Crisis, The: Cracker's Fortune

A BLACK FLORIDA COMMUNITY FINDS A FUTURE IN ITS PAST

BACK IN THE days when Cracker Johnson reigned as "King of Black West Palm Beach," custom-fitted awnings shaded his 1926 vernacular frame home from the Florida sun. All around the five-bedroom structure, automatic sprinklers watered palm trees where pet parrots nestled in cages. Inside the two stories, just past the wall relief sculpture above the stone fireplace, a hollow china cabinet hid a secret room - the perfect place to stash cash and booze during Prohibition.

For two decades, James Jerome "Cracker" Johnson, ladies man, famed numbers kingpin, nightclub owner and liquor smuggler, held court from the house on the hill among the rest of the Black elite in the tony Freshwater section of West Palm Beach. During the Roaring '20s, the blue-eyed, fedora-clad Johnson lavishly spent his income - upwards of $10,000 a week - giving to church, sending kids to college and loaning money to Blacks shut out of White banks. His largess didn't only extend to the Black part of the city. When the Palm Beach housing bubble burst in the late 1920s, leaving the city of West Palm Beach virtually bankrupt, Johnson came to the rescue with a $50,000 loan.

By the time my family toured Johnson's old estate in January, it was clear that the home had seen better days. Just beyond the "For Sale" sign, you could see windows covered with plywood. The hardwood floors and window frames were rotting and water stains pocked plaster walls. On soot-covered bathtubs, supersize roaches lay in their final repose. Across the grounds at the servants' quarters, above where Johnson used to park his shiny black roadster, we watched a squatter scurry out.

At first glance, the house doesn't justify its quarter-million-dollar price tag. Three generations since Cracker Johnson's reign, a deteriorating infrastructure, crack cocaine, bad city planning, integration and doomed housing policies had all taken their toll on the surrounding community. Until the house was put on the market in December 2004, it had been operated as an 11 -room boarding house, catty-corner from the rough Dunbar Village housing project.

The good news is that a constellation of factors have aligned around the community to make it poised for a comeback. As in Harlem, Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles, "New Urbanism" and government "smart-growth" policies are fueling targeted development in the Black neighborhoods of West Palm Beach.

First incorporated in 1894 to house the Black and White workers servicing the leisure classes vacationing on Palm Beach, West Palm Beach has long lived in the shadow of its wealthy, manicured neighbor. Beside the Intracoastal Waterway separating the two towns, working-class residents established low-key communities.

Today, West Palm Beach, a city of almost 89,000, is clearly stepping out on its own. Last year alone, close to $1 billion was pumped into downtown West Palm Beach. Martini bars, glitzy restaurants, cobblestone streets, high-end retail and luxury housing are sprouting just a dozen city blocks away from Cracker Johnson's house. Property values are skyrocketing. The national media have declared downtown West Palm Beach a trendy new beachhead for East Coast intellectuals who are snapping up the modest housing stock by the bundle.

"What I've seen, summed in one word, is 'revolutionary,'" says Jerry Kolo, Florida Atlantic University professor of urban planning who has studied Black communities across South Florida. "There is so much going on that the pace and scale of the projects we are seeing coming out of the ground would actually mesmerize anybody."

All of this has left Black West Palm Beach spinning, whipsawed between runaway private development and an enduring legacy of political neglect. Upwards of 90 percent of residents of the historic Black neighborhoods are renters, leaving them particularly vulnerable to displacement. History has not been kind to this community when it has sat in the path of development.

"This county is a tale of two cities. It has been for its whole existence," notes Rev. Carrill Munnings of West Palm Beach's Trinity United Methodist Church, a third-generation resident. "They will bulldoze this whole neighborhood and act like we were never here."

IT'S BEEN CALLED FLORIDA'S first gentrification: In the 1890s thousands of Black workers were recruited from all over the country by Standard Oil tycoon Henry Plagier to build the 1,100-room Royal Poinciana Hotel, then the world's largest wood structure, on the island of Palm Beach. Wealthy tourists were deposited via Plagier's newly constructed railroad line to the lush Poinciana, laying the groundwork for his dream of a playground for the rich. Nearby Flagler's hotels, there was a community called The Styx - a settlement where construction workers, maids, butlers and gardeners had built homes and founded churches and schools on land they rented.

According to oral history passed down in the Black community and documented by journalists and historians, shortly after the Poinciana was built, Plagier either hosted a party or hired a circus and gave free tickets to his workers. When the workers returned to The Styx, they learned they had been evicted. Historians continue to debate Flagler's involvement and even the exact year it happened. But according to the book Pioneers in Paradise: West Palm Beach, the First 100 Years (1994), media reports from the time and a firsthand remembrance by an elderly White Palm Beach resident confirmed this much: In 1912, landowner Col. E.R. Bradley gave the Black workers two weeks' notice to leave The Styx. After that, he ordered their homes burned to the ground.

