The life and times of the Miami Seaquarium: Star attraction to troubled landmark
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The end of the Seaquarium
A Miami landmark, once a star attraction but recently a troubled theme park, is making way for redevelopment.
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When Lolita died two years ago, the killer whale’s longtime home went into its own death spiral.
The Seaquarium — battling animal-rights accusations and a landlord that wanted the attraction out — couldn’t survive for long.
And it won’t.
The marine theme park’s final day is Sunday, Oct. 12 — 70 years after the attraction opened on a stretch of waterfront Virginia Key on Sept. 24, 1955.
“As a native Miamian and having handled their PR in the ‘80s and again in the 2000s, I always have held a fondness for the Miami Seaquarium,” said C.L. Conroy, a strategic communications consultant in Miami. “But those were different times. It’s a shame to see it close after all these years. But the industry and attitudes have changed so much the past few years.”
Time caught up with the Seaquarium. A faded Miami attraction surrounded by competition. A wave of concern about the health and treatment of the marine mammals. The quest to redevelop the waterfront property.
It all added up to the demise of a Miami landmark.
It took years, but groups like PETA and Friends of Lolita, a whale freedom advocacy group, were heard.
PETA, a Virginia-based nonprofit animal-rights organization that was formed in March 1980, about three weeks after Lolita’s tankmate Hugo died in the Whale Bowl at the Seaquarium, released a statement celebrating the announced shutdown:
“Champagne corks are popping at PETA, following the news that the Miami Seaquarium is finally having to shut its doors after more than 50 long years of imprisoning sick and suffering animals.”
Miami developer David Martin and his subsidiary, Terra, plan to take over the troubled property and redevelop the tourist attraction that once was Miami’s version of Disney.
What are the developers getting for the $22.5 million investment for a county lease? Priceless memories with a whale-sized history. And a prime piece of waterfront land.
Walt had Mickey. Wometco, a former corporate owner of the Miami Seaquarium, had a bottlenosed dolphin named Flipper.
Young boaters zipping along Biscayne Bay may be surprised to learn that the waffle-shaped gold dome looming off the coruscating Miami waters once contained one of Florida’s most popular attractions.
1950s: Birth of a marine marvel
Dolphins, seven bottlenose like Flipper, were there when the park opened as Florida’s largest marine attraction and one of the biggest in the United States in September 1955. The mammals were under the direction of visionary Adolph Frohn, a Bavarian-born circus-animal trainer, who aimed to teach the dolphins tricks that were more sophisticated than rising halfway out of the water for a fish, the Miami Herald reported at the time.
Over the years, Flipper and company and their ancestors were trained to flip, toss beach balls to spectators and perform stunts in response to a trainer’s subtle hand gestures.
The Seaquarium also sold admission tickets by drawing on locals and international travelers interest in seeing sea lions, seals, and the venue’s massive reef tank.
Florida, a decade removed from World War II, wasn’t just about its beaches.
1960s: Flipper’s fame
That sleek creature gliding through the Flipper Lagoon challenged Mickey Mouse for world’s most adorable movie and TV character during the marine park’s 1960s heyday.
“Flipper,” an Ivan Tors-produced TV series filmed at the Miami Seaquarium, aired 88 episodes over three seasons on NBC from 1964 to 1967. The TV show was a spin-off from two successful movies, 1963’s “Flipper” starring Chuck Connors, and its 1964 sequel, “Flipper’s New Adventure.”
A crew of seven Seaquarium dolphins performed in the role of Flipper for the TV show that co-starred Brian Kelly and child actors Luke Halpin and Tommy Norden.
Norden, 73, visited the Seaquarium for the 25th and 50th anniversaries of the “Flipper” character in 1986 and 2013.
The decade’s other star: Carolina Snowball. She was a white albino dolphin, and Sonny Boy was her baby.
ARCHIVES: Meet the Seaquarium stars: Flipper, Salty, Lolita, Hugo, Carolina Snowball
1970s: The orcas era
Flipper was soon joined by killer whales Hugo, in 1968, and Lolita, in 1970, and they were trained to share Seaquarium’s star billing.
The marine landmark would need its biggest stars: Hugo and Lolita, who was also called Tokitae — Toki for short — the regal name given the orca by a group of indigenous people in Washington state that had advocated a return to her native waters. But she became best known as Lolita, the performing star at the Miami Seaquarium.
The Seaquarium reigned from the Rickenbacker Causeway as an international beacon.
But then came Walt Disney World’s arrival in Central Florida on Oct. 1, 1971. The Miami attraction weathered the subsequent roster of theme parks in Orlando that followed Disney’s Magic Kingdom, including Sea World in 1973, where parts of “Jaws 3-D” were filmed in 1983.
Epcot followed in 1982 and Universal Studios Florida in 1990.
The Seaquarium survived, pivoting over the decades, perhaps most beloved as an outdoor classroom for grade school tours and for family visits to see marine stars perform. Flipper and descendants. Hugo and Lolita. Salty the Sea Lion.
Fans could take all of these stars home thanks to Mold-a-Rama machines dotted through the 60-acre park. These kid-magnet machines formed figurines for a quarter that were made from melted wax-like plastic beads poured through black octopus-like piping into sweating metal pincher molds. Today, the price for one of these Seaquarium souvenirs runs about $4.
These contraptions used 200-degree temperatures and the muscle of Hercules to press and release a finished, cooled mantelpiece memento into a silver chute and trap door from which young visitors would eagerly hoist their delicate treasure. The crayon-like aroma of melted plastic is as much a nostalgic trigger symbolizing childhood and parenthood for generations, as memories of getting splashed by Hugo and Lolita.
