On March 1, 1926, Temple Beth El in West Palm Beach was the first synagogue in Palm Beach County to be incorporated. The earliest Jewish congregation in the area formed in 1919, meeting in a private home on 5th Street in West Palm Beach. Within a few years the congregation split into the Reform Temple Israel and the Conservative Temple Beth El.
Popular entertainer Sophie Tucker (left) at a Temple Israel dinner in West Palm Beach in 1952. Leon Goldsmith, president of the congregation from 1942-48, is on the right. (Photo courtesy of the Florida Photographic Collection)
Tags: churches, Jews, This Week in History, West Palm Beach
Every once in a while we shamelessly write about ourselves. In this case, it’s about what used to be at the southwest corner of Dixie Highway and Belvedere Road, an area that hosts this newspaper.
In September, long-timer Jim Anderson (Anderson Hardware) recounted “Sonny-Boy’s Fruit Company,” a market that sat at the southeast corner of that intersection, back to before World War II, and was gone by the early 1950s. The spot later hosted a bank.
The east side hosted a Howard Johnson’s and Mount Vernon Motor Lodge, now Hotel Biba.
But it appears the corner that’s now The Palm Beach Post’s complex was, in the years just after the war, a barbecue drive-in.
In January, Bill Ande, a musician and record producer in Chicago, wrote to say his father and grandfather ran the place. His source is someone who knows: his mother, Barbara Ande, whose 100th birthday is Monday.
A 1947 city directory says Ande’s Frozen Malts operated at 418 S. Poinsettia Ave. By 1951 “Ande’s Drive In” was operating at 2729 Poinsettia. Poinsettia later became Dixie Highway.
“I was a kid, but I used to go in there and eat,” Bill Ande recalls. “After I used to deliver papers in the morning, I used to go there and play the pinball machines with friends of mine. I remember it was great barbecue.”
What kind?
“It was very Southern. It was, as far as I can remember, sweet.”
His mother rose at 4 a.m. to bake pies and cakes, he says. She also once “punked” the cook with a rubber spider in the pancake mix. The place is gone from city directories by 1954.
Operating as early as 1951, if not before: Ande’s Bar and Package at 1001 Belvedere, just east of where Interstate 95 now crosses. The place was a favorite with the boys from Morrison Field, then mostly an Air Force base and now Palm Beach International Airport, Ande says.
His dad died young, at 55. Bill Ande later got into a band in the San Francisco. When the members realized all were from Florida, they named it Osceola. The group never released an album, but ex-members have dug up concert recordings and were considering producing something, he said.
Ande’s barbecue drive-in sat on a corner at 2729 Poinsettia, which is now Dixie Highway and the home of The Palm Beach Post. (Photo courtesy of Bill Ande)
Tags: restaurant, West Palm Beach
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
We’re starting our 12th year of Post Time. Thank you!
We’re reminded that history is about real people. On Jan. 16, 2005, we ran a feature on the slayings of two federal agents in West Palm Beach. We’d found relatives of Robert Moncure thanks to his surname, but not Frank Patterson. This past November, I received this email:
A week or so ago, while browsing the Internet, I discovered a copy of your article, dated January 16, 2005, and titled ‘75 Years Ago: Murder and Moonshine.’
While I am not sure what may have motivated you to write the article or the newspaper to publish, some 75 years after an event that most people might view as an insignificant bit of history, I wish to personally thank you and the paper for doing so. Otherwise, I might have never learned the details of the death of Frank Patterson, who was my grandfather.
After my grandmother moved to Tampa to raise her children, the details of those days were not often discussed by her. She died in the 1950s, while I was still a child, and growing up, all I learned from her children, my father, aunt and uncles, was that he died from a shotgun blast while attempting to serve a warrant during Prohibition. Even my Uncle James Patterson, who is Frank Patterson’s last surviving child and who is a retired schoolteacher living in California, knew very few details, other than that, as he was an infant at the time.
I have shared your article with my uncle, his daughter and my own children and grandchild, and they are also grateful for your efforts in researching and writing of those events so long ago.
You might find the following a bit ironical…A fact that I never knew was that I was born in 1951 on the anniversary of his Jan. 18 death. Likewise, the fact that, after I closed my real estate and civil law practice in Tampa, in 1986, I moved to Houston,where I have since practiced law exclusively as a criminal defense attorney — something my grandfather might have looked on with displeasure.
Thank you…for your efforts as they have reached across time and space and touched more hearts, in a positive way, than you could have imagined.
Richard Steven Patterson
Click on the image to read the Jan. 19, 1930 account of the shooting as published on the front page of The Palm Beach Post.
Tags: notorious crimes, Prohibition, West Palm Beach
On Nov. 30, 1955, the city of West Palm Beach sold a water bond issue to purchase the West Palm Beach Water Co. and its 17,000 acres of land for $8.5 million from the Henry Flagler estate. Flagler built the water plant at Clear Lake in 1894 when just a few hundred people lived in the area. By 1955 the water company served 15,700 households and businesses in West Palm Beach and Palm Beach, and it currently provides water to 51,000 customers. Read more about the current state of the water facility here.
1919 “Map of the Property of the West Palm Beach Water Co.”
Tags: Henry Flagler, This Week in History, West Palm Beach
