Paradise Park was the ""colored only"" counterpart to Silver Springs, a central Florida tourist attraction famous for its crystal-clear water and glass bottom boats. From 1949 to 1969, boats passed each other on the Silver River - blacks on one side, whites on the other. Though the patrons of both parks shared the same river, they never crossed the invisible line in the water. Full of vivid photographs, vintage advertisements, and interviews with employees and patrons, Remembering Paradise Park portrays a place of delight and leisure during the painful era of Jim Crow. Racial violence was at its height in Florida - the famous Groveland rape case happened right as Paradise Park opened - and many African Americans saw the park as a safe place for families. It was a popular vacation spot for the area's strong black community, which outnumbered the white community as early as the Civil War and had become one of the most cohesive and prosperous black populations in the South. This book compares the park to other tourist destinations set aside for African Americans in the state and across the country. Though Silver Springs was Florida's only attraction to operate a parallel facility for African Americans, Paradise Park has been just a whisper in the story of Florida tourism until now.

In the postwar explosion of domestic tourism, Weeki Wachee spring offered the quintessential vacation fantasy, a city of colourful mermaids in a natural crystal spring right off the West Coast highway in a sparsely inhabited Florida. In those early days, the mermaids had to stand alongside the highway to flag travellers down, but once word of their charms got out, travellers headed south to playgrounds in Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, and Tampa found Weeki Wachee a tantalising detour from the gruelling two-lane road connecting vacationland with the work-a-day world to the north. Vickers shows how that local novelty became a stellar international attraction. Founded in 1947 by Walton Hall Smith and Newt Perry, Weeki Wachee and its featured attraction, mermaids, combined the allure of pinup girls with the wholesome talents of variety entertainers to create a daily schedule of underwater acts ranging from eating bananas and performing ballet to staging underwater musicals. For nearly 60 years, these mermaids with their underwater talents have attracted crowds of vacationers, film crews, and celebrities. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as interviews with dozens of mermaids and other park employees, Vickers traces the park's rise to prominence. Brilliantly illustrated with 250 stunning photos, the resulting work shows what it was like to be a mermaid at Weeki Wachee in its heyday. Weeki Wachee Mermaids also explores the enduring appeal of the attraction. Once people get past Weeki Wachee's once crumbling, recently restored exterior, they continue to be just as genuinely awed by the mermaids as Elvis was.