WFLA-AM, operated by Addison Mizner’s Boca Raton development company, went on the air on Feb. 5, 1927. “The Voice of Tropical America,” was touted as one of the largest radio stations in the country, “broadcasting all the warmth and beauty of sunny southland through to the ice-locked and snow-bound north.”
According to Donald Curl’s Mizner’s Florida: American Resort Architecture, the company ran out of money before it built a permanent studio, so WFLA’s broadcasts originated from a frame structure covered with palmetto fronds at the corner of Palmetto Park Road and NW Fourth Avenue. The station shut down within a year as Mizner’s empire collapsed.
WFLA radio towers in 1927. (Photo courtesy of the Boca Raton Historical Society & Museum)
The concrete bases for the radio towers are still visible on the lawn in front of the Boca Raton Museum of Art School on Palmetto Park Road. (Photo courtesy of the Boca Raton Historical Society & Museum)
Tags: Boca Raton, radio, This Week in History
On Jan. 25, 1925, the Orange Blossom Special arrived in West Palm Beach for the grand opening of the Seaboard Air Line station, the flagship of the Seaboard line. The Mediterranean Revival station building, on Tamarind Avenue at Datura Street, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The Seaboard line was the second railroad to come to the area, after Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway.
Postcard from around 1939 with the caption “The Orange Blossom Special Going Througg Orange Groves in Florida.” (Courtesy of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida)
Postcard from the 1920s of the Seaboard station in West Palm Beach. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
The Seaboard station in 1969 (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
Tags: railroads, This Week in History, West Palm Beach
On Jan. 18, 1930, rum-runner George W. Moore fatally shot Prohibition agents Robert Moncure (pictured below) and Franklin R. Patterson. Moncure and Patterson, along with two other federal agents, were raiding the South Dixie Highway home where Moore allegedly stored the illicit liquor he sold to local speakeasies.
Tags: Prohibition, This Week in History
On Jan. 9, 1878, the Spanish brig Providencia bound from Mexico to Spain with a cargo of logs, hides and 20,000 coconuts ran aground on what was then known at the lake region. Local residents took the coconuts as salvage and within a decade, the area was filled with palm trees, and the island had a new name — Palm Beach.
Tags: Palm Beach, place names, shipwrecks, This Week in History
The West Palm Fishing Club is one of the oldest sport fishing clubs in the country. It was founded in 1934 and soon had a clubhouse meeting room at the Royal Worth Hotel — later known as the Pennsylvania Hotel — on South Flagler Drive. On Jan. 6, 1941, the club opened its new headquarters on Flagler Drive at Fifth Street.
The original clubhouse meeting room in the old Pennsylvania Hotel in the 1930s. (Photo from West Palm Beach Fishing Club Archives. Click here to see more photos and read more about the history of the club.)
The West Palm Beach Fishing Club building in 2009. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
Tags: buildings, fishing, This Week in History
