Bed and breakfast’s building move stalls
Edgewater’s journey of less than a mile meant to aid revitalization.
Unwieldy logistics are in part to blame for delaying plans to turn downtown’s Edgewater rooming house into a B&B.
WEST PALM BEACH — Bad weather, safety concerns and the unwieldy logistics of moving an antique, twostory building through a mile of city streets have stalled plans to turn downtown’s Edgewater rooming house into a bed and breakfast to reawaken the Historic Northwest neighborhood.
West Palm Beach’s Community Redevelopment Agency was to receive the building last summer, as a gift that would provide rooms for a proposed B&B next to the historic Alice Moore home, at 801 4th St.
That’s just 0.9 miles north of the Edgewater’s current spot at 316 Gardenia St. but the move requires disconnecting overhead traffic signal arms, Comcast and AT&T cables and FPL power lines one block at a time, not to mention notifying train lines, as the building rolls through town. How that gets accomplished, without endangering the public, has had the owners and county traffic engineers at loggerheads for nearly a year.
“This has been pretty frustrating for all parties concerned,” Jon Ward, executive director of the CRA, said Monday.
A meeting is scheduled for Friday, “to try and get all parties in the same room to come to some sort of agreement and break this stalled issue loose,” Ward said. “Failing that, the owner’s only other option seems to be the demolition of the building at its current site.”
The CRA has spent millions on projects to revive the Historic Northwest, to turn it into a focal point for African-American tourism. It bought and is rehabbing the 1930s era Sunset Lounge, designing a music-themed park and creating a community of small businesses in shotgun-styled houses. It helped a restaurant expand and redid several blocks of streetscapes, with more to come.
As part of that plan, the agency wanted to convert the Moore home,
which it owns, into a B&B. But to make it work financially, the Moore home needed more guest rooms.
Meanwhile, downtown, Flagler Realty & Development wanted to tear down the 1920s-era former rooming house, to make room for a parking lot on the Gardenia site, one of a half-dozen lots they assembled behind an area of office buildings. The city decided the Edgewater held too much history to allow its demolition, so a deal was struck requiring Flagler to move the house and turn it over to the CRA.
The receiving site was readied. Movers lifted the Edgewater about 5 feet, propped it up and underpinned it with steel beams, in preparation.
All the parties would have to find a quiet Sunday when they’d be ready to go.
The move was scheduled to take place last August, then last September. Then Hurricane Irma erased that schedule, as the agencies and companies had more pressing concerns for several months. Freed of those concerns, county engineers now have new ones, about the planned route for the northward journey.
Pat Burdette, owner of Orlando-based Modern House and Building Movers, said Tuesday he’s been strategizing how to move the Edgewater and squabbling with a host of local government departments along the way.
He estimates the job would cost $200,000, all said. He wants to move it west to Quadrille Boulevard, then north to Banyan Boulevard, west to Tamarind Avenue, then north to 4th Street for a block and a half, to the lot next to the Alice Moore home.
The problem is, three Banyan intersections — at Quadrille and at Rosemary and Sapodilla avenues — have a total of eight traffic signal support arms that would have to be moved but which can’t come out of the ground. Burdette wants to have a welder cut the arms off, then reattach them after the house goes by.
But Mo Al-Turk, director of the county Traffic Division, says the county wants to see professional engineering analysis that proves the reattached arms would withstand hurricane conditions. He’s not satisfied with the less-formal plans he says Burdette submitted.
The Traffic Division suggested an alternate route for the house, via Fern Street, to avoid the traffic signal arms altogether.
Burdette though, thinks that makes no sense. “A car will go down Fern, a 40-foot building will not,” he said.
Fern has more than a dozen oaks and other trees that would have to come out, stumps that would have to be removed, parking lot pavement that would be damaged and need repair, streetlights and signs, palm trees and other vegetation that would have to be taken out and put back, he said. And 137 parking spaces would have to be closed, which means temporary replacement spaces would have to be identified.
And now we’re in hurricane season again, so Burdette’s wondering if a city official is going to come around again to tell him the 200-ton building needs to be tied down, which he thinks is ridiculous. “I’ve shipped buildings on barges on the open ocean and you don’t have to secure them,” he said. “You have a building that heavy, you don’t have to tie them down.”
And as time goes by, and government agencies require more permits and regulatory changes, and utility crews vanish to deal with hurricane recoveries elsewhere, he said, the building sits in the sun, deteriorating. “I would at this point pretty much recommend they demolish the building,” he said.
That’s not the outcome the Community Development Agency hopes for. It has pinned its hopes on coming to terms Friday. “I hope we will be successful and can get this moving,” Executive Director Ward said.