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Originally appeared in The Palm Beach Post, Saturday, October 28, 1995, page 1D, by Candy Hatcher, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
One of Palm Beach’s most indispensable and elegant structures, having weathered two replacements, several makeovers and a century of traffic, is ready for travelers again.
Flagler Memorial Bridge, stronger and better looking after a 6 1/2-week rehabilitation, is scheduled to reopen by 6 a.m. today, although one lane in each direction will be closed for several more days.
It’s opening in time to do what it was designed to do 100 years ago, when Henry Flagler linked the mainland with the playland: Allow the rich to get to Palm Beach for the winter.
The bridge was first a one-lane wooden railroad trestle that provided access to Palm Beach, via the Florida East Coast Railway, in the 1890s and early 1900s. Then it became a toll bridge – pedestrians paid a nickel and horseback riders a dime to cross. In 1938, the wood gave way to a concrete-and-steel, four-lane structure that cost the county $725,000.
And now, after a $2.5 million makeover with new concrete, steel, paint and wiring – and 44 days of headaches and inconvenience for tourists, residents and merchants who had to find another way to the north end of the island – the bridge is horizontal again.
No offense to the other two spans, say historians, but of the three bridges that come to Palm Beach, this is the bridge.
If only it could talk.
It might tell us the real scoop on Henry Flagler’s wife, Mary Lily, who moved to Whitehall in 1902 and immediately began complaining about the bridge next door. She griped about the trains’ noise and smoke, so the next year, her husband moved the bridge.
If the bridge could talk, we might hear about the extravagant parties at Whitehall and The Royal Poinciana Hotel, where guests came from all over the East Coast. They brought their private rail cars and parked them at the depot near the hotel. One party drew 46 rail cars, said Tim Frank, Palm Beach’s
landmarks coordinator.
If the bridge could tell stories, we’d probably hear a few about the construction crews, such as the time in 1902 when a worker finished his job on the bridge, retired to a Banyan Street saloon and drank five half-pints of whiskey. He was thrown out of the bar and told to go home and sleep. That night, friends found him in bed, lifeless. The newspaper headline the next day: “Drank Too Much Whiskey and Death Soon Followed as a Result.”
Norman Latham, whose father won the contract in 1936 to replace the wooden bridge with a concrete-and-steel structure, remembers coming to work for his father shortly after he earned his engineering degree. “He was a tough taskmaster,” recalled Latham, now 84.
The son knew the bridge would require five coats of paint, and he suggested it be painted with spray gun instead of by hand. He said he’d build a spray machine with a 15-foot handle and rig cables so the machine could be turned off and on.
“My father said, `You’re not dry behind the ears yet. You don’t know what you’re talking about,’” Latham remembered. So he offered to do the job under subcontract for what his father said it would cost to paint by hand.
“I did it for half,” he said with a grin. “I made big money. He didn’t ever say so, but I think he was proud of me.”
The bridge was dedicated in July 1938 – the only four-lane road in Palm Beach County. A plaque on the east end commemorates its construction and lists Latham’s father, E.H. Latham, as well as the county commissioners in office at the time.
Historian James R. Knott, an 85-year-old retired judge, remembered details about the bridge’s construction and opening, but he wanted to be sure of the dates, so he telephoned Latham to discuss it.
Knott was sitting in his West Palm Beach condo overlooking the Intracoastal Waterway, and Latham was sitting across the waterway in his Palm Beach home, and the two octogenarians were trying to trip each other’s minds to remember the little things.
Latham: There’s steel underpinning in one end, but not the other. Two crews of workers were involved in the construction. Rinker’s plant was on the north side of the bridge, remember?
Knott did. And he recalled other details, such as a Jacksonville engineer telling a county official that the state Democratic party was expecting a $1 million kickback from the bridge contract (It didn’t get it).
Dressing up the bridge
He also recalled the concrete structures on the Palm Beach side of the bridge – gifts from a British man who “thought the bridge should have something to dress it up.” And the wrought iron lamps at the east entrance, given to the town by Col. E.R. Bradley.
