If you hang around the Pelican Harbor launching ramp in Miami during the first week of July, you may catch sculptor John T. Young walking among those 22 gray steel fins sticking out of the ground. That was his idea, and he plans to come down from Seattle to check it out and get in on the landscaping - troughs and crests of grass that will give you a better idea of what in the world he has in mind there.

He's thinking a pod of whales, or maybe dolphins. Young, a professor of sculpture at the University of Washington, has another pod like it in Seattle at Sand Point, a former U.S. Navy base that's now a public park. The fins come from U.S. Navy submarines built in the 1960s and decommissioned after finishing their hitches.

"It's like they're coming out of the water and swimming through the park," Young says. "There are some interesting myths that whales and dolphins could swim under ground and pop up in various places. It's the global pod that I'm creating, popping up in various parts of the world."

Technically, the fins are fairwater diving planes, mounted horizontally on the conning towers of fast-attack and ballistic missile subs. Vertical now to represent the dorsal fins of dolphins or whales, at first glance they're easy to mistake for airplane tails unless you know submarines.

Young likes the fact that none of the subs ever fired a shot in anger. More than that, he likes that the U.S. Navy let him have the fins - 100, if he can use that many - to create works of public art, his specialty. He dreams of recreating this one in several other sites, including a southwestern U.S. desert and another one or two at Vladivostok and Murmansk, on opposite coasts of Russia.

If Young can persuade the Russian navy to pitch in, he'll like that even more: "I'm hoping to use 12 fins from Soviet subs and 12 from ours and put them together as a kind of ultimate statement about cooperation, collaboration and the end of the Cold War."

Young calls it The Fin Project. The theme of the thing is world peace and its creed comes from the Old Testament, that part about beating our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks and studying war no more - an idea that never quite catches on, but at least it inspires artists. Young caught the spirit six years ago when his daughter showed him some fins in a photograph given her by Bryan Zetlen, a family friend in the business of recycling decommissioned Navy stuff. 

"They assumed he would landfill them or create artificial reefs or any of the more traditional uses for submarine parts," Young says. "Most parts get melted down to steel that John Deere buys for tractors, but these weren't recyclable in the usual way. They have a foam filling that's blown in, not like foam rubber but hardened like a rock. It creates a stress that prevents vibrations and reduces sonar detection.

"Bryan said maybe my students would like to strip the steel off and use it for sculpture, but I said no way would we cut these up for metal. They're just fabulous forms in and of themselves. "When I saw the photo I saw the dorsal fins of an orca whale, and that's where the art started. The wheels began to turn. The idea came to me that this could be global piece about turning weapons into art."

The first Fin Project was dedicated in Seattle on Memorial Day 1998. Young wanted another on the east coast and here it is, but why here in Miami? "These are cold war subs and Miami's proximity to Cuba makes it an ideal site to make a pointed statement about the cold war. Also, Miami has a progressive attitude toward public art." 

Vivian Rodriguez, the Miami-Dade County parks director, helped Young navigate the labyrinth of permits required for waterfront projects. Young had only one disappointment: "DERM, the Department of Environmental Resource Management, refused to allow us to put anything in the water itself. We proposed to have four or five fins in the water. That would have been astonishing." 

It's somewhat astonishing anyway to see 22 fins, as high as 12 feet, stuck in the ground on a formerly empty piece of land east of the launch ramp. The ones nearest the water protrude only about four feet above ground. Across 400 feet of land toward the 79th Street Causeway, the closer they get to the road the taller they are. 

One or two more leaping across the street to the other side would be spectacular, but too complicated. 

Just getting the fins to Pelican Harbor was a big job, involving seven large flatbed tractor-trailers in a caravan from the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard to Miami. Young says a foundation created for the purpose spent "well over $100,000" to transport the fins (five tons each, three to a truck) and then have a contractor set them in place.

Because the art is public, the public is encouraged to do much more than gaze at it. In Seattle, the fins are used as ceremonial backdrops on Memorial Day and Veterans Day. Boy Scouts have picnics among them. "I hope you'll see people playing Frisbee through the fins," Young says. "In Seattle, they play fins Frisbee all the time." 

Up close

The Pelican Harbor launching ramp is alongside the eastbound lanes of the 79th Street (JFK) Causeway, one mile from Biscayne Boulevard and three miles from Collins Avenue, Miami Beach.

More information on The Fin Project and photos of the Seattle version can be seen at John T. Young's website, http://faculty.washington.edu/jtyoung/fins.html