Until 1982, Donna Psaropoulos, also known as Dolphin Donna, served up barbecue, key lime pie and Brunswick stew at Topfer’s Pit Bar-B-Q on South Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach. Topfer’s was reborn as Toppers Bar-B-Q in Boynton Beach in 1990, and then as Dolphin Donna’s in Lake Park in 1993.
A reader is hoping to find the recipe for Topfer’s barbecue sauce. Can anyone help?
Tags: Boynton Beach, restaurant, West Palm Beach
By Bill McGoun
During my junior year at Lake Worth High School, 1953-54, students there and elsewhere did their best to dismantle two Florida resort hotels.
The Lake Worth choir took a three-day concert trip that included a stopover at the Walesbilt Hotel in Lake Wales. One of our singers thought it would be a great idea to set a lighter-fluid fire in one of the sand-filled cigarette disposal urns, not realizing that the flames would singe and nearly set fire to the wall.
Then, some of the girls wanted to hold a singing session in the lobby and decided it would work better if the upright piano were on the other side of the room. A few of us boys started pushing it, not noticing that a caster was missing. Instead of moving, it turned over, making a rather sickening sound as it crashed to the floor.
The Walesbilt is now closed. I wonder if our visit had something to do with its demise.
That same year, the Florida Key Clubs held their annual convention at the Pennsylvania Hotel, on the south side of Evernia Street and Flagler Drive in West Palm Beach. We of the Lake Worth club were trying to get one of our own, club president Harold Lewis, elected Key Club governor. At least a dozen of us were packed into two adjoining rooms.
To get away from the crush, Mike Brenan and I decided to go out for something to eat, having no budget for hotel-priced food. To get out, we had to dodge assorted athletic events in the halls, ranging from foot races with toilet-paper finish tapes to place-kicking contests.
The Pennsylvania was one of those old-style Florida hotels with louvered wooden doors outside the main doors to allow air to circulate into the rooms. The kickers were aiming at the exit sign at the end of the hall, but errant kicks already had smashed some of the louvers. I learned later that one of the participants was a Miamian who would later become a well-known college athlete.
Mike and I headed for The Hut (above, in a photo that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1946), a popular teen hangout on Flagler Drive where the northernmost part of Phillips Point now stands. When we got back the hotel was strangely quiet. After knocking several times, the door of a darkened room was opened slightly, one of our fellow students peered out and, seeing it was us, said, “Get in. Quick.”
“What’s going on?”
“The hotel cop raided us.”
The raider had expelled everyone from the two rooms except the four who were supposed to be there. One of the expellees had slammed the door on the officer’s hand, which did nothing for his disposition.
A few minutes later, there was another knock at the door. Mike and I, who by now were in our underwear, were herded into the shower to hide, carrying our clothes. There was an inch or so of water in the shower. I heard a splash, upon which Mike announced that he had dropped my trousers.
Wonderful, I thought. I had displayed the usual forethought of a teenager, which meant I had no other trousers with me.
Whoever had knocked, it wasn’t the officer. We turned on the lights, upon which I found that it was not my trousers Mike had dropped. They belonged to the expellee who had shut the door on the officer’s hand.
It just wasn’t his day.
The convention from then on was relatively uneventful. Despite our en masse lobbying, Harold lost the election, largely because a Miamian had split the South Florida vote, allowing a North Floridian to triumph.
Then came the banquet, in the hotel ballroom. During the evening, the room was getting effectively smaller. A pool of water that had appeared in one corner kept getting larger, forcing us to move the tables to keep out feet dry.
Later we found out what had happened. One of the Key Clubbers from some other school had, as a prank, locked his roommate in the bathroom. The roommate climbed onto the sink in an effort to get out the window, which wouldn’t have done him any good as there was no fire escape there.
What he managed to do was pull the sink away from the wall, breaking the pipes and sending water working its way several floors down to the ballroom.
Publication of the state Key Club magazine was suspended for a year in order to pay the hotel for the damage. The Pennsylvania long has been shut down and torn down. Again, I wonder if our visit had anything to do with that.
The 1950s often are portrayed as a decade in which nothing happened.
They certainly were not as eventful as the 1960s, but they had their moments. Next time, I’ll tell about some of the favorite teenage pranks in Palm Beach County then.