The bridge has been in the news a few times in the past 20 years. In 1980, boats and barges ran into the bridge seven times in two months, forcing it to close for repairs. In 1983, the bridge closed again for $670,000 in repairs.
And now it’s open again, and lots of people, especially Latham, are glad.
He calls it “our bridge.”
“It stood up better than any of the rest,” he said. “Most are torn down by the time they’re 40 years old. . . . It’s never given any structural trouble.”
The Flagler Memorial Bridge
Vital stats: 2,299 feet (.43 mile) long, 52 feet (four lanes) wide, weight limit 32 tons.
Originally built: 1895.
Steel replacement opened: 1938.
Original form: wooden railroad bridge.
Bridge traffic in the early 1900s: 552,630 people crossed the bridge in the year between March 1901 and March 1902.
Bridge traffic in the 1990s: 23,000 vehicles a day, or 8.4 million vehicles a year.
Sources: Florida Department of Transportation; the Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
Bridge trivia
In 1903, Henry Flagler had the bridge torn down and rebuilt farther away because noise from the trains running beside their new house disturbed his wife.
Flagler Memorial used to be a toll bridge. In 1913, pedestrians and passengers in street cars paid 5 cents to cross the bridge; it cost a rider on horseback a dime; one horse, buggy and driver, 15 cents; each driver with automobile, 20 cents; and each additional automobile passenger, another nickel. The toll was lifted in 1928.
The bridge was designated a historical landmark in 1989.
Cost of construction in 1938: $725,000, with 9,700 cubic yards of concrete, 4,240 linear feet of concrete handrail and 587,600 pounds of structural steel.
Cost of construction in 1995: $2.5 million to repair the sidewalk, replace some of the structural steel, rewire some of the electrical works, renovate the bridgetender’s house and install lights.
Sources: Florida Department of Transportation; the Historical Society of Palm Beach County; the Flagler Museum; and Palm Beach County: An Illustrated History by Donald W. Curl.
Henry Flagler, the man who turned a stretch of swamp into the fanciest winter resort in the world, was the first to link Palm Beach with the mainland. In 1895, he built a one-lane wooden railroad and foot bridge. In 1901, half a million people used the bridge. (Photo courtesy The Historical Society of Palm Beach County)
Looking east across the Flagler Bridge from West Palm Beach, some time in the early 1900s: The first cars arrived on Palm Beach in about 1908.
Posted 16 years, 6 months ago. 3 comments
By AVA VAN de WATER
Palm Beach Post Home Editor
In the booming 1920s, downtown West Palm Beach had dozens of hotels and rooming houses that drew tourists for the winter social season. The Intracoastal Waterway lapped at the hotel door fronts, and ferries shuttled guests to and from Palm Beach.
Today, just one of those grande dames remains, and maybe not for long. The Pennsylvania Hotel sits quietly on South Flagler Drive, only its elegant ivory facade, arched windows and graceful lines hinting of its social heyday.
“The Pennsylvania was the biggest, the fanciest and the nicest,” said Dale Waters, historic planner for West Palm Beach.
Built in 1926 – smack in the middle of prohibition – the hotel was dubbed “The Breakers West.” It was the site of balls, coming out parties, elegant dinners, and other celebrations associated with the city’s social season. Even slot machines graced its halls.
Now, the eight-story, 230-room building has a more serene role – a residence for the elderly run by the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirmed of South Florida Inc. But the hotel is abuzz again since the Sisters announced plans to raze the former hotel to make way for a 19-story, up-to-date residence for the independent elderly as well as those needing special care.
Preservationists are upset about the possibility of losing the hotel, one of the last large Mediterranean Revival-style buildings downtown.
Designed by the prestigious firm of Harvey & Clarke as a prime example of the Mediterranean style so popular in the 1920s, the hotel has graceful arches, a tower and decorative ornamentation. A flat roof is hidden by parapets, decorated with barrel tile.
