This week in history: Lake Worth incorporated

On June 14, 1913, the city of Lake Worth was incorporated as the fourth city in Palm Beach County, after West Palm Beach, Palm Beach and Delray Beach. The area had been known as Jewell (or Jewel) in the 1890s, and in 1912 it was platted as the Townsite of Lucerne. But another town had already claimed the name Lucerne, so the city became Lake Worth.

Lake Worth pioneer and historian Lillian Curry (right) in 1913, age 4 or 5, with her family in the tent on Second Avenue North where they lived when they moved to Lake Worth. A year later, electric lights were introduced. Curry died in 2000 at age 92. (Palm Beach Post file photo, courtesy of Sandy Capton, Lillian Curry’s great-niece.

Tags: incorporated, Lake Worth, place names, This Week in History

Lake Worth publisher braved 1928 storm

Every year at this time we donate a Post-Time column to what’s arguably the most important event in Palm Beach County history: the 1928 hurricane . It’s the second deadliest natural disaster of any kind in America. The official death toll of 1,836 was updated to 2,500 at the 75th anniversary in 2003, and many historians believe far more died.

One of our more loyal readers has been retired pilot William S. Stafford, who lives all the way in New Zealand.

Stafford grew up in Lake Worth. At the time of the storm, his father, James, later Lake Worth’s youngest mayor, was about 7 years old. And his grandfather, William M. “Chief” Stafford, was publisher of the Lake Worth Leader.

“My father would not discuss the ’28 storm, but my grandfather retold it to me quite often, and my grandmother made interjections throughout his dialog, adding to their night of terror,” he writes.

Just after noon, William Stafford crossed to the Lake Worth Casino. Winds were so strong that any attempt at photos “was all but impossible due to the sand and its effects on the camera.”

His 3-ton 1926 Hudson sedan got him back over the wooden bridge, waves breaking over it.

Realizing it was too late to get out a special edition, he shut down the presses and sent his workers home. His own trip home, normally 5 minutes, took 25. At one point a small house or shed flew over the car and smashed to the ground just behind him.

It took him 10 minutes to get the door open. He and his wife had to shout to be heard. They could hear windows upstairs starting to smash; they ran up and began tearing off closet doors and nailing them to the frames.

“Chief” ran outside to rescue his pet Shetland pony, trapped in its shed, which blew away as soon as the horse was out.

As the eye approached, Stafford ran out to secure more windows. Then the second half was on them. Knowing it well could be worse, he and his wife put their children under mattresses and the dining table. The family cowered for another four hours.

The next morning, they saw their home was one of only two left standing in the neighborhood. The morning after the storm, Stafford raced to his newspaper to find the roof had come down right on the presses. It would be weeks before he could publish again.

The family home later would be condemned. A new one finished in 1929 incorporated salvaged items, so “there were always constant reminders in the ‘new’ house of the ’28 storm,” William writes.

This photo of Narcissus Street, looking south from Second Street in West Palm Beach, was taken Sept. 16, 1928, following the hurricane. (Palm Beach Post file photo)

Click here for more photos and memories of the 1928 hurricane.

Tags: 1928 Hurricane, hurricanes, Lake Worth, Lake Worth Casino

Palm Beach County as it was: Changing times

By BILL McGOUN

Sixth 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

The first decade after World War II was not a time of big change as far as downtowns were concerned. Palm Coast Plaza, the first shopping center, was not opened until 1959, and Palm Beach Mall, the first mall, did not come on the scene until 1967.

In residential areas, however, change was the norm as the vacant lots and blocks of the coastal cities began filling in quickly. The two vacant lots across from our house on South O Street in Lake Worth became the sites of a two-story apartment building and a one-story prefabricated house.

The vacant lot at S. Palmway and 3rd Avenue where I often played sprouted a one-story group of apartments. In the southwest, new streets — C, D and E — were cut between 6th and 12th Avenues S., and
the Whispering Palms subdivision was built on the south side of 12th Avenue.

The same pattern would hold true in other coastal cities, as most neighborhoods filled up to reach their present configuration. The great leap west would come later.