The Black families marched by foot across the bridge to the city of West Palm Beach, newly established by Plagier for "my help." They were told they could live in Pleasant City and Northwest, two Blacks-only neighborhoods on the mainland. They've been there ever since.

During the early part of its segregationist history, a vibrant Black community thrived in the two Black neighborhoods living in a quirky mix of housing styles: from American bungalow/craftsman, mission and shotgun, to Bahamian vernacular- and American Foursquare-style homes with modest yards.

Cracker Johnson - so named because he resembled his father, a White man from Georgia who had employed his Black mother as a maid - used proceeds from a gambling and pawn brokering business to invest in Florida real estate. He owned and operated the city of West Palm Beach's segregated jail, a movie house and a nightclub. At his Florida Bar, Johnson required employees to wear dinner jackets, tuxedo trousers, wing-collared dress shirts and bow ties.

Johnson was in good company in the elite Freshwater section of Northwest West Palm Beach. Two blocks away sat Pine Ridge Hospital, a facility established for Black patients. Johnson's Division Avenue neighbors included prominent Black families such as the Robinsons (grocers), Vickers (a dentist) and the family of Gwen Cherry, who would go on to become a state legislator.

Many of the Black pioneers never lived to fully appreciate their professional success. In 1946, at age 68, Cracker Johnson was murdered outside his bar. It would be almost another 15 years before city statutes would legally allow Blacks to live outside the Northwest and Pleasant City neighborhoods. Before then, the Black population outgrew the number of housing units legally available to them. As many as three families crowded into single-family houses.

After integration, the communities fared even worse. White and Black flight, a shrinking tax base and the construction of high-density public housing helped to breed the largest concentration of poverty, drug abuse and pathology in West Palm Beach. With the arrival of the 1980s crack wars, the community began to resemble a war zone.

Then, in the early 1990s, a White development lawyer named Nancy Graham was elected as mayor of West Palm Beach. She was on the vanguard of a new approach to city planning called "New Urbanism."

IT'S HAPPENING ALL OVER the country; urban municipal leaders are beginning to find new ways to think about inner cities. Instead of concentrating poverty in massive public housing complexes, the thinking went, why not integrate poor and middle-class people in mixed-income housing? Instead of building homes farther and farther away from business centers, destroying green space and lengthening commutes, why not bring businesses and residents back to the city? Scholars like Harvard University business professor Michael E. Porter hailed the competitive advantages of doing business in urban centers by founding the influential Institute for a Competitive Inner City.

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Led by Graham, the city of West Palm Beach became a New Urbanist pioneer. The government combined $600 million in private and public fundings to build CityPlace, a 72-acre development of upscale retail shops, and blocks away the trendy Clematis commercial strip at the mouth of the waterfront. This investment inspired the influx of millions more dollars in retail and housing at the city center.

But talk of development in downtown neighborhoods spooked many Black property owners, who feared a ploy to wrestle the waterside community away from the founders. "They have tried all kinds of little tricks to get this area," says retired educator Elizabeth Munnings, mother of Rev. Munnings. In the late 1980s, Munnings helped organize the Save Our Neighborhood campaign, which successfully lobbied to have the Northwest community recognized by the local, state and national registries of historic places.

While the official designation slowed redevelopment plans, it ultimately failed to halt the destruction of the community's architectural history. In 2001, a rash of mysterious fires burned 15 mostly vacant homes in Northwest. Police investigated the chain of arsons, dubbed "historicide," and eventually charged a mentally ill woman who lived in the neighborhood. Some property owners still don't consider the case resolved.

A city-commissioned study published in 2002 catalogued dozens of buildings that have been demolished since 1953. Until recently, the most visible sign of Black West Palm Beach's past glory was the Gwen Cherry House, a historic two-story building that was established as a museum in 1982 and for the past decade had been in the process of restoration by the Black Historic Preservation Society of Palm Beach County. But by early 2005, the building had been taken over by drug dealers and the roof collapsed during a nasty storm, forcing officials to condemn the property. City officials quickly razed the building. At the time of the building's demolition, it had not been used in six years, and the Black preservation board had not met in six months, according to member Gwen Ferguson. The board is currently on hiatus and is "planning on reorganizing," Ferguson says.

Even as an irreplaceable piece of local Black history has suddenly vanished, there appears to be little sense of alarm or urgency. No fundraisers, no emergency meetings, few reactions suggest there is a crisis.

"I call it the 'Palm Beacher attitude,'" says Rev. Munnings. "You go to sleep, it's heavenly. You wake up, it's heavenly.... People just calm down and lay back here. And this is not the time to lie back in this community. There are some very powerful people who are wanting to come down here."