1980s: Football and the beginning of a dive
A columnist for the Miami News once wrote a humor column opining that the 1983 Super Bowl-bound Miami Dolphins — yes, that happened — were playing NFL’s biggest game under the wrong name. He reached out to the Seaquarium to make his case.
The team logo on the Dolphins’ helmets, writer John Keasler opined, sported a bottlenose dolphin like Flipper. He suggested the team amend its fight song and even its name to shoehorn the proper dolphin variety in its lyric. “The Miami Bottlenosed Dolphins.” Flipper already had some history with the Dolphins, performing in a tank in the Orange Bowl for the new professional football team in the mid-1960s.
But the attraction had hit its first hurdle by the end of 1979: waning interest.
After 28 years of profits, red ink swirled in the Miami Seaquarium’s books by 1982. Attendance had topped a million visitors annually but that number dropped below the million mark by 1980.
Arthur Hertz, the former chair of owner Wometco, said the Seaquarium lost about $276,000 in 1982 because of a slumping tourist economy. Hertz faced a $500,000 loss by 1983.
So when the Miami News columnist suggested Miami’s high-flying Dolphins shine its wattage on the struggling attraction, a Seaquarium spokesman at the time addressed the question, “Aren’t our Miami Dolphins really and truly Miami bottlenosed dolphins?” The answer: “Yep, just like Flipper.”
That same December 1983, the soaring University of Miami Hurricanes football team was on the way to its first national championship under coach Howard Schnellenberger. The Seaquarium caught the football spirit by inviting Schnellenberger to attend the christening of its newborn manatee.
The attraction named the 75-pound baby, “Hurricane.” Schnellenberger fed carrots to the rest of the manatees, including Hurricane’s mom and pop, Romeo and Juliet, in the Seaquarium’s pool.
“I wish,” said Schnellenberger, “that some of my linebackers were as big as these creatures.”
Pop superstar Michael Jackson was in Miami for the Jackson brothers’ Victory Tour and he was even more popular than the Dolphins and Canes in 1984. Marine park workers feverishly and fruitlessly tried to lure Jackson to the venue by imagining a poster image of Lolita with a white glove in her mouth and a caption reading, “Where is Michael Jackson?”
Jackson was several miles away at the Orange Bowl. But the Seaquarium had already lured The Great One, comedian Jackie Gleason, from Miami Beach where he’d filmed his TV show, to visit Hugo in his tank in the late-1960s.
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By 1985, the Seaquarium saw a bit of a resurgence after several lean years — the worst, 1980, when Hugo died of a brain aneurysm, possibly from years of bashing his head against the tank he shared with Lolita. Hugo was unceremoniously laid to rest without fanfare, reportedly in a county landfill. Lolita spent her next 43 years living alone in her tank, performing at her trainers’ behest for the public.
Still, the park continued to capture attention, and the Seaquarium’s principal performers — 16 dolphins, 15 sea lions and Lolita, along with thousands of small tropical fish, hundreds of birds and turtles, a handful of sharks and eight manatees — did their part to attract visitors.
The American Ballet Theater was also tapped to come to Miami for a shared performance with two of the Seaquarium’s star manatees, Romeo and Juliet.
“We thought it would be a cute thing to do,” C.L. Conroy, then an account executive with Hank Meyer Associates, told the Miami Herald in 1985.
Conroy had to buy a half-dozen long-stemmed red roses for the promotional photo shot. “It was in case the manatees ate them all,” she said at the time.
Forty years later, the memories still abound for Conroy.
“When I got to know the vets and caregivers for the place and how much they knew and appreciated the mammals, and the behind-the-scenes stories they had to tell, it gave a new appreciation.”
1990s: Flipper’s finale
In 1997, the last of the original bottlenose dolphins that starred as film and TV’s Flipper died. Her name was Bebe. She was 40 and died at the Seaquarium where she was born in 1956, one year after the theme park opened.
Animal rights activists started to gain traction, protesting the confinement of the venue’s dolphins and Lolita.
Lolita was the focus of a “Free Lolita” campaign, inspired by movies like “Free Willy” in 1993.
2000s: Goodbye to Lolita and to the Seaquarium
Summer campers and South Florida elementary schoolchildren were still shepherded across the Rickenbacker Causeway attraction on field trips to visit the mammal billed with a mouthful of a name, “Lolita, the Killer Whale,” through the 2000s and 2010s.
Despite that title, Renee Sweeney, a former Seaquarium show consultant during the Wometco era, remembered a gentle creature upon Lolita’s 2023 death from kidney failure and age in the Miami Herald’s obituary for the marine star.
“All I did was was say ‘good morning’ to an amazing animal, and rub her tongue in the quiet of the early morning,” Sweeney said in mourning.
By the 2010s and 2020s, activist campaigns, fueled by social media posts and national media coverage, cemented the Miami Seaquarium’s demise.
The venue’s Mexico-based owners, The Dolphin Company, told reporters it had tried to restore the fading attraction since taking over operations in 2022. By 2024, the Seaquarium, under damning inspection reports that found, among other citations, two dolphins had ingested a two-inch nail and a broken bolt, lost its accreditation from American Humane’s animal welfare certification program. That loss left the Seaquarium in violation of its lease with Miami-Dade County.
David Martin, the developer, plans to keep the Seaquarium name and build a new aquarium on the grounds, if he wins approval from Miami-Dade County. The remaining marine mammals will be shipped to new homes. A marina, restaurants and a public baywalk will wind along Biscayne Bay.
What about the landmark gold dome?
It will likely survive the new waterfront plans, keeping alive a piece of the Seaquarium and South Florida history.
This story was originally published October 10, 2025 at 7:09 AM.