Inside, the crown jewel is a beautifully tiled mezzanine, where 4-inch squares of Spanish tile provide a gleaming backdrop for high ceilings. Wonderful columns are decorated up to 4 feet with colorful blue, green and yellow tiles made by Addison Mizner’s factory.
The Pennsylvania once hummed with activity. The dining room seated 400; a beauty shop and barber shop had a steady stream of customers. But today, footsteps echo in the halls of the nearly empty building that is being prepared for an uncertain future.
Of the half-dozen resort hotels that graced the downtown waterfront, only the Pennsylvania remains. The former George Washington Hotel, now the Helen Wilkes Residence Hotel, has been dramatically altered. Long gone are the Lake Court (now the site of the Noreen McKeen Residence next to the Pennsylvania), the Salt Air (the old downtown Holiday Inn site), the Royal Palm, the Monterey and the South Palm Inn.
Designed to be entered from Evernia Street, the hotel features a large, arched window with iron grill and stairs that lead to the grand mezzanine. Unfortunately a large canvas awning hides the window’s beauty, and an alternate entrance, favored by the Carmelite Sisters, takes visitors into a lobby of 1960s or ’70s vintage.
But beyond the mezzanine level, there is little of interest in the hotel.
The upper floors are marked by long, straight hallways that lead to small rooms with tiny baths. Although ceilings in the mostly 11-by-11-foot rooms are tall – about 12 feet – the hallways have dropped ceilings of acoustical tile that hide air-conditioning ducts and pipes. Contemporary bamboo wallpaper lines the walls; new carpet covers the concrete floors.
And while there is a beautiful crystal doorknob here, a simple brass knob there, the rooms are nondescript. New windows with plastic mullions replaced original double-hung sash windows in the mid-1980s. Tiny bathrooms with tall tubs hinder the elderly, and ill-designed fire exits lead not to the outside, but to the mezzanine or lobby.
“The facade of the building is beautiful. The mezzanine is beautiful. The functional use of the building ends right there,” said Kathleen Chobot, spokeswoman for the Carmelite sisters.
But preservationists hope to preserve the facade – and a part of West Palm Beach’s elegant past. They would like the sisters to consider gutting the interior of the building (except for the grand mezzanine level) rather than tearing it down.
“There is not a whole lot left downtown,” Waters said. Of 25 major buildings, “maybe 6 or 7 are of landmark status . . . There really isn’t another major building downtown in that style.”
THE PENNSYLVANIA THROUGH THE YEARS
1900: Henry M. Flagler sells the land at what is now the southwest corner of Evernia Street and Narcissus Avenue to Wilmon Whilldin. The same year, Whilldin sells it to Lewis D Lookwood.
1901: Lockwood erects a four-story, wood-frame hotel, the Holland House. To the east of the hotel sits a public park and boat pier.
1923: Lockwood sells Holland House to Henry J. Dynes.
1925: Dynes buys the lot next door, razes Holland House and commissions the architectural firm of Harvey & Clarke to design the eight-story Pennsylvania Hotel.
1926: The 216-room Pennsylvania Hotel opens.
1927: Financial troubles plague the hotel. Harvey & Clarke files a $6,000 lien against it.
1930: Florida-Collier Coast Hotels Inc. takes over the Pennsylvania, renaming it the Royal Worth Hotel.
1943: Robert Kloeppel of Jacksonville buys the Royal Worth, changing name back to the original Pennsylvania Hotel. (Kloeppel also owns the George Washington Hotel – now known as the Helen Wilkes Residence Hotel and originally called the El Verano Hotel.)
1960: A two-story parking garage is added to the west of the hotel.
1961: A swimming pool is added on the east side, off the mezzanine and sun room. The pool deck forms the roof of a loggia on the ground level.
1964: Kloeppel’s heirs sell the Pennsylvania to the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirmed of South Florida Inc. for $800,000. By November, it is functioning as a seasonal and permanent private residence.
1965: The front desk area is converted to a chapel.
Mid-1980s: Extensive renovations are made to the hotel, including replacement of wood-frame sash windows with contemporary windows with plastic mullions.
