In 1921, the masonry structure that was being built to replace the 9-year-old wooden bridge collapsed under the weight of a steamroller two days before it was scheduled to open. A temporary wooden structure was built, and on August 11, 1924, the new Royal Park Bridge was completed.
Undated photo of the Royal Park Bridge (courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)
Tags: bridges, Palm Beach, This Week in History
By BILL McGOUN
Fourth in a series.
Part 1, Memories of Palm Beach County, 1943-1954
Part 2, The war years
Part 3, Before the urban sprawl
Part 4, The wide-open coastline
Part 5, The wide-open west
Part 6, Changing times
Today it is hard to envision the beachfront east of Lake Worth as it appeared in the 1940s. It was quite truly another world.
There was no Sloan’s Curve. State Road A1A continued south along the ocean beyond Ocean Avenue in Lantana, curving over to the lakefront where Manalapan Town Hall now sits.
(It was State Road 1 when we came to Lake Worth in 1943. The As were added later to avoid confusion with U.S. 1.)
There was only one house between today’s Sloan’s Curve and the Lake Worth Casino area. I heard that it belonged to Lily Pons, then one of the world’s leading sopranos, but I never have been able to confirm that.
Across the street to the north of the casino was a nightspot named the South Ocean Club, which burned in 1957, after we had moved from S. O Street. Kreusler Park occupies the site today.
The casino itself (pictured above in a 1938 Palm Beach Post file photo) was the original 1922 building, the north half of the present structure. There was a salt-water pool behind it and an underpass in front leading beneath State Road A1A to the beach. The walkway along the beach was wooden, with several gazeboes. At least two of them extended eastward over the sand.
At the south end of the Lake Worth beach were the studios and transmitter of radio station WWPG. I had an old console radio next to my bed and WWPG was the only station near enough that I could hear it.
South of WWPG there was nothing on the ocean until Manalapan.
This aerial photo taken from a 1940s postcard shows the Lake Worth Casino in the center with A1A running the entire distance north and south of the casino right along the beach. The road in this area was later moved away from the water. Photo courtesy: Florida Photographic Collection.
I’m sure there was a lot of open beach in south county but I don’t recall ever having been there before the Lake Worth High School graduation party of 1955. The party was held at the Boca Raton Club’s beach pavilion, south of the inlet, which has long since given way to more intense development.
To the north, Palm Beach was already developed but there was virtually nothing between Blue Heron Boulevard in Riviera Beach and Jupiter Inlet. All I remember are the Seminole Country Club and some houses in Juno Beach.
Singer Island was still empty in the late 1950s; I attended a beach party there while a student at Palm Beach Junior College (now Palm Beach State College).
Bridges were lower, one was manually-operated
Getting onto Singer Island was a bit of an adventure. The Blue Heron bridge was a low-level wooden structure and the floorboards bounced as we rode over them. The Southern Boulevard bridge was similar, but in better shape. The Lake Worth bridge of that era was concrete; a part of it is in use today as a fishing pier.
South of the Lake Worth bridge, roughly where the Bryant Park boat ramp now is, was a wooden dock. This structure served two purposes. First, it allowed people to tie up their boats. Second, it concealed the pipe beneath that dumped raw sewage into the lake.
Lake Worth wasn’t the only city polluting the lake. When I was in the PBJC choir, we appeared on the Today show when it was broadcast for a week from the parking lot of the Society of the Four Arts in Palm Beach. To provide a backdrop, water skiers were enlisted to ride on the lake.
People watching elsewhere probably thought that was a natural occurrence. We who lived in the area knew it was an anomaly. Ordinarily, no one in his right mind would ski on that cesspool.
The most interesting bridge was the manually-operated turn span on Ocean Avenue in Lantana. After lowering the gates, the bridge tender would walk to the center of the span, insert a long steel rod looking like a giant Allen wrench into a hole in the floor, and walk around it in large circles to open and close the span.
James Willard Easton and two unidentified women manually crank the mechanism that opened and closed the Lantana Bridge. Undated photo provided by Lantana Historical Society.
Inlets haven’t changed much…
Palm Beach County’s four inlets were pretty much as they are today, except for the extension of the north jetty at Boynton Inlet to shield the waterway from the prevailing rollers out of the northeast. Those rollers could be treacherous and the narrowness of the inlet, which was cut originally to improve circulation of lake water and not for navigation, allowed little room for error.
Once I rode a charter boat through the inlet. The skipper positioned his craft northeast of the opening and watched the sea behind him. When he saw what he wanted, he jammed both throttles wide open and the boat almost leaped toward the inlet.
Charter boats could outrun the rollers, but drift boat could not. In 1964, a following sea capsized the Two Georges as it tried to get into the lake and swamped it. Five people died.
When I got my first bicycle in 1945 I celebrated by riding out to the ocean, south to Lantana, west to U.S. 1 and back north to our home via Dixie and Federal highways. When I got home I was exhausted and my parents, whom I had neglected to let in on my plans, were frantic.
By that time, with World War II nearly ended, the beach was open day and night. During the early years of the conflict, when German U-boats attacked the shipping lanes off Southeast Florida, the beach was closed at night and patrolled by mounted Coast Guardsmen.
There was a wooden tower on the casino from which volunteers watched for enemy activity. I had a book with silhouettes of German and Japanese airplanes so I would know right away if one flew over.
I never saw one.
…but the beach has changed
To people in Lake Worth then, the beach was theirs for the asking. If they wanted to hold a beach party, they could do it just about anywhere. No one dreamed that someday that beach would be separated from the road by a string of condominium buildings.
The beginning of the end for an open beach came in September of 1947, when a powerful hurricane roared ashore. The ocean road was so badly damaged that it was abandoned. Lakefront land was filled and the road moved westward to its present location. In the process, Sloan’s Curve was created.
The casino and the boardwalk also were hammered. The casino was rebuilt and expanded and the wooden walk and gazeboes replaced with concrete structures.
A look at a map shows that Sloan’s Curve lines up almost perfectly with the West Palm Beach-Lake Worth border and the Palm Beach-South Palm Beach border similarly lines up with the Lake Worth-Lantana
border. That’s because what today is Palm Beach south of Sloan’s Curve once was part of Lake Worth.
In what must go as one of the most short-sighted decisions in history, Lake Worth gave all that land, except for the casino property, to Palm Beach.
I should have got a hint of the future one day about 1950 when Herb Engelman and I started walking along the lakefront south of WWPG, where the first apartment building in the area was being constructed. Suddenly a man came from the building waving a handgun and shouting, “This is private property! Get off!”
We did. Looking back I can see that this was a foretaste of what was to come. At the time all I thought of was self-preservation.
The beach itself south of Sloan’s Curve remains public, because the old right-of-way abuts it, making the county the upland property owner. Unfortunately, Palm Beach County has never done anything to
improve access, bowing to the will of affluent oceanfront residents who do not want to share “their” beach.
This 1981 Palm Beach Post file photo shows a path that used to be State Road A1A along the ocean from Sloan’s Curve in Palm Beach south to the Lake Worth Casino. The stretch of road was washed out in 1947.
NEXT: The Wide-Open West
Bill McGoun is a retired editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. He is the author of four history books, including Lake Worth High School: A History and Southeast Florida Pioneers, which tells the history of Palm Beach County, the Treasure Coast and the Lake Okeechobee region through the lives of noted individuals. He is working on a history of the Palm Beach County school system.
Tags: beach, bridges, inlets, Lake Worth, Lake Worth Casino, Sloan's Curve
Every once in awhile, we get questions that stump all our usual Post-Time sources and we turn to you for help.
George Moore, a retired commercial seaman now living in Jacksonville, called to say that in the 1950s and 1960s he made regular runs down the coast to Palm Beach and out to the Bahamas. He says that some time in the summer of 1961, his tug barely survived a 25-foot wave that crashed onto the beach at Palm Beach and did some damage. He said he remembered reading about it in The Post before he went back to North Florida. A search of our archives and a check with the National Weather Service’s Miami office turned up nothing about it.
And Daniel John Gorham, now of San Ignacio, Belize, who was Palm Beach County’s supervisor of registration – the precursor to supervisor of elections – from 1960 to 1965, asks about a statue. It was a stone duck. It stood from around 1930 to around 1940 on Lucerne Avenue in Lake Worth, at the approach to the Intracoastal Waterway bridge. How did it get there? Why and when was it removed, and to where? Or was it destroyed?
Readers: Can you help?
Tags: bridges, Lake Worth, unanswered questions
Q: Is it true one of the bridges from West Palm Beach to Palm Beach collapsed once?
A: It was the Royal Park bridge, the “middle bridge” of the three. It happened on Dec. 29, 1921. Here’s the tale, according to Judge James R. Knott’s “Brown Wrapper” historical series in The Palm Beach Post:
A new masonry structure was being built to replace the old wooden bridge, which had stood for about nine years. It was two days from being dedicated. Sara Dean, wife of S. Bobo Dean, publisher of The Palm Beach Daily News (“The Shiny Sheet”) rode her bicycle across at 10 a.m. She apparently was the only resident ever to use the doomed bridge.
About 2 p.m., as a steamroller was packing the surface, the head of construction heard a cracking noise and ordered the machine off. He and an assistant raced onto a barge to investigate from the water line, but as soon as they did, a pier on the Palm Beach side gave way and the two spans crashed down, throwing workmen on the spans and the boat into the water.
Everyone was rescued, but later another span and another pier fell in. The bridge that inspectors had passed two days earlier was now a jumble of concrete chunks and steel rods. A civic uproar followed, with people calling for penalties for those responsible.
A temporary wooden structure was built, and it would be nearly two years before the bridge finally opened on Aug. 11, 1924. A suit against the construction company ended in a settlement. In 1958-59, the bridge was renovated, widened to four lanes and switched from a swing opening to a lift span. A $50 million renovation now under way is scheduled to be completed this year.
Tags: bridges, Palm Beach
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.
Tags: bridges, Henry Flagler, Palm Beach, railroads
