NORTH PALM BEACH PARK GETTING $1M UPGRADE

Anchorage Park to get new sea wall, docks, kayak launch.

NORTH PALM BEACH — A popular village park is getting more than $1 million in upgrades.

North Palm Beach is installing a new sea wall, 16 floating docks and a kayak launch at the Anchorage Park marina. The dog parks will get new grass in the next few weeks, and the baseball fields have new sod.

“We’re making a rather healthy investment in Anchorage Park,” Public Works Director Steven Hallock said.

The village is paying for the work with grants, sales tax money and money from its general fund, Hallock said.

The contractor had to replace the sea wall before any of the floating docks could be added, Hallock said. The replacement is coming just in time: As the contractor was driving in new pilings, the sea wall started to fail.

No one working on the project knew how old the sea wall was, only that it was meant to be a temporary fix after a hurricane damaged the marina more than a decade ago.

The contractor has until September to finish the new sea wall. The village hasn’t gone out to bid on the new docks yet, but the goal is to have them done by Oct. 1., Hallock said.

Two temporary boat slips will be added, along with the kayak launch, bringing the marina up to the 18 slips it had before the project, Hallock said. If the village is awarded another grant, it will add 16 more floating slips on the south side of the marina.

The boat launch was open during most of construction, including Memorial Day weekend.

The contractor is required to give the village two weeks’ notice before the few times when he will have to close it, Hallock said.

Only North Palm Beach residents are allowed to use the boat launch.

Residents who lease slips at the marina were required to take their boats out of the water. Some stored them on trailers, and some docked them elsewhere.

The village plans to bring back a filet table, which fisherman use to clean and cut their catches, that was removed for the construction, he said.

Plans eventually call for moving all of the dry boat storage to one side of the park, replacing the screening around the storage with a prettier buffer and adding boat trailer parking, Hallock said.

ALLEN EYESTONE / THE PALM BEACH POST Alan Gerwig, design engineer at Alan Gerwig & Associates, looks over the progress at the Anchorage Park marina in North Palm Beach last week. New pilings are being hammered into the canal bed to hold cantilever cement panels to replace the decaying steel panels.