After Stamie's Smart Beach Wear closed, its 20-foot Jantzen Girl sign, a much-photographed Boardwalk landmark since 1965, was hauled away.
The red-suited Jantzen Girl, an icon in a bathing cap suspended in graceful mid-dive above a Boardwalk swimwear shop since the 1960s, was hauled away on a flatbed trailer in the drizzle of Monday morning.
“A lot of people were upset about it,” said Louie Louizes, who owns the shop that used to be the girl’s diving platform.
“I had nothing to do with the sign coming down," he explained. "Jantzen owns it.”
The 20-foot fiberglass bathing beauty is one of six created in 1959 by a Los Angeles mannequin company for Jantzen, the Portland-based swimwear company, now owned by Perry Ellis International. It depicts the company’s logo, a red-suited woman diver, which had been in use since the 1920s.
The diving lady made it to Miami and then, in 1965, to Stamie's Smart Beach Wear shop, 8 N. Ocean Ave.
The shop, named for longtime owner, Stamie Kypreos, first opened in a hotel across the street not long after World War II ended, then moved across the street in the 1950s. When her daughter, Irene Koutouzis, retired at the end of 2017, the Boardwalk swimwear shop closed.
With the shop’s closure, Jantzen wanted its sign back, according to Louizes. (The company did not respond to requests for comment.) The sign’s destination is somewhere in Washington state, he said.
There are only three other diving girl signs like this still in existence. One used to grace left field in Portland’s Civic Stadium, now Providence Park, before being removed in 2000; one used be at Jantzen’s Vancouver, Washington, factory, which closed in 1998; and one has been on rotating display at department stores selling Jantzen products.
In recent years, then, this left Daytona Beach’s as the only Jantzen Girl sign with a fixed address. The only one in the country you could reliably walk up to on the street and photograph. As many Daytona Beach tourists since the 1960s did, walking across the street to the sidewalk and raising their various Brownies, Arguses, Polaroids, Instamatics, disposable cameras and cell phones to their eyes and pointing at the diving girl.
Photos that recalled the kind of place they visited. Which is how strictly commercial signs often grow into city symbols.
Think of the Citgo sign in Boston, which nobody associates with Citgo but which everyone associates with Kenmore Square and Fenway Park. Think of Seattle’s Public Market sign. Think of the Coppertone sign in Miami. Think of the Vegas Vic neon masterpiece on the Las Vegas strip.
And here, just a few blocks away from the “World’s Most Famous Beach” sign at the East International Speedway Boulevard Approach, was our own sign. A nod to a time of finer beachwear and a declaration of our beach-town identity. From her candy-red bathing cap to her matching toenails, a reminder of classier days on the Boardwalk.
Sometimes she was a ghostly white, more recently she had more of a beige tan. She was taken down and given a thorough makeover in 2004 and required regular coats of wax to stay looking good in the summer sun.
Louizes said after the recent two hurricanes and years of harsh seaside conditions, she could use further restoration. “It needs about $10,000 worth of work on it,” he said.
As someone who grew up around the Boardwalk, Louizes said, “I understand a lot of people may feel sad” at the diving girl’s removal.
A commercial artist who used to operate a Boardwalk area airbrush shop, Lucky Louie's, he is opening an art gallery, Ocean Avenue Gallery, on the site of the old swimwear store. As far as the blank space where the diving girl used to be, he is making plans.
“I’m going to do something in similar artistic style there,” he said. Watch this space.
A cool idea, but the diving girl left a big swimsuit to fill. I’ll certainly miss her.
She goes the way of the red globe that said “PIER” high atop the Daytona Beach Beach Pier’s Space Needle, and the monocled Mr. Peanut sign on Ridgewood Avenue that used its dapper cane to point tourists to a gift store that sold peanut bars in Holly Hill, and the orange Union 76 ball over Daytona International Speedway.
Local landmark signage long gone. But none of them spoke to the way we were like the diving Jantzen Girl.