A few weeks ago a reader wrote about his memories of growing up in Palm Beach. He told an entertaining tale about having a pet kangaroo who “seemed unable or unwilling to understand that only members” of the Coral Beach Club were supposed to attend the parties on the beach.
Life magazine photo
It turns out that Joey the kangaroo was a Palm Beach celebrity, featured twice in Life magazine (here and here — scroll up at the second link to see the photo of Joey playing dodge ball), and the instigation of an ordinance banning as pets any animals that weren’t dogs, cats, canaries or parakeets.
The ordinance was not popular with everyone in Palm Beach. Several prominent residents signed a petition to let Joey stay, and four-year-old Caroline Kennedy called Joey her friend.
The ordinance was modified after Joey’s owners, Walter and Tanya Brooks, challenged it in court, but the Town of Palm Beach still has an animal ordinance prohibiting exotic animals as pets and listing “serious annoyance” to neighbors as a violation.
While the court decided his fate, Joey became a popular resident of Masten’s Doghouse on Military Trail in West Palm Beach.
Joey eventually found a permanent home at the Dreher Park Zoo where he died in relative obscurity several years later.
Tags: animals, ordinances, Palm Beach
Today is April Fool’s Day. For some it’s a day for telling tall tales. For lovers of history, it’s a good day to bust myths and legends. In Palm Beach County, there’s none more infamous than that of the Styx. Here’s what we wrote in 2000:
The legend of the Styx has been passed down by oral tradition and is accepted as gospel by many. But the evidence all but dismisses it. The shantytown sprang up on Palm Beach’s County Road, north of the Royal Poinciana Hotel, in the 1890s for more than 2,000 black workers at nearby hotels. The story is that Henry Flagler was eager to oust the residents so he could develop the land. He had it condemned on health grounds, then hired a circus to set up across the Intracoastal Waterway in West Palm Beach, gave black residents free passes, and while they enjoyed the show, burned their homes down.
Another version places the incident on Guy Fawkes Day, Nov. 5, 1906.
Inez Peppers Lovett, who was born in 1895, said in 1994, a year before her death, that she recalled packing up and leaving the Styx but remembers no fire.
And in 1994, T. T. Reese Jr., of the pioneer Dimick/Reese family, wrote to The Palm Beach Post “to lay these questions to rest.”
First, Reese said, Flagler didn’t own the property. The Bradley brothers — Col. E.R. Bradley owned the famed Beach Club casino — bought the 30 acres around 1910 and by February 1912 had cut it into 230 residential lots.
In 1912, Reese says, his father was ordered by Bradley to move the residents out. He says his father gave them at least two weeks, and he remembers seeing them walk across the bridge, hauling their belongings. After everyone left, Reese says, his father cleared the land, pulled up the trash and burned it. Newspaper clippings from the time back Reese’s version of events. He died in 1997.
When Standard Oil baron Henry Flagler built his first two resort hotels in Palm Beach in the mid-1890s, workers on the projects, many from the Caribbean, lived at and around the intersection of North County Road and Sunset Avenue. The shantytown was known as the Styx, which in Greek mythology was the river to Hades. Shacks small and large served as homes, schools and stores. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: African Americans, Palm Beach, Styx
By Michelle Quigley
Two documentaries produced by The Education Network (T.E.N.) of the Palm Beach County School District have been awarded Tellys.
The documentary Laura Woodward: Visionary Artist won in the documentary, cultural and education categories. The 30-minute production tells the story of Laura Woodward, a landscape artist who used her paintings to persuade Henry Flagler to build a resort in Palm Beach in 1894.
The Hurricane of 1928 — documenting the deadly storm that slammed into Palm Beach County and roared inland to lift the water right out of Lake Okeechobee — also won in the education category.
You can watch Laura Woodward: Visionary Artist and The Hurricane of 1928 right here on HistoricPalmBeach.com.
In 2009 T.E.N. won an Emmy award for its Anywhere/Anytime science videos.
The Telly Awards are in their 31st year of honoring the best local, regional, and cable television commercials and programs, video and film productions, and works created for the Web.
Drawing of Laura Woodward, painting under an umbrella amid a tropical landscape. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: art, Glades, hurricanes, Palm Beach, videos
Today, chic ladies shriek for Chanel. But back in 1905, the woman who peddled ‘the latest French novelties’ was named Madame Najla Mogabgab — and she featured kimonos and other exotic costumes in her store inside Henry Flagler’s Royal Poinciana Hotel. The hotel boasted Fifth-Avenue-quality shops, and their dazzling window displays prompted the Palm Beach Daily News to dub the hotel’s shopping corridor ‘The Broadway of the Hotel Royal Poinciana.’ Next door were several other retailers, including Anthony’s, founded in 1895.
Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. The shop inside the Royal Poinciana Hotel features kimonos hanging on the left, lamps for sale above the dress racks, and lace and hatpins in the cases on the right.
Want to know more about our fashionable history? Order your copy of Palm Beach County at 100: Our History, Our Home. The 304-page, full-color, hardcover book — by The Palm Beach Post and the Historical Society of Palm Beach County — is the county’s official centennial book. It will be available on Nov. 1 for $45, plus tax, shipping and handling. Order your limited-edition copy at gallerypalmbeach.com
Tags: Breakers, Palm Beach, store
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
Posted in Archives October 28, 1995 at 9:18 am. 1 comment
