More Lake Worth beach clock pictures...

This one looks like it is from the mid 1960s.  Any others?  What about any of the digital clock that was there in the late 80s and early 90s?  Thanks to Marty Rosenblatt for this one and this one too - from the mid 50s.

Call Out: Pictures of the Clock at the Lake Worth Beach

The city is looking for pictures of the clock at the beach to give a designer inspiration for a new clock at the beach.  It is an adjunct to the Centennial celebration.  The pictures above are the ones that show the clock from my collection.  I would guess that the top one dates from the late 30s or early 40s; the bottom one has a date of 1981.  When I moved here in the late 1980s, I remember a green and white clock sponsored by Barnett Bank.

Please look through your old pictures to see if you have any images taken at the Lake Worth beach that contain the clock that was there.  Scan and forward them to me at wesblackman@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Elwell: Don’t spend money on dunes | www.palmbeachdailynews.com

The Town of Palm Beach is weighing options on beach re-nourishment after Sandy - and is choosing not to do it since it would likely be depleted during the summer.  The Chair of their Shore Protection Board said the following:

Board Chairman Llwyd Ecclestone said the best protection the coastal buildings can have is a sea wall. But he also said the dunes protect the sea walls. “A sea wall is a last defense,” he said. “Every building should have one.”

So, what is the condition of our seawall at the Lake Worth Beach - you know, the one "protecting" our NEW building that was built without the benefit of pilings.  It's the one we just spent $6 million plus on to "save."  ??

Click title for link to article.

LULA Lake Worth Arts DEADLINE EXTENDED ATTENTION ARTISTS:

Call for Artists: A Contest for the Creation of Centennial Postcards

Throughout 2013, the City of Lake Worth will be celebrating its 100-year anniversary. Known as a community that embraces artistic expression, the City is embarking on several arts-related projects as part of the yearlong centennial celebration. With this in mind, LULA Lake Worth Arts and the City’s Historic Preservation staff invite artists to submit artwork for consideration for the “Centennial Postcard” project. The Centennial Postcard project is meant to emulate nostalgic postcards of the past with a goal to provide a centennial keepsake for residents and visitors alike. The postcards will be available for purchase at various venues around town and will act as a vehicle to promote historic preservation and the arts within Lake Worth. Proceeds from the sales of the Centennial Postcards will benefit LULA Lake Worth Arts and the City’s Historic Preservation program. 

Five (5) works of art will be selected for the Centennial Postcard project, making selection competitive. One from each category will be chosen: 1) Photography, 2) Graphic & digital arts, 3) Visual arts drawing, 4) Visual arts painting, and 5) Visual arts vintage postcard. Selected artwork will developed into true mailable postcards, each with the artist credit and short biography on the back.

The selection panel consisting of 2 Art professionals and 1 Historian who will review the submitted images and select 5 qualified artists based on credentials and artistic design. All designs should evoke a sense of nostalgia with regards to the history of the City of Lake Worth, a Florida seaside community of diverse heritage.

Deadline: March 1, 2013

ELIGIBILITY AND RESTRICTIONS: 
The competition is FREE and open to all artists in Palm Beach County working in the media of painting, drawing, photography, graphics and digital design.

I know, I know...

We don't want to be another Delray Beach.  But, it turns out that I am doing some work in and around Delray recently.  Do you know that they have a free shuttles that run from their Tri-Rail station to two different areas of their downtown?  This is a sign showing the route at the station.

One Delray's Downtown Roundabout shuttle vehicles.

And, through the CRA and Beatify Palm Beach County, they are completing an entrance feature for their downtown, just east of the I-95 and Atlantic Avenue interchange.  Here are some pictures taken today:

There is also a Fairfield Inn being built just to the east of the interchange.  That is all.

For those of you that are asking...

Jim's picture of a new glider being tested by the Air Force is featured in "Torch" magazine.

"Torch" caters to the air safety and military crowd.
Apparently his picture of the glider is better than the manufacturer's 

Jim Stafford and family are alive and well and living in their same Lake Worth home.  Jim's photography was recently featured in "Torch" magazine.  Jim stopped by the house this week and wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

Seth Bramson - South Florida’s Premiere Historian 01/25 by High Noon in Lake Worth | Blog Talk Radio

Join me at noon this Friday (1/25) for talk with Seth Bramson. Seth Bramson is South Florida’s foremost and premiere historian.  He is America’s single most-published Florida history book author with 16 of his 21 books dealing directly with the villages, towns, cities, counties, people and businesses of the South Florida Gold Coast.    

     He is the Company Historian of the Florida East Coast Railway—one of only two people in the country who bears that title with an American railroad—and his book, “Speedway to Sunshine” is the official history of that famous line.  His collection of FEC Railway and Florida transportation memorabilia is the largest in the world:  it is larger than the State Museum’s collection and larger than the Flagler Museum’s collection.

     A graduate of Cornell University’s famed School of Hotel Administration, he holds Masters degrees from St. Thomas University and Florida International University, both here in Miami.  He is Adjunct Professor of History and Historian in Residence at Barry University and Adjunct Professor of History at FIU, where he teaches all of the University’s south Florida and Florida history courses.  In addition he is Historian in Residence at FIU’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.

     The founder of the Miami Memorabilia Collectors Club, his collection of Miami memorabilia and Floridiana is the largest in private hands in the country. 

     He is now working on his 22nd and 23rd books, one of which will be titled “Jewels in the Sunshine:  The Flagler System Hotels” and the other “Beach is Dynamite!  The History of Miami Beach High.”     

     Additionally he is the author of more than 120 articles on South Florida local and Florida transportation history including five in juried or refereed publications. 

