Naked Lady Park

If childhood is a mountain to climb, we knew we’d reached new heights when we got to the top of her tits. As a child of the 1980s, a visit to Naked Lady Park (or Dante Fascell Park, as the City of South Miami officially calls it) meant an opportunity to climb on a big, concrete nude body. An enormous, abstracted lady’s body, sunbathing continuously since 1968. Her posture—her entire demeanor—is relaxed and unfussed. She leans on smooth, elongated concrete hands, arms as solid as columns, her oblong head tilted toward the sun.  

Then there are her breasts, or tits as we called them. There was no other word for them. Pert, enormous mirrors of one another, they jut out from her torso like platforms, daring us to step up onto them. 

Naked Lady Park is still there today, just off Red Road in South Miami. This park always felt distinct. It teemed with life, a thriving jewel of South Florida’s pine rocklands and hardwood hammock.  When child-me was frequenting the park in the 1980s, the City mowed a big patch of the eight-acre plot, including the area where the naked lady was sunbathing. The southern end bordered Snapping Turtle Creek, whereturtles and birds sunned themselves on the banks. This patch of the park had a grove of native trees, which had a relaxing effect on my mother. Under their canopy, she’d sometimes name the trees. Cypress, she’d say. Florida pine. Live oak. Gumbo limbo. Cabbage palm.  

Nearby, there was a swing set and plenty of caruncle-faced ducks. But the very best thing was the naked lady. Her massive scale was irresistible for us kids. We stepped our feet on her toes, scaled her shoulders, and laid in the cradle of her sun-warmed belly. Some could even climb to her collarbones and then turn around, hug the place where her shoulder met her arm, and slide down to the ground. We adored our naked lady, devoured her. Sometimes we named her anatomy as we climbed. Tits, we’d say. Collarbones. Stomach. Va-gi-na.  

The area that made up Dante Fascell Park was historically home to the Tequesta people (and later, to the displaced Seminole people).1 It came under Spanish and British colonial rule, finally returning to Spain before Florida was ceded to the United States in 1821. Following the arrival of Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway in Miami in 1896—and its subsequent extension south toward Homestead in the early 1900s—the landscape surrounding South Miami changed rapidly.(2) By the 1920s, dirt roads and drainage ditches were beginning to define nearby farmlands. The trees around Red Road were cut and cleared to make way for citrus groves and tomato farms.  

When the Catholic Diocese of Miami was established in 1958, Bishop Coleman E. Carroll began acquiring land throughout South Florida with a mind toward future churches, schools, and cemeteries.(3) In 1966, Congressman Dante Fascell facilitated a deal between Bishop Carroll and the City of South Miami, and the parcel was sold for ten dollars with the agreement that it remain publicly accessible.(4) On April 4, 1967, the City Council passed a resolution naming the park in Fascell's honor.(5) At the time, Fascell was developing a reputation as a public servant dedicated to the creation of parks, public works, and land conservation across South Florida. Soon after the City named the park in his honor, Fascell became the leading congressional advocate for protecting Biscayne Bay and the northern Florida Keys. His efforts culminated in the establishment of Biscayne National Monument in 1968, preserving what would become two-hundred-and-seventy square miles of mangrove shoreline, islands, and coral reefs, and in the creation of Biscayne National Park in 1980.(6) 

Just a few miles north of the park, the Miami Beach-born artist Don Seiler was in his home studio at work on a monumental sculpture. Seiler’s Sunbather, as he called her, would seal his reputation as a sculptor capable of creating large-scale works strong enough to withstand children’s play and any weather beating South Florida could throw its way. Built just outside the family home, these sculptures became part of the Seiler children's everyday landscape. Their dad’s preference for durable material meant his children could play freely on the work. “Dad always had some larger-than-life project going,” Chris, Seiler’s third son, tells me. “And we always played and climbed all over all of it.”(7)  

Seiler was born on Miami Beach in 1928, the fourth son of German immigrant parents. In 1945, at the age of seventeen, he quit his job as Miami Beach lifeguard and moved to New York City to study at the Art Students League. The same year, he entered military service, serving with the 11th Airborne Division. After suffering gunshot wounds in the Philippines, Seiler moved back to Miami, married, and had his first son.

Don with Peter in Miami, c. 1955. Courtesy of the estate of Donald Lee Seiler.

Seiler was among the first wave of American artists to benefit from the “G.I. Bill,” and in 1946, he relocated to Paris to study with Ossip Zadkine at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.(8) In 1952, Seiler arranged to resume his studies at the Art Students League, taking master classes with Isamu Noguchi.

Peter and Don Seiler in New York City, c. 1952. Courtesy of the estate of Donald Lee Seiler.

Having studied with two of the most influential sculptors of the twentieth century, Seiler relocated the family to the Bahamas, a place that emboldened him to experiment with large-scale public sculpture. Whenever he made a new piece, Seiler created “paper dolls,” as he called them. These bent paper figures helped Seiler to work out problematic angles before committing them to steel and concrete. Working outdoors with his children nearby, Seiler developed techniques that allowed his sculptures to withstand both weather and play.

He welded complex internal armatures from steel and rebar, covered them with wire lath, and filled them with concrete. Layer after layer, with trowel and masonry, Seiler gradually built up a smooth concrete surface, which he then meticulously finished with detailed trowel work. In Seiler’s hands, massive concrete figures could appear delicate and smooth, practically aerodynamic.  