1986: John Johnson of the Historic Palm Beach County Preservation Board approaches the sisters to nominate the hotel for the National Register of Historic Places. Administrator Sister Joseph agrees.
1987: A new administrator of the Pennsylvania Retirement Residence, Sister M. Fidelis, writes to George W. Percy, State Historic Preservation Officer, stating that the sisters “strongly object to the property’s inclusion on the National Register.” No reason was given for the objection.
1994: Sisters announce plans to demolish the Pennsylvania and replace it with an 18-story, 230-bed nursing home and adult living facility.
C.J. WALKER Staff Photographer
1. The elegant 1926 Pennsylvania Hotel in West Palm Beach was nicknamed The Breakers West. It was the setting for elaborate social events and had slot machines in its hallway.
2. Graceful arches, a tower and external ornamentation on the Mediterranean-style Pennsylvania are worth keeping, preservationists say.
3. The Pennsylvania (above) as seen in a 1929 postcard. Its mezzanine has columns decorated with colorful tiles (left).
Originally appeared in The Palm Beach Post, Saturday, April 30, 1994, on page 1D.
By Eliot Kleinberg
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
David McCampbell shot down 34 Japanese planes. Joe McCarthy crossed 75 yards of cross fire on Iwo Jima.
A half-century has passed since World War II monopolized America’s consciousness. Many heroes have emerged in those decades, then slipped back to obscurity. They live their lives out of the spotlight, shunning attention but still proud of their accomplishments.
In all of America, only 205 people are alive today who earned this country’s highest military decoration: the Medal of Honor.
Ninety-eight received the decoration for action in World War II. Two of them live in Palm Beach County. Two others had lived here. So did one recipient from the Korean conflict. On this Veterans Day, here are their stories.
David McCampbell (third from left) was one of the first four recipients of Florida’s Congressional Medal of Honor license plate in 1986. Others pictured are Jean Jeago of Tallahassee representing her father John Mihalowski of Largo, James Howard of Belleair Bluffs, and James Hendrix of Davenport. Photo courtesy of the Florida Photographic Collection.
CAPT. DAVID MCCAMPBELL: ‘ACE OF ACES’
The walls of the David McCampbell terminal at Palm Beach International Airport and the walls of McCampbell’s Lake Worth home are covered with portraits and photographs of him in his Grumman F6F Hellcat. In one, the outside of his cockpit is adorned with rows of Japanese battle flags, each representing a downed enemy plane.
In a seven-month span, he recorded 34 kills– the most of any U.S. Navy flier. His nine kills in 11/2 hours set a record in the history of aerial warfare for a single mission.
“I brag about the planes I shot down, but I don’t brag about the number of people I killed,” McCampbell, 82, said recently. Since then, he said, “all I did was try to forget all of it.”
On June 19, 1944, Air Group 15 challenged 80 Japanese carrier-based aircraft bearing down on the U.S. fleet. McCampbell alone shot down seven Zeros, and he and his group routed the enemy fliers.
On Oct. 24 of that year, McCampbell destroyed nine “Zekes” and made two probable kills. He and his sole comrade– who had run out of ammunition — somehow managed to disarray the remaining 51, who peeled off before they reached the fleet.
After the war, McCampbell commanded the naval air training center in Jacksonville and the aircraft carrier Bon Homme Richard and served on the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington, helping draw up contingency invasion plans for Cuba during the 1962 missile crisis.
David McCampbell and Palm Beach artist Muriel Kaplan pose with Kaplan’s bust of McCampbell at the Norton Museum in 1990. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
His 35-year Navy career ended with retirement in 1964. He dabbled in real estate in the Bahamas before settling down in Hypoluxo and later in his current Lake Worth home. His name was added to the airport’s new terminal when it opened in 1988.
CAPT. JOE MCCARTHY: A DASH ACROSS A KILLING FIELD
Firefighter Joseph Jeremiah McCarthy worked at the busiest hook-and- ladder company in Chicago. But no burning building posed more of a challenge than the little hill McCarthy charged on Feb. 21, 1945, when he was a captain in the Marine Corps Reserves.