     He has appeared as a featured guest or commentator on Florida history programs on A and E, Discovery Channel, Florida Public Broadcasting, Fox FX The Collectibles Show, History Channel, Learning Channel and Turner South Network as well as all five local Miami television stations.

     Nationally recognized as Florida’s leading transportation historian and the Miami area’s pre-eminent local historian he has been quoted frequently in newspapers and magazines throughout Florida as well as in “The New York Times,” “Chicago Tribune,” “Bloomberg Business Week,” “History,” the History Channel Magazine and “U. S. A. Today.”

     He is a consultant to the transportation, hospitality and health care industries and a sought-after speaker and presenter. 

Local Eyesore Bites the Dust: 17th Avenue North and Dixie Hwy.

Would you want to live on a housing estate like this? New Chinese 'villas' look more like concrete slums | Mail Online

Click title for link to how China is providing for "worker" housing.  I am sure this is the vision portrayed of the future of Lake Worth if the height limit referendum doesn't pass in March - even if these buildings only three stories, I am sure anything goes as long as it gets people to the polls and the threshold for mass hysteria is reached.

Prosperity & Achievement: Nine Arches

Click title for link to Mary Lindsey's blog.  This particular post is about the potential removal/replacement of one of the artists' works.  No need to re-invent the wheel here.

Richard Blanco: Making a Man Out of Me

A look inside the man who read and wrote the poem today - click title for link.

Richard Blanco - One Today - 2013 Inaugural Poem

Full text below:

Miami-raised Cuban poet Richard Blanco delivered his poem “One Today,” written especially for the inauguration ceremony. The full text is below:

One Today

One sun rose on us today, kindled over our shores, peeking over the Smokies, greeting the faces
of the Great Lakes, spreading a simple truth
across the Great Plains, then charging across the Rockies. One light, waking up rooftops, under each one, a story told by our silent gestures moving behind windows.

My face, your face, millions of faces in morning’s mirrors, each one yawning to life, crescendoing into our day: pencil-yellow school buses, the rhythm of traffic lights,
fruit stands: apples, limes, and oranges arrayed like rainbows begging our praise. Silver trucks heavy with oil or paper— bricks or milk, teeming over highways alongside us,

on our way to clean tables, read ledgers, or save lives— to teach geometry, or ring-up groceries as my mother did for twenty years, so I could write this poem.

All of us as vital as the one light we move through,
the same light on blackboards with lessons for the day: equations to solve, history to question, or atoms imagined, the “I have a dream” we keep dreaming,
or the impossible vocabulary of sorrow that won’t explain the empty desks of twenty children marked absent
today, and forever. Many prayers, but one light
breathing color into stained glass windows,
life into the faces of bronze statues, warmth
onto the steps of our museums and park benches 2
as mothers watch children slide into the day.

One ground. Our ground, rooting us to every stalk
of corn, every head of wheat sown by sweat
and hands, hands gleaning coal or planting windmills in deserts and hilltops that keep us warm, hands digging trenches, routing pipes and cables, hands

as worn as my father’s cutting sugarcane
so my brother and I could have books and shoes.

The dust of farms and deserts, cities and plains mingled by one wind—our breath. Breathe. Hear it through the day’s gorgeous din of honking cabs, buses launching down avenues, the symphony

of footsteps, guitars, and screeching subways, the unexpected song bird on your clothes line.

Hear: squeaky playground swings, trains whistling,

or whispers across café tables, Hear: the doors we open for each other all day, saying: hello| shalom,
buon giorno |howdy |namaste |or buenos días
in the language my mother taught me—in every language spoken into one wind carrying our lives

without prejudice, as these words break from my lips.

One sky: since the Appalachians and Sierras claimed their majesty, and the Mississippi and Colorado worked their way to the sea. Thank the work of our hands: weaving steel into bridges, finishing one more report for the boss on time, stitching another wound 3
or uniform, the first brush stroke on a portrait,
or the last floor on the Freedom Tower
jutting into a sky that yields to our resilience.

One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes tired from work: some days guessing at the weather of our lives, some days giving thanks for a love that loves you back, sometimes praising a mother who knew how to give, or forgiving a father

who couldn’t give what you wanted.

We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home, always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together

LW Historic Bike Ride for MLK Day - Sunday 1/20

The crowd assembled at the Calvary Methodist Church around noon Sunday.  The church sponsors a community bike ride every other month.  This one coincided with the MLK, Jr. holiday.

Lake Worth resident Ted Brownstein briefs those attending on Lake Worth's  founding and racial history.

Bill and I had the pleasure of being a part of the Historic Bike Ride yesterday afternoon to celebrate the impact of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Lake Worth, Florida where, over time, the city has evolved to embrace people of color and the diversity of our population - but that was not always the case.  Despite its founding by black pioneers Fannie and Samuel James, who homesteaded here and ran the first post office of "Jewell" - the city itself endured (and at times promoted) being a segregated community.

Click here for information regarding the route of the bike tour and a detailed history put together by Ted Brownstein that shows the evolution of race relations in the city of Lake Worth over time.

Formerly known as a wall of segregation, now known as the Wall of Unity.  See remains of barbed wire atop the wall.  This was the dividing line between the black and white areas of town - originally constructed in the 1950s.

We couldn't finish the entire ride due to other commitments.  If you participated and have pictures or video that you would like to share, please e-mail me at wesblackman@gmail.com

Click here for related Palm Beach Post article.

Joel Chandler, Open Government Guru, Slaps South Florida Cities With Lawsuits - Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach - News - The Daily Pulp

Not a bad idea to keep local governments accountable.  I remember way back when, during a time when the Palm Beach Post was a legitimate news organ, reporters from that paper would approach municipalities with a series of similar public information requests.  They would then report on the performance of each and give them a grade for responsiveness, speed and accuracy.  Now, I guess that job is left to us regular citizens.  Click title for link.