A new MiMo home awaits the Coppertone Girl

This famous Coppertone sign, featuring a young girl and her frisky dog, mooned over downtown Miami for nearly five decades. It has been an object of great interest to the MiMo Association in recent years. Upon learning that the sign would have to be removed from its Flagler Street location of the past 13 years, association members took it upon themselves to find the girl and her dog a new home in the MiMo/Biscayne Boulevard Historic District in Miami’s Upper Eastside. As part of the process, former caretakers Dade Heritage Trust deeded the sign to the MiMo Association for the restoration and relocation work. Now it seems the association could be in the final stages of securing a new site for the ageless 49-year-old.

Besides working out a contract with Hye Realty and ensuring proper financing, the association will need to obtain a “certificate of appropriateness” from the city’s Historic and Environmental Preservation Board. The board is composed of citizen appointees charged with promoting and protecting Miami’s heritage. Any significant changes to the exterior of a building in an historic district, for example, must pass their review. Board members are empowered by the city’s historic-preservation ordinance. In other words, if they don’t approve, the sign won’t get the necessary city permits, and it stays unlit in a warehouse. Two designs for attaching the sign to the building were to be presented to the board on September 2.

Although nearly indistinguishable at first glance, the two designs display the sign in different positions. One of those has the base of the sign 17 feet off the ground. While this positioning will keep the sign out of the reach of most vandals, it would mean the girl’s pigtails will rise above the rooftop, which could prove problematic for city officials. (If you are a certain well-connected artist, you might get your oversized and colorful girl hung slightly off the wall of, say, a tall, blue apartment building in Wynwood with little resistance from city officials. Mere mortals wisely present a second design, just in case.)

The alternative placement is only seven feet lower, but that’s enough to bring the girl’s head below the roof line. This position is less appealing on a visual level, but more important, the sign’s safety comes into question. At only ten feet off the ground, a pair of vandals could easily steal or damage the Coppertone letters. Since these letters are vintage and, in essence, irreplaceable, that buffer zone becomes vital. Besides, the higher placement just looks nicer.

The location could not be better for the Coppertone Girl and her admirers. Situated at the northern end of the MiMo/Biscayne Boulevard Historic District, the sign can greet visitors motoring down Biscayne Boulevard into the heart of the area. The building itself is a stylish white, four-story structure that fortunately -- for the sign’s purposes -- has no windows on its inviting north wall. (Owned by Hye Realty, whose principal is Miami businesswoman Debra Ohanian, the building’s ground floor is occupied by Open Doors, a contemporary furniture store owned by designer Stephanie Tyler, a MiMo activist.)

Erected in 1964, the building is only five years younger than the sign itself and one of the more minimalist structures in the era. If opposites attract, this is certainly a match made in heaven, or at least in a vibrant corner of the often paradisiacal Miami. Just across the street is the Vagabond Motel, one of the landmark MiMo buildings in the district (see cover story “Big Man on the Boulevard”). The juxtaposition of the two icons just yards from each other could enhance each other’s distinctiveness in a playful manner appropriate to the MiMo era in which they were created.

MiMo, or Miami Modern, is an architectural style that blossomed here after World War II. It is a subset of a larger modernist movement. That building boom lasted roughly 20 years and was so extensive that Miami is considered one of the top locations in the world to see it. Because the style was directed mostly at the service industry (hotels and motels in particular), the architecture needed to be eye-catching, the advertising even more so. The Coppertone Girl’s homegrown kitschy appeal neatly captured the era, making it worthy of historic preservation and inclusion within the historic district.

Should the negotiations fail or the city reject the plans, there are other contenders in the area for the sign. Most notably, the Historic and Environmental Preservation Board issued a “certificate of appropriateness” in June for the owners of a proposed car wash at 6405 Biscayne Blvd. to “work” with the MiMo Association. Negotiations between the property owners and the association slumped when the association’s board rejected the viability of that location for a car wash, but talks could resume if needed.

However, if current negotiations do produce a contract with Hye Realty prior to the September 2 meeting of the preservation board, and if the city gives the location and placement its blessing, the final hurdle will be approval from the Schering-Plough Corp., which now owns the Coppertone trademark. The company has offered to help the project financially.

If everything falls perfectly into place, Tropical Signs of Florida will be installing the girl and her puppy as early as December. Under the direction of Jerry Bengis, the Hialeah-based company has been working on the sign’s restoration following its removal from the Flagler location this past May. Adding yet another layer of historical value, it was Bengis’s father who built the sign and placed it at its original downtown Biscayne Boulevard location on the now-demolished Parkleigh Building in 1959.

Having the Coppertone girl restored and returned to Boulevard in time for her 50th birthday next year has been, until recently, only wishful thinking on the part of everyone involved. But now things are really looking up.

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