Two days earlier, about 60,000 Marines had landed on an 8-square-mile piece of rock– half the size of McCarthy’s current hometown of Delray Beach — called Iwo Jima.
Joe McCarthy, who received the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions on Iwo Jima in WWII (Palm Beach Post file photo)
“I was scared all the time,” the 80-year-old past president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society recalled recently. “Any man tells you he wasn’t scared was an imbecile. But you dealt with it.”
It took the Americans 36 days to take Iwo Jima. Nearly 6,000 of them and all but about a thousand of the island’s 22,000 defenders died.
The commander of the Iwo Jima campaign called the taking of Hill 382 — referred to as “the meat grinder” by the Marines who took it– “the turning point of the Pacific war.”
With about 300 Japanese defending the hill, five assaults had failed, and hundreds of Marines had died. The Americans could see the faces of the Japanese soldiers firing through slits from inside two pillboxes on a ridge.
It was only 75 yards away.
McCarthy got a team together. “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get it.”
He was 32 years old. He weighed 190 pounds.
“I had all those young punks,” he recalled. “They called me the old man. But they couldn’t keep up with me running like hell.”
McCarthy and the others zigzagged across the field, stopping to dive to the ground or into divots formed by bombs.
McCarthy and the others came up to the pillbox; he threw three hand grenades through the slits. About 20 soldiers inside died. Seeing two soldiers fleeing the installation, he shot both dead.
The group then ran to a second pillbox and knocked that out as well, killing another 22. McCarthy spotted a soldier aiming at one of his men, Sgt. Thomas F. McCarthy (no relation.)
“McCarthy grabbed his rifle . . . wrenched it out of his hands and shot him with it,” Thomas McCarthy wrote later.
McCarthy was hit by mortar fire three days later — his third set of injuries in the war– and was moved to Guam to recover.
After the war, McCarthy returned to the fire department, where he organized the nation’s first emergency rescue and ambulance service. He retired in 1973.
“I would hope and pray there never be another Medal of Honor issued,” he said. “I hope and pray there’s never any more wars. But we’ve got to remain strong.”
MAJ. GEN. A. A. VANDEGRIFT: ‘HELL, YES. WHY NOT?’
On Aug. 7, 1942, 11,000 Marines landed at Guadalcanal and the rest of the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia. It was America’s first amphibious assault of the war and its first offensive action in the Pacific.
The six-month campaign would be the longest of the Pacific war. More than 5,000 Americans and 20,000 Japanese died.
Troops fought bad weather, rough terrain, disease and an incessant air, land and sea bombardment. Even as they slogged through swamps and tried to distinguish friend from foe in dim light and rainstorms, they were seeing
firsthand the Japanese code of bushido– death before surrender.
Once, someone asked the 55-year-old Marine major general if he could hold the island.
“Hell, yes,” Alexander Archer Vandegrift said. “Why not?”
Maj. Gen. A.A. Vandegrift (rear of jeep, left) riding through Guadalcanal jungle in November 1942 (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Vandegrift earned the Medal of Honor for his leadership while he led the occupation and defense of the island, from Aug. 7 to Dec. 9, 1942.
Control of the island seesawed for months until the Japanese were finally ousted in February 1943. The victory was welcome news during a grim time when the German and Japanese juggernauts appeared unstoppable.
The Virginia native became the Corps’ 18th commandant in January 1944. In March 1945 he became the first Marine officer to attain four-star rank. He retired in 1947.
In 1959, he moved to Delray Beach. Accompanied by two aides, his eyesight taken by illness, he stayed out of the spotlight, but continued as a trusted adviser to the Corps, friends say.
Vandegrift died in 1973 at 86.
SGT. BERNARD P. BELL: ASSAULT ON A SCHOOLHOUSE
Six months after D-Day, on Dec. 18, 1944, U.S. Army Sgt. Bernard Pious Bell and eight of his buddies found themselves facing 150 Germans in front of a small-town schoolhouse in Mittelwihr, France.
