Florida’s Crisis of Black Preservation

Frederick's Island shack is a new business located in the historic Northwest District. Ignatius Wallace (pictured here) and his brother Frederick are descendents of the black workers burned out of the Styx on Palm Beach.

The Northwest Historic District where the Cracker Johnson House sits was West Palm Beach’s first historic district to be included on the National Register of Historic Places (February 1992). The near-downtown community was first settled in 1894, when the black community was burned out of their previous  homes on the island of Palm Beach called “the Styx” and forced to live in segregated neighborhoods in West Palm Beach until 1960.

The Northwest community remains predominantly black, but many middle- and upper-class blacks moved to other neighborhoods when they were legally permitted to after desegregation. There are still good examples of late 19th- and early 20th-century American bungalow/craftsman-style homes in this neighborhood, which also has mission, shotgun, Bahamian vernacular and American Foursquare styles. Tamarind and Rosemary Avenues were the commercial centers for blacks by 1915, but many historically and architecturally significant commercial and residential buildings have been demolished or remodeled.

Among the priceless pieces of African American history now lost is  the 1926 Gwen Cherry house, formerly at 625 Division Ave. Cherry was Florida’s first black woman legislator. The house briefly housed the now-defunct Palm Beach County Black Historical Society which was vandalized and then burned down in a fire, along with the records. One artifact that was lost was the numbers ledger for Cracker Johnson’s Boleto numbers game.

Due to the recession, the state of Florida has suspended all preservation grant funding to save historic structures throughout the state, creating a crisis of preservation, according to the Orlando Sentinel, 8/16/2009. African American communities such as the Northwest District are particularly vulnerable, because the property values are so depressed that bank financing to protect the properties is not available. Private businesses owners such as Frederick’s push through, optimistic that 100 years after it was founded, Palm Beach County’s wealth will finally reach them.

Frederick Wallace, the proprietor of Frederick's Island Shack at the corner of L.A. Kirksey Road and Henrietta Avenue, hopes his restaurant opened in 2008 will create positive change in the community.

This wall inside Frederick's Island Shack is a tribute to his ancestors who pioneered Palm Beach County. At the center is Frederick's great grandmother Flora Curry Storr (1874-1921) who was a Bahamian native who was an original settler of the Styx on the island of Palm Beach. When major work was completed on the elite Palm Beach resort in 1894, her home was burned to the ground and she and her family marched across the bridge to the segregated mainland neighborhoods in West Palm Beach.