18 News
The COASTAL STAR
June/July 2021
Along the Coast
Happy 90th! Looking back at births of Manalapan, Ocean Ridge
By Eliot Kleinberg Across America, 1931 was a step in the morphing of a brutal economic downturn into a history-making Depression. In Palm Beach County, where the real estate boom had gone bust even before the rest of the nation crashed, people nevertheless were busy making towns. This year marks the 90th birthdays of Ocean Ridge and Manalapan. One was named for high ground, rare in South Florida. One was named for a place up North, something that is not rare at all.
Water all around, no get out
Manalapan’s creation goes back to the 19th century. George H.K. Charter, then 36, came to the barrier island in 1882. Five years later he became a contractor for the “barefoot mailman” delivery route. And on a 21/2-mile stretch of land, he would plant a coconut grove and build a home he called Buzzard Roost, using materials that washed up. In 1889, President Benjamin Harrison issued Charter a homestead for 126 acres. Just two years later, Charter sold his property for $7,500 — about $216,000 in today’s dollars — to Elnathan Field, who created Hypoluxo Beach Co. Field was one of many to employ “Hypoluxo,” the original name for Lake Worth — not the city, but the stretch of what’s now the Intracoastal Waterway that then was a closed-in lake. Hypoluxo is an indigenous word translated as “water all around, no get out.” Three years later, in 1894, Henry Flagler’s first Palm Beach hotel opened. That same year, Field built a 21/2-story inn on stilts. He called it Manalapan Cottage, for a township about 50 miles south of New York City in his native New Jersey. Its name is an indigenous word for “land that produces good bread.” Two years later, Field filed a plat for Hypoluxo Beach and started selling lots.
ABOVE: Getting around Manalapan in 1920 was difficult and primitive by today’s standards. LEFT: The 1891 newspaper ad promoting George Charter’s property.
ABOVE: Harold Vanderbilt moved from Palm Beach and in 1930 built the iconic Eastover, along with its massive seawall, that still stands today in Manalapan. RIGHT: Vanderbilt in 1930 after his America’s Cup victory. Photos from the Boynton Beach City Library In 1912, he sold his remaining property to a man who later sold it to Leila and A. Romeyn Pierson for $40,000, more than five times what Field had paid in 1891. With a nod to Field, the Piersons called the tract Manalapan Estates — a neighborhood name that eventually would become a town name. Soon the state wanted to open up the south end of Lake Worth. The logical spot on the barrier island was the narrowest, at the southern tip of the Pierson property. The Legislature condemned the tract and finished the Boynton Inlet in 1927.
‘The Commodore’
Then “Commodore” Harold Vanderbilt showed up. Harold, great-grandson of railroad magnate and college founder Cornelius Vanderbilt, was the last of his family to take an active role in their empire. When his father died in 1920, Harold inherited no fewer than nine railway companies. Harold got the “commodore” moniker through his competitive yacht racing, including a victory in the 1930
America’s Cup. He also was an avid bridge player. He was happy being part of Palm Beach society. But after the 1928 hurricane, he and the town had a falling-out. He asked the town to abandon to him the stretch of land between his home and the beach. The town declined. So the commodore went down the coast road to Manalapan. There, he bought 500 feet of oceanfront. He built Eastover, later listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Later, Vanderbilt and several other owners of large estates decided to split off their own municipality. Vanderbilt wrote a charter for the town of Manalapan, and the Legislature approved it on June 23, 1931. He included the barrier island part as well as the south end of Hypoluxo Island, where some of his relatives and friends had built their estates. As late as 1953, it still had only 60 residents.
On the beach
Ocean Ridge’s founding was a bit more complicated. Its backand-forth with Boynton Beach, and the resulting mishmash of names, sounds like the “Who’s on First” routine. As with Manalapan, the roots of Ocean Ridge go back to the 1800s. In 1877, H. Dexter Hubel filed for a homestead for 80 acres along the coast, east of what’s now downtown Boynton Beach. At the time, the beach wasn’t worth much. It was blocked by heavy brush — and in any case, settlers came to farm, not sunbathe. The stretch of oceanfront did have a 20-foot ridge. An ocean ridge. Hubel built a hut of palmetto leaves and driftwood and sent for his family in Michigan. After experiencing a cooking fire soon after, the Hubels gave up and went back North. In 1880, the keeper of the Delray Beach House of Refuge — one of several federal coastal outposts that helped wrecked
sailors — paid the federal government 90 cents an acre for the tract. In 1891, the company digging the canal that would become the Intracoastal Waterway sold off 160 acres to settler George H.K. Charter. He paid $240, or $1.50 an acre. (A buck and a half is $44 in today’s money — still not a lot for acreage now worth millions.) Just months later, Charter turned around and sold to the pioneer Byrds, who lived near what’s now West Palm Beach. They paid $700, giving Charter a nice bump. Pretty soon the land would be worth a lot more as Flagler arrived. Among those who followed Flagler, seeking their own fortunes, were two men from Michigan: William Linton and Maj. Nathan Smith Boynton. Linton bought the Byrds’ land for $6,000, and Boynton built the oceanfront Boynton Beach Hotel. But Linton ran into money problems. In 1897, Boynton tried to make whole the people who’d bought deeds from Linton that now were worthless. But those victims were so angry they took Linton’s name off their proposed town, changing it to Delray (no “Beach” yet).