As for the downtowns, there was some infill and some realignment. In addition to the department-store changes noted previously, downtown West Palm Beach would add the Surf Theater in the 300 block of Datura Street and Mike Pucci’s Bowlarama on Evernia Street between Dixie and the Florida East Coast railway. It was there that I did my first indoor bowling and had my first pizza.

Back in Lake Worth, the chief change would be the demise of the outdoor bowling alley, replaced by a five-and-dime. Otherwise, downtown remained pretty much the same into the 1950s, when the Lovett’s and Margaret Ann chains were combined and both Lake Avenue stores were closed.

The new company, Winn-Lovett, built a Kwik-Chek store on the east side of North Dixie Highway just north of 2nd Avenue. Later in the decade, Winn-Lovett would merge with Dixie Home to form Winn-Dixie and the Dixie Highway store would be renamed.

School days

I spent six years at South Grade. The school was of such a size that occasionally it had too many students in a given grade for one class but too few for two. As a result, some classes were split. I attended fourth grade in a class that was half sixth-graders and sixth grade in a class that was half fifth-graders.

The school safety patrol was drawn from boys in grades five and six. I was on the patrol for all of the fifth grade and six days of the sixth. Why? Because South Grade had a new principal who was a hard-liner on any infraction of rules. Any lapse of attention and you were off the patrol. Ditto for being late twice, my Waterloo.

That was the year that South Grade got its first girls on patrol, a change born of necessity. By mid-year all the boys in grades five and six had been kicked off.

The only field trip of the year was an excursion by bicycle to Sunset Ridge Park for a May Day picnic. This was before people got paranoid about celebrating May Day because the Communists made such a big deal
out of it. I would come home exhausted and sunburned.

In 1949 I headed to the hill on the west side of town to attend what then was Lake Worth Junior-Senior High School, housed in the two oldest buildings on the present campus. I was there for six years, graduating in 1955.

My youth included the usual mix of odd jobs, including what then were the two traditional ones, paper boy and bag boy, tasks now taken over by adults. I bagged groceries at the Kwik-Chek on Dixie Highway and was for a time one of the best paper carriers The Palm Beach Post ever had.

That’s because I was delivering The Miami Herald. I also briefly delivered the erstwhile Lake Worth Leader, a daily published out of a Quonset hut on N. G Street along the Florida East Coast railway.

The Quonset hut, a World War II innovation, became popular for low-cost construction after the war. When Lake Worth Junior-Senior High School added a metalworking shop about 1950, it was in the form of a Quonset.

Cities would adopt various strategies as they began to get built out. Some would aggressively annex while others, such as Lake Worth, were content to remain within their boundaries.

Boynton Beach and Boca Raton had more aggressive policies than did Delray Beach, which is why today Delray Beach’s city lines are closer to Atlantic Avenue than to either Ocean Avenue in Boynton Beach or
Palmetto Park Road in Boca Raton.

As to high-school education, the byword was addition by subtraction. In 1950 the downtown high schools in Delray Beach and Boynton Beach were closed and replaced by Seacrest High School, built roughly halfway between the two downtowns. The same year Industrial High School, the African-American school in West Palm Beach, was replaced by Roosevelt High School.

The “race question”

Jim Crow still was the rule in those years. Like most white youths I didn’t have to think much about race, so I didn’t. If you are African-American you can’t ignore race, as it confront you constantly.

Larry Rivers, a Florida A&M University professor, once told me in regard to the Confederate flag, “I’d like to forget about it, but everybody keeps shoving it in my face.”

If you lived in Lake Worth then, the race question was all but academic. The only African-Americans lived in the Osborne section, which was physically separated from the rest of the city. They went to the Osborne school through eighth grade and then to either Carver High School in Delray Beach or Roosevelt High, if they could arrange transportation.

Lake Worth never had the separate water fountains, rest rooms or railway waiting rooms that West Palm Beach had. About the only time we ever went into an African-American neighborhood was to eat at Harvey’s, a Tamarind Avenue institution in West Palm Beach with some of the finest barbecue I ever have eaten.