Rising property values are also creating hardships. "There is no attainable housing in West Palm Beach and especially the historic areas," says Lia T. Gaines, president of the nonprofit Business & Economic Redevelopment Corporation and secretary of the West Palm Beach chapter of the NAACP. Her family's historic 1925 homestead was among the Northwest homes burned in 2001. Although she was unable to collect a settlement - the building was not insured at the time - she still hopes one day to raise the money to rebuild a replica. Meanwhile, property taxes on the land itself have almost doubled. "There is no predictability for the community to be involved and participate" in the redevelopment, Gaines says. "Many people have given up. Many have sold out."

"Nobody fights it," frets Everee Jimerson Clarke, whose father's family lived and worked in The Styx settlement on Palm Beach. Clarke is the founder and president of the Pleasant City Family Reunion Committee and Heritage Gallery and recently published a pictoral history of Black West Palm Beach, Pleasant City: West Palm Beach, through Arcadia Press.

"I used to fight. I don't have anyone to back me now. We don't have the money in the community anymore," says Clarke. "They rezoned a lot of our businesses in Pleasant City. Pleasant City is lost."

Three years ago, the city's housing authority took 55 Pleasant City properties by eminent domain to make way for a $30 million, 240-home mixed-income development called MerryPlace.

"They've taken Pleasant City," Clarke adds, "and the next step is to get that hill" - the Northwest neighborhood.

HISTORY HAS placed Blacks on the losing side of redevelopment, but the key question in 2005 is: Does it have to be that way?

Kolo, the urban planning professor, says no. "If the city, the private sector and grass-roots organizations would work together from the beginning to the end, then we would have plans to have a little bit of something for everyone. It's not socialism, it's just good planning."

Gaines, the nonprofit redevelopment executive, agrees.

"I have no problem with gentrification. It would be fine if we can do some affirmative marketing to make sure that Black people can move in as well... I really do believe it can work."

Gaines says a 2002 city-commissioned study by Stull & Lee, a firm led by the noted Black Harvard architecture professor M. David Lee, laid out a blueprint for how to revitalize the city's Northwest neighborhood in a way that respects its history as a Black enclave. The plan features all the new urbanist buzzwords: mixed-income and mixed-use open-space development, loft-style living. But it also proposed Black-themed businesses and a cultural corridor along Division Avenue celebrating the area's Black legacy.

"It can work as a win-win," Gaines says. "But left on its own, the market will not do it. The community, we are willing to do our part. We really just have to have the political will to do it."

Gaines and former Palm Beach County commissioner Maude Ford Lee, the current president of the West Palm Beach NAACP, say they are applying pressure on the city of West Palm Beach to take the Stull & Lee plan off the shelf, where it has lain dormant for the past three years. Current West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel says her administration, elected in 2003, is in the process of reviewing all previous plans for the downtown area.

Absent an intervention from the city, the fate of Black West Palm Beach ultimately will rest on the economic power of the Black community, says Kolo.

"Those who will be able to benefit will be the highly connected," he says. "Particularly the Black middle class and the upper middle class, it's about us being prepared to jump on opportunities if and when they arise. We have to figure out how to develop, to use some of the laws, the Community Reinvestment Act. People can literally get help."

"If you have the money to jump in the pool, you can go with the flow. If not, then you are going to be left behind."

THIS JANUARY, my family found itself in the fortunate position of being prepared to jump, thanks in part to the New Urbanism paradigm. My mother had made a small profit on the recent sale of a property in Northwood Hills, another Black neighborhood in West Palm Beach. In the past four years, my husband and I have watched the equity in our Victorian townhouse located in inner-city Washington, D.C., climb into the mid-six figures.

My mother was looking for the opportunity to move back into town to be closer to her job in West Palm Beach. My husband and I were looking to invest outside the overheated D.C. market. When we visited the West Palm Beach house in January, we had no idea that this was "The Johnson House," as the old-timers there invariably refer to it - right before launching into their own Cracker Johnson theories and stories.

Maybe we watch too much Home & Garden Television; we didn't see the hot mess that the house was, but an architectural gem with some serious potential. It could be a fun family project for my mom and sisters, who will live in the house while we restore it. It would also be a good investment and a way to maintain an owner-occupied Black presence in the neighborhood.

Learning the story behind the house and its original owner was an added bonus. We hope that Johnson's chutzpah and way with money will rub off on us as we explore plans to restore the buildings. One idea is to open a bed-and-breakfast as part of the proposed Black cultural corridor along Division Avenue. Until then, whenever we pass the secret room behind the fake china cabinet in Cracker's old living room, we have to chuckle. After all these years, the old man keeps on giving.

Natalie Hopkinson is a Washington Post staff writer and visiting professor at the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism.