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On May 10, 1948, the city welcomed a new city hall on Second Street, across from the county courthouse. The former city hall, at Poinsettia Avenue and Datura Street became an office building. The 1948 building was demolished in 1981.
The old “new” city hall (Courtesy Historical Society of Palm Beach County postcard collection)
The 1980 city hall building (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
Tags: buildings, city hall, This Week in History, West Palm Beach
On April 30, 1962, the former home of the West Palm Beach Library opened at the head of Clematis Street, replacing the nearby Memorial Library, built in 1923. The 1962 building was demolished in 2009 to make way for a clear view of the waterfront.
Read more about the history of the West Palm Beach Library here.
Tags: buildings, libraries, This Week in History, West Palm Beach
This week marks the 15th anniversary of the Palm Beach County Courthouse. Here’s a chronology that ran soon after the new complex opened April 20, 1995:
1916: Palm Beach County’s first courthouse built. The 38,400-square-foot neoclassical structure houses county government offices, as well as courts. Cost: $135,000 ($1.8 million in 1995 dollars).
1927: Expansion doubles size.
1967: Study recommends new courthouse; county opts to expand instead. “Wraparound’’ finished in 1972 brings it to 232,150 square feet.
September 1984: County commissioners vote 3-2 to put criminal courts on Gun Club Road.
July 1985: Commissioners endorse 465,000-square-foot downtown courthouse; old courthouse would be used as annex.
November 1986: County officials mull 500,000-square-foot courthouse as part of $200 million bond issue for courts, jails, county offices. Estimated cost: $80 million.
January 1987: To keep court downtown, West Palm Beach pledges $15 million garage and spending $15 million on land.
May 1987: Commissioners endorse 906,000-square-foot judicial complex with 16-story courthouse, separate six-floor building for state attorney and public defender, 3,000-car garage. Estimated cost: $220 million.
April 1989: County commission approves design. Estimated cost: $139 million.
December 1989: Commission sidesteps voters and approves bond issue for courthouse, jails. August 1992: Six-story state attorney/public defender building opens seven months late.
February 1995: Latest $1.5 million list of cost overruns exhausts contingency account of nearly $13 million, pushes courthouse over its $124.7 million budget. Estimated cost: $125.1 million.
April 1995: County moves into new courthouse. March 15, 2008: Original courthouse, restored for $18.9 million, opens as a museum and home to the Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
The Palm Beach County Judicial Center was under construction in 1991. The new complex officially opened on April 25, 1995, but it was plagued by delays and cost-overruns. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: buildings, courts
By Michelle Quigley
The Northwest Community Consortium, Inc. is hosting a Black History Month trolley tour of historic sites in the northwest neighborhood.
Tour-goers will see Payne Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church and Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church, both founded in January 1893; Pine Ridge Hospital, which opened as a hospital for African-Americans in 1916; the Sunset Cocktail Lounge, a showplace for black entertainers in the 1940s and 50s; and the home of Haley and Alice Mickens, where Dr. Alice Moore still resides.
The tour is Saturday, February 27, 2010, beginning with a program at 8:30 a.m. at the Salvation Army Community Center at 600 N. Rosemary Avenue, followed by the tour at 10:00 a.m. The program, including a display of Ineria Hudnell’s photo collections, and tour are free and open to the public. Registration is required. Please call 561-820-4872 to register. Click here to see a map of the tour route.
The Sunset Cocktail Lounge in West Palm Beach was the “Cotton Club of the South” in the 1950s. Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie and Duke Ellington were among the performers at the Sunset, owned by Dennis and Thelma Starks. Mrs. Starks, who died in 2008 at 91, recalled, “We had music on those days.” (Palm Beach Post file photo)
The Sunset Cocktail Lounge and Ballroom in 1930s. (Palm Beach Post file photo/Courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)
The Sunset Cocktail Lounge in 1973. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
The Sunset Cocktail Lounge in 2003. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
The Payne Chapel at the corner Ninth and Division streets. The church’s origins lie in old Palm Beach, when blacks worshiped at Bethel AME Church in the shanty town called the Styx. When it moved to Banyan Street in West Palm Beach in 1902, it was known as Payne Chapel, named after one of the bishops. In the ’20s, it
moved to Ninth and Division streets, meeting in the basement. In 1937, the church was completed and services were held upstairs for the first time. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Retired teacher Alice Moore stands in front of her 1917 historic home on Fourth Street. Moore is the adopted daughter of Dr. Alice Frederick Mickens, a West Palm Beach civil-rights leader. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
This photo from the Collie family shows John Collie’s son, Warren (in black suit) and one unidentified gentleman standing in front of the new Pine Ridge Hospital shortly after it opened. The hospital served black patients in five counties until 1956, when St. Mary’s Medical Center integrated. In 2008, the property was sold to the Charmettes Inc., an international service organization. Charmettes was founded locally by Frankie Drayton Thomas and Gwendolyn Rodgers, whose husband, Edward Rodgers, was Palm Beach County’s first black judge. (Palm Beach Post file photo/Courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)
Tags: African Americans, Black history month, buildings
Fifteen years ago this week, on Feb. 18, 1995, the historic 70-yearold Pennsylvania Hotel, a concrete link to South Florida’s chaotic real estate boom, came crashing down.
In the 1920s, downtown West Palm Beach sported dozens of hotels and rooming houses. The Pennsylvania, built in 1926 at Evernia Street and South Flagler Drive, was the last.
Dubbed “The Breakers West,’’ it was one of seven great waterfront hotels.
The other six are all gone: the former George Washington Hotel, later the Helen Wilkes Residence Hotel; the Lake Court, now the site of the Noreen McKeen Residence next to the Pennsylvania; the Salt Air, at the site of the downtown Holiday Inn razed in 1994; the Royal Palm, the Monterey; and the South Palm Inn.
The eight-story, 230-room Mediterranean Revival-style Pennsylvania was designed by the famed architects Harvey & Clarke with graceful arches, a tower and decorative ornamentation.
A flat roof was hidden by parapets, decorated with barrel tile.
Inside: a mezzanine with high ceilings and 4-inch squares of Spanish tile. Columns were decorated up to 4 feet with colorful blue, green and yellow tiles made by architect and developer Addison Mizner’s own factory.
A dining room seated 400 and the place had a barber shop and beauty salon.
The Pennsylvania hosted balls, coming-out parties, elegant dinners and other celebrations of the city’s social season.
In 1964, it was sold for $800,000 to the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm of South Florida. A 1986 attempt to get the hotel onto the National Register of Historic Places failed when the sisters objected. In 1994, the group announced plans to level the building, saying it wasn’t structurally sound, and build an elderly care facility. City commissioners approved by one vote. The building came down in five seconds. Ground was broken in November 1995 for the $40 million, 13-story McKeen Towers seniors residence. It opened in February 1998.
The Pennsylvania Hotel in 1962 in West Palm Beach. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: buildings, hotels, West Palm Beach
