30,000 braved rain to watch fish in a tank
A steady downpour failed to douse the traffic jam.
Fifteen thousand cars, the newspapers said, inched along to get to Marine Studios, shoreside showplace of the briny deep temple just opening south of St. Augustine.
The soggy motorists and their passengers, 30,000 strong, the papers figured, filled the $500,000 aquarium, the likes of which one had never seen.
Mrs. W.D. Burden, wife of the Marine Studios president, cut the ribbon that opened the wonderland to the word.
Within its two glass tanks, swam the marvels of the marine world — sharks, dolphins, big and lesser fish of every stripe.
“Never before anywhere have I seen such sublime and beautiful marine life,” said noted author Charles Francis Coe, speaking in the stead of two U.S. senators and the governor, who were prevented by the elements of other acts of Providence from attending as scheduled. “I have never seen a more beautiful setting anywhere.”
Marineland stood splendid on the jungle shore in the wilderness 20 miles south of St. Augustine. Conceived as a motion picture set — for an opus about a killer shark with a golden heart, curiously inspired by the classic King Kong, directed by Jacksonville’s Merian Cooper.
Cooper penned wild animals in a stockade to film his jungle classic and Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney figured he would do the same with fish, making a movie of them in an underwater studio.
But Whitney discovered that people were more interested in looking at porpoises than in going to movies about sharks, so he scrapped the shark movie idea and made “Gone With the Wind” instead.
A tangled tale for a place on the wild Florida shore that drew 30,000 from miles around on a rainy day, to watch fish swim in a tank.
Bill Foley was a Times-Union reporter, editor and columnist for more than 40 years. He’s best known for his quirky columns about Jacksonville and Northeast Florida’s history. He wrote this piece in a series of Millennium Moments columns in 1999 leading up to the year 2000. Foley died in 2001 at age 62.