Of course, we had to order takeout or eat in our car. Only African-Americans were allowed inside. The first time I ever was inside was in the 1980s, but that was after Harvey had died and the food was decidedly inferior.

The evolution of the two-car family

A watershed event in my life, though I didn’t realize it at the time, came in 1953 when the Blosseys, our landlords on S. O Street, were killed in a traffic accident in Indiana. The new owners had other plans for the property, so we had to find a new home.

Dad bought a house at 1603 N. O Street and we moved in the summer of 1954, as I was entering my senior year in high school. For the first time, we lived somewhere where Mother, who never drove, could not walk to shopping.

In a way, it was symbolic of the rush to the wide-open spaces that would engulf Palm Beach County, and the nation, the decades to come. The two-car family would become the norm, due both to desire and to
necessity. Like all downtowns, Lake Worth’s would decline and come back in specialized form, stressing dining and entertainment.

Fortunately for my own mobility, by that time I had a car, if a 1947 Crosley could be called a car. It seems appropriate that it was built by an appliance firm, as it was about as large and as stylish as a refrigerator crate.

As I said in the first part of this series, I wouldn’t trade today for the “good old days.” I enjoy modern medicine and the Internet too much. Also, today’s society is a more just society, having excised the demons of Jim Crow for the most part.

I like to recall the days of my youth, but once around that block was enough.

- – -

A reader identified as Valesha corrected me on an item in the first part of this series. I had said the 1963 bus wreck in which 27 farm workers occurred when the bus missed the turn onto the old Six-Mile Bend bridge east of Belle Glade. In fact, as she noted, it happened when the bus collided with a truck. The wreck occurred several miles from the bridge on Brown’s Farm Road.

Memory can be a tricky thing. I tried to check my facts as much as possible but on this one I goofed. Valesha had a personal reason for remembering, as four of her relatives were among the 27 killed. Thanks for setting me straight.

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: Lake Worth, Palm Beach County as it was, schools, store

Palm Beach County as it was: The wide-open coastline

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

Palm Beach County as it was: Before the urban sprawl

By BILL McGOUN

Third 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

Lake Worth neighborhoods tend to be a hodgepodge of housing styles. That’s because the city was built in spurts. First, there were the original homes put up shortly after the 1912 drawing that kicked off the city. Then there were the houses built during the 1920s land boom. Finally, the remaining lots were filled in after World War II.

When we arrived in August of 1943, the first two phases had been completed. There were two vacant lots across from our home in the 200 block of S. O Street. Next to them was one of the oldest houses in town, home of Naomi Shipman Smith, one of the seven girls in Lake Worth High’s first graduating class in 1923.

Around the corner, at Palmway and Third Avenue S., was a palmetto-scrub lot in which I played as a child, and once got my foot speared by a cactus thorn that went through my sneaker. Such lots were common throughout the city.

The southwest was the least developed of the city’s quadrants. There was one big undeveloped tract bounded by B and F streets and 6th and 12th avenues, broken up only by a few sandy trails. The Whispering Pines subdivision south of 12th Avenue was yet to be built. The effect was that the Osborne section, then home to the city’s only African-Americans, was physically separated from the rest of Lake Worth.

What I remember most about the Whispering Pines land was how Dad would take me with him in December to cut one of the pines for a Christmas tree. These were slash pines and they were so crooked that the tree had to be tied up to keep it standing. In those days, we didn’t know slash pines would become endangered trees that no one in his right mind would cut today.

Undeveloped areas dotted the county

Other cities were similarly spotty in development. In the south end of West Palm Beach was a large undeveloped area bounded by Dixie Highway, Olive Avenue and Beverly and Gregory roads. The site of St. Juliana’s church and school was a golf driving range.

Driving down U.S. 1 in Palm Beach County there were several miles of open country between the villages of Jupiter and Juno Beach (today’s State Road A1A along the ocean was U.S. 1 then). After Juno Beach were several more miles of open country until you hit Lake Park.

From Lake Park through Lantana the highway as solidly urbanized. But there then were miles of open country between Lantana and Boynton Beach, between Boynton Beach and Delray Beach, and between Delray Beach and Boca Raton.