Completed and transported to Dante Fascell Park in 1968, Seiler’s Sunbather is about seventeen feet long, eight and a half feet high, and seven and a half feet wide of solid, reinforced concrete. It is among Seiler’s largest and most refined public sculptures. Though not explicitly designed as playground equipment, Sunbather welcomed children in every possible way, situating it squarely into the play sculpture movement that Architectural Review explained as a “new relationship between art and citizen.”(9) Though the movement produced some innovative (and photogenic) results, particularly by Egon Møller-Nielsen and Isamu Noguchi, play sculpture never entered the main stream. 

Dante Fascell Park is still home to Seiler’s Sunbather, and today, she has company. In 2020, the City of South Miami added a trio of Colombian sculptures as part of the “Sister City” cultural exchange (Miami’s sister is Medellín, Colombia). Officials from the City of South Miami have stated that they are considering adding even more sculpture in the future, though none will be climbable like the Sunbather. The park now also boasts several sports facilities, tidy pathways, shaped hedges, and a gated playground for tots with a rubber, poured-in-place ground. The City has also added a low black fence around Sunbather, fundamentally changing the way people experience her. A sculpture that once invited climbing, balancing, and imaginative engagement has been diminished by the barrier, which now implies a more traditional “look-but-don’t-touch” artwork. There are no signs that forbid climbing, but today, tourists mostly sit on her lap and take photos.  

Recent improvements have made Dante Fascell Park more accessible through features such as rubber surfacing and accessible pathways, enabling more children and caregivers to enjoy the site. Yet these changes also ushered in a broader shift in playground design toward increasingly standardized, safety-engineered environments that can inadvertently reduce opportunities for open-ended exploration, managed risk, and imaginative play.  In this —one of the most visibly violent moments in US history —our litigious American culture has chilled us with a fear of risk that has permeated our bones. Far too many designated play spaces mirror what has happened in Dante Fascell park–-a decisive turn toward predictability and risk aversion. 

In my childhood, Seiler’s Sunbather had a hand in our development. We practiced making decisions, worked in teams, and were free to take risks. Yes, someone’s cousin definitely fell from her bent knee. Yet as the British play advocate Lady Allen of Hurtwood opined in her 1965 tour of American playgrounds, we mustn’t design playgrounds “as administrator’s heaven and a child’s hell.” Hurtwood went on to warn: “It is better to risk a broken leg than a broken spirit.”(10)  

But it isn’t all about designing for children, and nor should it be. Caregivers also need to be considered in urban design. This means simple things like valuing caregivers' need for rest, gathering, and connection. It is also about empowering us all to value caregiving, and be able to give care with a deep sense of trust in children’s play. When we can’t attune to our children because of stress, or aren’t able to spend much time with them because of financial demands, when the environment seldom provides us with the chance to rest, or to support our kids to engage in healthy opportunities for risk-taking, we all suffer.   
There are bigger systemic reasons for all of this. When we talk about Child-friendly cities and policies, we aren’t just talking about better playground design. We’re talking about housing, health care, paid family leave, green space, healthy food, and walkable neighborhoods where caregiving can flourish. Child-friendly cities require more (and better paid) midwives and teachers. Alternative childcare arrangements. Local schools and libraries, and operating budgets large enough to sustain them. Not to mention places to swim and, yes, sunbathe.  

“Children are a kind of indicator species," Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of the Colombian capital Bogotá from 1998 to 2001 said. “If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people."11 When one designs places for caregivers, babies, toddlers, and young children, one is designing well for the elderly, people with disabilities, teenagers, those on low incomes or without access to a car, or anyone else with temporary or permanent mobility limitations. By paying heed to children and caregivers, municipal leaders, policymakers and designers would have the tools and strategies to make cities better for all people.  

People living in cities around the world likely don’t need play sculptures like Seiler’s Sunbather, but they do need the kinds of things that she engendered: opportunities to play, gather, and participate in healthy family, community, green space, and cultural life.  

After giving birth to my own children, memories of the enormous naked lady came flooding back. I recalled the smoothness of her torso, what lying across her stomach and hips in the sun felt like, how deeply satisfying it was to climb the heights of her shoulders and what a hard fall felt like. In a poetic reversal, as I lay supine for my children to explore and take satisfaction in my own body, I realized I was now the oversized lady and my children were the explorers.  

Public art can do more than beautify a park —it can shape identities, memories, not to mention the social life of a community. Don Seiler’s Sunbather—our naked lady—invited us to climb, balance, explore, fall down, and imagine rather than merely observe. She transformed our park into a place of encounter, where families could gather in the shade of trees, and children engaged in the kind of managed “risky play” essential for developing confidence, resilience, creativity, and physical competence. 

Seiler’s unique and lasting work functions not only as a beautiful and provocative modernist play sculpture, but also an enduring piece of placemaking history and civic infrastructure. Conjuring the naked lady now, I try on her pose and relax. It doesn’t take long before my kids notice and make a beeline in my direction.  

Notes

(1) Charlton W. Tebeau, The Indians of Southern Florida, 1513–1763 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1965), 3–42; National Park Service, "Native Peoples," Biscayne National Park, accessed July 28, 2026. Native Peoples, Biscayne National Park.