blue as the shimmering surface of the dolphin pool. He talks of Marineland having a different "head" than the corporate parks.

"We're more laid back. We're trying to preserve the character of old Florida," he says. "We're what Florida was before all the negative stuff."

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Piloting a boat out of the Marineland marina, it doesn't take long for the view to change from scrub and sand and salt water to more man-made vistas.

Wooden stilt houses hunker above the sand like crabs on spindly legs. Next come condominium corridors and curving cul-de-sacs connecting modern, single-family homes. When Cornelius Whitney built Marineland, it was in the middle of nowhere. Now, somewhere is edging closer.

Less than a mile north of Marineland, a convenience store has been carved out of the scrub. A billboard rises behind it. The board's three-word message, visible to the boaters evicted from Marineland: KEEP FLORIDA BEAUTIFUL!