The first subdivision between Delray Beach and Boca Raton was Hidden Valley, which led to the observation that if there had been a valley in that area, it certainly had remained well hidden.

When sculptor Leno Lazzari and his wife were murdered in their U.S. 1 home in 1948, no one heard the shots and the bodies were not found until the next day. The home was at least a mile from any neighbors. It sat on the east side of the highway just south of today’s intersection with NE 20th Street and 5th Avenue in Boca Raton.

Most cities in those days were self-sufficient, and Lake Worth was no exception. Lake Avenue between Dixie Highway and L Street included three supermarkets, the chain-operated Lovett’s and Margaret Ann and the locally-owned Central Market. There were two movie theaters, the Fountain’s clothing store and two 5-and-10 cent stores.

One of the latter was built shortly after the war on the site of an outdoor bowling alley with concrete lanes and duckpins as well as standard tenpins. Yes, those lanes were just about as crude as they sound. I did my first tenpin bowling and my only duckpin bowling there, with the expected degree of success.

Each September, Mother and I would trek to The Book Store — that was its name — between K and L streets on the south side of Lake Avenue, to get my school supplies. Evidently the schools had been in touch with the store beforehand, as everything needed always was on hand, from pencils to paste pots to protractors.

Once I was old enough to go alone, I would spend my Friday afternoons in the Worth Theater, the building that now houses the Lake Worth Playhouse. My mother would give me a quarter. The double-feature bill of a Western and often a Bowery Boys film, plus a serial, cost nine cents. A big mug of A&W root beer was a nickel and a big candy bar another nickel. Sometimes I had no idea what to with the other six cents.

On family outings we would go to see a first-run film at the Lake Theater, now a shuttered museum at Lake and L. There a child’s admission was higher, 14 cents.

Downtown West Palm Beach was the big city

When Lake Worth was not enough, there was always downtown West Palm Beach. Mother and I would catch a bus a block from our house that would deposit us at Banyan Boulevard (then First Street) and Olive Avenue. Here we had out choice of three major department stores within a block. Montgomery Ward was on the east side of Olive where the city parking garage now sits. Burdine’s was on the northwest corner of Olive and Clematis Street and Penney’s was just to its north on the west side of Olive.

Later, Burdine’s would move to Dixie Highway, to the site of the just-opened City Center. Penney’s would move onto Clematis east of Olive and Belk’s would take over and combine the old Burdine’s and Penney’s spaces.

West Palm Beach was big time to someone from Lake Worth. It had three 5-and-10s and four movie theaters. There was the Florida, in the wedge formed by South Clematis and Narcissus, the Rialto on the east side of Narcissus north of Clematis, the Arcade behind the Comeau Building and the Coral on the north side of Clematis between Dixie and the FEC Railway tracks.

The only theater building remaining downtown is the Cuillo Center. It was built as the new Florida Theater in the 1950s and the Florida was renamed the Palms.

I don’t remember ever going to a movie in West Palm Beach then. Generally, Mother and I went north just to shop for clothes, usually at Montgomery Ward.

I got my first and only baseball glove, a Johnny Pesky model that I still have, at the Montgomery Ward sporting goods store that sat on the First Street (now Banyan Boulevard) side of what now is the parking lot of the just-vacated City Hall.

When we were finished shopping, Mother and I would walk to First Street and Dixie, near the Firestone tire store, to catch the southbound bus home.

For a brief time, Palm Beach Mercantile, a store that had been a downtown fixture since 1896, would be somewhat of a tourist attraction. That was due to a major expansion in 1950 that included, among other things, the first escalator in the county. Apparently too many people went to look and too few to shop, as the store went out of business in 1957.

In fact, major changes would come to all Palm Beach County downtowns in the years following the big war. In the concluding chapter of this series I will deal with those changes.

NEXT: The Wide-Open Coastline

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.

Burdine’s photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. Montgomery Ward photo courtesy of Pleasant Family Shopping (http://pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com/).

Tags: downtown, Lake Worth, store, West Palm Beach