The West Virginia native– two weeks shy of his 33rd birthday– and his fellow GIs somehow held them off.
While his men covered him, Bell dashed toward the schoolhouse, surprised two guards at the door and took them prisoner without firing a shot. He found more Germans in the cellar; threatening them with a hand grenade, he got 26 to surrender.
The next day, the Germans pounded the house with artillery and mortar fire. Bell repaired damaged radio equipment under heavy small arms fire and ran through cross fire to update his commander.
At dawn the next day, a German tank poured so much fire it virtually demolished the building’s upper stories. Bell wormed his way to the exposed second floor and directed fire on tanks and soldiers.
Later, he stood beside an Allied tank and helped aim it toward a wall which shielded hiding Germans. He directed machine gunners to mow down the Germans as they dashed past the gaps.
Bernard Bell (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Bell killed more than 20 soldiers and captured 33.
“He was utterly fearless,” recalled Bob Gans of Los Angeles, who fought with Bell in Europe. “I was scared all the time and most everybody was. But Bell was the kind of guy who would push himself past us. I don’t know how many times we would be laying there with the bullets flying and he’d yell, `Let’s go. Let’s do it.’ ”
After the war, Bell moved to North Palm Beach and worked at the Veterans Administration office in West Palm Beach. He moved in the 1960s to Albuquerque, N.M., and later was a patient in a veterans hospital there.
Bell died in January 1971.
SGT. RONALD E. ROSSER: ‘THE ANGRY MAN’
When Ron Rosser’s older brother was cut down by a machine gun in the freezing cold of Korea, Ron decided to “get even.” The 19-year-old from the coal mines of eastern Ohio, born on the day of the stock market crash in 1929, asked for and got a spot right on the U.S. Army’s front lines.
On Jan. 12, 1952, Company L of the 38th Infantry Regiment assaulted hills in the area of Ponggil-li, north of the fiercely fought border between the two Koreas. The regiment found itself pinned down by the machine gun, artillery and mortar fire of 2,000 soldiers.
Rosser, 22, an observer in the lead platoon, was in the front lines when they came under fire from 200 soldiers in all directions. He turned around to find everyone else dead or wounded. He handed an assistant his radio and, armed only with a carbine rifle at his hip and a single grenade, dashed toward the enemy installation.
“I could hear the Reds chattering and even smell the garlic on their breaths,” he said in a 1965 interview. “There was only one way to go so I took off for the hilltop shouting like an Apache.”
Witnesses later told Medal of Honor officials Rosser was like an angry man encased in an invisible, bulletproof shield.
“Suddenly I knew nothing could stop me,” Rosser said.
At the first bunker, he killed all eight soldiers inside with a burst of fire. He reached the top of the hill and found himself straddling a trench above and between two Chinese soldiers. He shot one between the eyes, whirled, and shot the other in the chest before either could act.
He then dove into the trench, surprising the soldiers inside. He killed five and wounded a sixth. He threw his grenade into a bunker; as two soldiers emerged, he shot them to death.
Rosser, who was shot in the shoulder and hand, made several trips to get ammunition or call fellow grunts to follow him as he made attack after attack. “They all got cut down around me,” Rosser recalled recently.
On May 30, 1958, two unknown soldiers– from World War II and Korea — were interred at Arlington National Cemetery. Among the honor bearers was Ron Rosser.
In 1960, Rosser took over the Army recruiting office in West Palm Beach. “All you have to do is freeze for two years in Korea and you look for a warm place,” he said of his move to South Florida.
Rosser left the Army in 1968. He worked for the Veterans Administration and the Postal Service, taught junior high school in West Palm Beach, served as Haverhill police chief and was a construction foreman. He moved to his
family home in Ohio in 1980.
“These people were my enemy,” Rosser recalled. “I didn’t think about them being fathers and sons and husbands. I just knocked down uniforms. They were trying to kill me. (For) every one I killed, I got another breath.”
Note: This story originally appeared in The Palm Beach Post, Wednesday, November 11, 1992, on page 1A.
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