Dig deep into Fort Lauderdale’s past before boring tunnel

Someone should warn Elon Musk: He’s boring under the Boulevard of Broken Dreams.

Musk’s plan is to wow Fort Lauderdale with his otherworldly tunnel project, but he’s wowing folks who for years have been wowed up the wazoo, with not much to show for it. This is the place where grandiose proposals go to die.

Musk’s wonderfully named The Boring Company plans a subterranean loop from downtown Fort Lauderdale to the beach and back, in which tourists and locals, for a fee, can zoom back and forth in nifty Tesla sedans like electric prairie dogs.

An under-Uber. Which sounds preposterous, though not as preposterous as the notion, when he took over a struggling electric roadster manufacturer a dozen years ago, that the mercurial Musk could build Tesla into the world’s most valuable car company. Or turn SpaceX into a viable commercial space venture. No doubt Musk can remove the fi from sci-fi. (He has already completed a 1.7 mile Tesla tunnel in Las Vegas, with another 29 miles on order.)

After the Fort Lauderdale City Commission voted to fund a $375,000 feasibility study Tuesday to gauge the loopiness of a 5.4-mile underground loop, it occurred to me that the route would be burrowing under a boggling number of grand and exciting projects that never materialized.

They include an elevated monorail (circa

1983) running through downtown Fort Lauderdale and connecting with a 165-mph Orlando-to-Miami bullet train. That should not be confused with the magnetic-levitation monorail (1994) connecting the airport to the cruise terminals at Port Everglades.

In 1991, the city was offered a bargain price for a — shall we say “pre-owned” — monorail that previously shuttled tourists around the Miami Seaquarium. Ready to roll. Yours today for just $500,000. (Tracks not included.) All it needed was a sandblasting and a fresh coat of paint.

Twelve months later, nothing. Thirty years later, still nothing.

The most recent big idea to wither in in our subtropical languor was the WAVE streetcar system. Sixteen years in the making, funded and shovel-ready, it was turned to dust by the city commission in 2018. After all those years, we were so damn close to, well, something one might find in an actual city: a 2.8 mile transit system that could eventually expand to Sawgrass Mills or the airport.

But no.

Lately, there’s fanciful talk of an intercounty monorail connecting the college campuses in Davie with Hard Rock Stadium and points south. If all our transit proposals were laid end-to-end, we could finally get somewhere during rush hour.

We’re especially brutal when it comes to aquariums. The latest project, abandoned amid the pandemic, would have used a kaput department store in the Galleria mall. Much grander, public-funded aquariums have been proposed and discarded in the vicinity of the Museum of Discovery and Science (1992) and on a city-owned lot by the Intracoastal Waterway (1993). Instead, we have a parking garage, albeit a nicely illuminated one.

Fort Lauderdale’s thwarted visionaries once planned a tunnel instead of replacing

17th Street Causeway (1987), not far from the never-did-happen 300-acre WorldGate marina and office park (1990). And whatever happened to those movie studios on Southwest 13th Street (1985)?

Fort Lauderdale still awaits that promised

$60 million Wet ‘n’ Wild waterpark near Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport, the same site where the Schlitterbahn Corp. planned its

$110 million waterpark (2013), in the vicinity of impresario Zev Bufman’s never-to-be outdoor amphitheater (1988).

We were once titillated by Wayne Huizenga’s Blockbuster Park (aka “Wayne’s World”), a 3,000-acre sports and entertainment complex with hotels, water park, virtual reality amusement park and arenas for his pro baseball and hockey teams (1993), which might have been built either west of the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport or south of Miramar. Neither, it turned out.

My favorite outlandish proposal was Die Mauer Erlebnispark (1995), a 20-acre, $30 million theme park off I-95, the theme of which was life behind the Iron Curtain. The park would have featured a Cold War museum, hotel and various rides and attractions that recalled fun times in the old Soviet bloc, surrounded by a concertina-topped wall, overseen by an “authentic” East Berlin guard tower. And you thought Elon Musk was fanciful.

Too bad Die Mauer Erlebnispark never happened. Musk could have tunneled under the Berlin — make that Berlinish — Wall and whisked its befuddled patrons to freedom in subterranean Teslas.

Nothing boring about that.