Annie the Dragon

In 1971, Florida artist Louis VanDercar constructed an enormous hollow dragon statue on an outcropping of rock on the Space Coast's Merritt Island. Popular for children to play inside, it was affectionately known as "Annie". After Warren McFadden took over the property in 1981, he used it for many fundraising events for charities like Yellow Umbrella Abused Children Foundation. McFadden made a number of additions and improvements to the statue, such as rigging it to shoot flames out its nostrils on the 4th of July.

Unfortunately, the sculpture partially collapsed into the water and fell apart during a storm in August 2002. The owner and the Brevard County government were unable to come up with a mutually viable plan to rehabilitate it. In 2008, a developer planned a luxury hotel/spa on the site and promised to reconstruct the dragon as the hotel's centerpiece, but like so many developer's promises, it never to came to pass. Many have tried to mount campaigns to bring the sculpture back, but all have stalled. Oddly, it seems virtually everyone in the area wants it to be rebuilt, so why hasn't it?

Above: Annie in her heyday. Below: An old postcard depicting the outcropping before Annie's construction.

The Space Coast

One of Florida's greatest claims to fame, the Space Coast is the area around Merritt Island (where NASA launched Space Shuttles from Kennedy Space Center until the last voyage on July 8, 2011) and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the site of various space launches both civilian and military. Cities in the area include Titusville, Rockledge, Cape Canaveral, Cocoa, Cocoa Beach, Melbourne and Palm Bay. One of the Space Coast's area codes is "321", which was chosen as a deliberate nod to the "3-2-1, liftoff" countdown of space launches.

You can watch rocket launches from a number of handy points on the island, as delineated in the graphic below, swiped from spacecoastlaunches.com.

The place is a veritable space-geek's wet dream, but even without all the rocketry going on, there's plenty of good old fun and sun going on. Me, I like to hang out on Cocoa Beach and slug 'em back at the Mai Tiki Bar on the pier, 800 feet out over the Atlantic.