Looking across Biscayne Boulevard, the 73-foot-diameter SkyLife Balloon today dominates Miami’s Bayfront Park in the very spot where the city’s own Mildred and Claude Pepper Fountain briefly was the metropolitan area’s splashy centerpiece.
The fountain, or what’s left of it, is now the base for what’s to become an advertising-festooned carnival ride floating 500 feet into the air, connected by a steel cable to what was once a complex mechanism whose 36 powerful jets of water and five computerized spray configurations shot skyward to mirror the moods of the sea.
And so Miami goes from the sublime to the ridiculous once again.
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