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: hotels, restaurant, schools
In 1925 Paul Dunbar opened Ye Tower restaurant on U.S. 1 in Lantana with his brother Harley. In those days, the population of Lantana was about 150, and the restaurant fed prospective buyers of sand-and-scrub lots during Florida’s first real estate boom. Mr. Dunbar, who served as Lantana’s mayor from 1948-1957 and led the drive to buy what today is Lantana’s public beach, died in 1993 at age 90.
Owner Paul Dunbar, shown standing in front of the original tower in this mid-1920s photo, once said that he never sold his private stock of moonshine which he kept under the counter. (Photo courtesy of Paul Dunbar)
The 1928 hurricane destroyed the building’s 54-foot tower, and it was replaced by a much smaller tower.
Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County
The restaurant is on the right in this December 1980 Palm Beach Post file photo taken when around the time new traffic lights were installed at the intersection of Central Boulevard and U.S. 1. Note the National Enquirer Christmas tree in the background.
Ye Tower was torn down in December 1987 and replaced by a strip mall named Ye Tower Plaza.
When the restaurant closed in 1987, a barbecue sandwich was $1.50 and a slice of banana cream pie was 75 cents.
Paul Dunbar, with his son-in-law Fred Thomas (left), watches as a demolition crew tears down the restaurant in December 1987. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
Read more about Ye Tower restaurant and other memories of Lantana here.
Tags: building, Lantana, restaurant
Last week’s column on Guy Metcalf sparked a request that we profile another colorful pioneer, E.R. Bradley, who owned competing newspapers, albeit in different eras. Here’s a reprise of a December 2001 column:
Kentucky Col. Edward Riley Bradley operated his popular, but clearly illegal, casino in Palm Beach for a half-century.
The former livery boy was the only owner in history with four Kentucky Derby winners.
He would buy the Palm Beach Post, Palm Beach Times and Palm Beach Daily News in 1934.
He opened his Beach Club in 1898, just four years after Henry Flagler made Palm Beach a synonym for turn-of-the century indulgence.
Bradley’s club was renowned for its cuisine, but that wasn’t the draw. The white clapboard building on Royal Poinciana Way attracted tycoons who thought nothing of plunking down hundreds of thousands of dollars at the tables.
It was a private club with a cadre of security guards. Membership was a who’s who.
Stung by poor patronage the first year, Bradley and his brother were about to abandon the club when they opted to break tradition and admit women.
But no single women or people younger than 25. No smoking inside. Drinks only with meals. Evening dress mandatory after 7 p.m.
Florida residents were barred; Bradley reportedly targeted society Northerners who could afford to lose big because he feared locals would end up on, or before, a grand jury.
Bradley made generous contributions to churches, charities, and politicians.
There were feeble attempts at raids, but he always got a tip, and by the time agents showed up, tables had been folded and guests swayed to an orchestra or sipped tea. Bradley, in ill health, closed the Beach Club in 1945 and died at 86 on Aug. 15, 1946; as per his will, the club was razed for Bradley Park. On his death, Joseph Kennedy lamented, Palm Beach “lost its zipperoo.”
Edward Riley Bradley (Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)
From 1898 to 1945, Edward Riley ‘E.R.’ Bradley owned and operated the nation’s longest-running illegal gambling casino in Palm Beach. The casino, along with its fancy restaurant, was called the Beach Club, a rambling green-trimmed white building located where Bradley Park is today. It received its charter from the state to operate as a ‘social club,’ but the ultrawealthy who attended bet millions at the gaming tables each season. (Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)
Groundbreaking for St. Edward Church, April 25, 1926. E.R. Bradley is in the foreground. (Photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County)
Tags: buildings, Palm Beach, restaurant
By Michelle Quigley
On April 5, 1988, T.C. Bumper’s, the last remaining drive-in restaurant in Palm Beach County, closed after 32 years. The drive-in, at Southern Boulevard and Parker Avenue, had been an A&W in its early days and still served frosty mugs of root beer as T.C. Bumper’s.
Manager Ruth Place of T.C. Bumper’s pauses during lunch hour under a sign announcing the last day for the last drive-in root beer stand. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
Tags: restaurant, This Week in History
