May 14, 2012
The tiny pond at the north end of Howard Park was once a basin large and deep enough for barges that carried passengers and crates of produce from the Glades. Regular boat service to the basin began operation on May 17, 1918, but the basin and canal lost favor when a railroad line and motor highway to the Glades opened in the mid-1920s. The 1928 hurricane destroyed the docks and slips.
In 1997 preservationists tried to get the Stub Canal and Turning Basin onto the National Register of Historic Places, but National Park Service denied the application, saying the canal and basin had lost their link to the city's past. Even without the official National Register designation, the city installed a historic marker in Howard Park.
Glades farmers shipped their vegetables down the West Palm Beach Canal to the Stub Canal that led to the turning basin where there were docks, warehouses and trains to transport the produce to northern markets. (Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)...
Read more...
May 7, 2012
The town of Gulf Stream, incorporated on May 12, 1925, was established as a sporting enclave for the wealthy when brothers John Shaffer Phipps and Howard Phipps founded the Gulf Stream Polo Club in 1923, and Paris Singer and other Palm Beachers built the Addison Mizner-designed Gulf Stream Golf Club the following year. The Phipps family sold the polo grounds in the early 1960s, and it later moved to its current location off Lake Worth Road west of the Florida Turnpike, where it's now known as Gulfstream Polo Club.
...
Read more...
May 3, 2012
By Barbara Marshall
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
For 22 years, I've wondered why there was a "C" on my mailbox door.
Now I know.
In 1940, John W. Cummings and his wife, Nora, owned my Flamingo Park house, according to just-released Census records. Cummings managed the Florida Theater on Clematis Street, now the home of Palm Beach Dramaworks.
He was from Tennessee, two years younger than his wife, and had completed only the eighth grade. Yet he made a comfortable $3,000 salary. At the time, his/my house, was valued at $6,000.
The mailbox is a cubby cut into an exterior wall that also served as a milk box for deliveries from the Alfar Dairy, a few blocks away, I've been told.
Now every time I retrieve a new batch of Bed, Bath & Beyond circulars and Pottery Barn catalogs, I'll think of John and Nora.
And if they were the ones to install that hideous downstairs bathroom tile, I'd like a word.
Other posts about the 1940 Census: Vivid stories emerge from otherwise dry statistics and A tale of two lives from the 1940 Census...
Read more...
