Macarthur Wasn’t Gardens’ Lone Resident On 1960 Census

Q: Is it true that John D. MacArthur was the only person listed on the 1960 Census for the city of Palm Beach Gardens?
Todd Vittum
North Palm Beach.
A: There was only one, but it wasn’t MacArthur, the billionaire real estate giant who founded the city in 1959 but whose official residence was a modest home on Evergreen Street in Lake Park.
The only official resident in 1960 was actually Charles Cooper, then 71, who MacArthur recalled having found “squatting” in a shack. MacArthur said later that Cooper’s home was assembled from packing boards and had no water, toilet or electricity. MacArthur said he made a deal: he gave Cooper a home outside the city for rent of $1 a year, and he got to burn Cooper’s shack down.
By 1970, the town’s population was 6,007, making it the town with the greatest population increase in the country between 1960 and 1970, not hard to do when you start with one person. The town manager calculated that, at that rate, Palm Beach Gardens would have 36 million residents by 1980. (In 2000,
the town had 35,058 residents.)
In the early 1960s, MacArthur bought and moved into the Colonnades Hotel on Singer Island. There, he held court with a cup of black coffee and a bottle of Scotch in the hotel’s coffee shop.
He had a stroke at the hotel in 1976 and died 14 months later. The hotel closed in 1987 and was razed in 1990.