On April 17, 1894, nearly seven months before the city was incorporated, West Palm Beach’s first post office opened in a tent on the northwest corner of Clematis Street and Narcissus Avenue.
Photo courtesy City of West Palm Beach history Web site
Read more about the early days of West Palm Beach at the city’s history Web site.
Tags: post offices, This Week in History, West Palm Beach
Evelyn Wolf Elliott of West Palm Beach wrote us about the Southboro Post Office.
Currently at 840 Southern Blvd., at Parker Avenue, near Publix in the Southdale Shopping Center, it’s one of three Palm Beach County branches the postal service is considering closing.
The others: downtown Boca Raton and Lantana.
Ms. Elliott, born in 1928, believes that in the late 1930s or early 1940s, the office was around the 3600 block of South Dixie Highway.
That’s where a Goodwill store recently stood until it was razed in 2006 to make way for a condominium.
Evelyn recalls that the building originally housed a family grocery store.
She says a doctor later built a private hospital across the street in a two-story building that now hosts an antique store.
The post office moved in 1955 to the southwest corner of Puritan Road, at 5001 S. Dixie Highway.
In 1996, with the building plagued by peeling paint, cracking concrete and a dearth of parking spaces, the postal service moved to Southdale.
A businessman then bought the Southboro location for $212,000 to convert it to a pack-and-ship store.
It’s currently owned by A.B. Levy Antiques of Palm Beach.
Obituary: Palm Beach County Commissioner and former Boca Raton Mayor Steven Abrams brought our attention to a New York Times obituary of Bernard Ehrlich, who died at 87 on July 16.
The Vienna native was a senior partner in the New York firm WBTL Architects and Planners until he retired in 1990.
The obituary quoted the firm’s managing partner as citing two Ehrlich works, the 1966 Barbados Hilton and the 1969 tower at the Boca Raton Resort & Club, as “early examples of postmodern design, largely unsung in the architectural press of the time.”
In 1956, Arthur Vining Davis bought the hotel and surrounding property. Thirteen years later, his Arvida company began a $14million expansion that included the 27-story tower, then the tallest building between Miami and Jacksonville.
Tags: buildings, post offices
Readers: For our May 7 column, Dottie Patterson, archivist for the Delray Beach Historical Society, gave us the lowdown on the story behind the name of Old Germantown Road. Because no good deed goes unpunished, we’re running yet another inquiry past Dottie: Was Zion the first postal address used for Delray Beach, in 1885?
“Yes,” Dottie writes, “the House of Refuge was the first post office in the Delray area. Of course you know the story of the Barefoot Mailman. In his book Letters from Linton, Charles Hofman says there was a man called ‘Long John Holman’ who carried mail from St. Augustine to Biscayne Bay, hiding in caves along the way. He started doing this during the Third Seminole War in the 1850s and also again during the Civil War.
“In 1885, the U.S. government contracted for mail carriers along the South Florida coast. These were the ‘Barefoot Mailmen.’ It was their custom to stay over at the Orange Grove House of Refuge.
“Annie Andrews, wife of the refuge keeper, Stephen Andrews, ran the Zion post office out of the House of Refuge from 1885 to 1893.
“I looked at the bibliography in Charles’ book, but where he got the info on Long John Holman was not apparent. I know that Charles is a meticulous researcher and was a high school and college English teacher, etc.
“He dedicated his book to his grandparents, Delray Beach pioneers (1895). Underneath was a quote from Psalm 84:7: ‘They work from strength to strength until they stand before God in Zion.’ I suppose Annie Andrews chose the name.”
Thanks again, Dottie. As always, we welcome more detail from our readers.
Updates: The Germantown Road column also prompted a note from Dr. Bennett Miller of Atlantis. He notes that while we mentioned Germantown, Tenn., far more prominent is the one near Philadelphia, where in October 1777, George Washington’s army fought “a pivotal battle in our fight for independence. Initially, the Americans penetrated into the streets of Germantown, but partly due to a heavy fog, the Americans were eventually defeated, and from there had to withdraw to winter quarters at Valley Forge.”
Tags: Delray Beach, place names, post offices
