Century Village Then and Now

Century Village Then and Now by Irv Rikon

Monday, September 28, 2009 - From: https://cvbitbucket.blogspot.com/2009/09/early-history-of-uco.html

I first came to Century Village in 1971 to visit my mother, who had just moved here from New Jersey. She had read about Century Village somewhere, had come to West Palm Beach to see it for herself, liked what she saw and bought a condo. When she moved, she had no one to help her. I was away, traveling around the world. By the time I arrived, we'd not seen each other for over a year.

Dubbed a "retirement community," Century Village was not yet completed when I arrived. Several different architectural styles existed, partly because the original builder hadn't the funds to finish the complex, nor did the successor corporation. Finally, a group headed by Irwin Levy, an attorney, came along, and Century Village at last was successfully launched. The promotion of CV was novel. A comedian, Red Buttons, was enlisted to help sell properties, and television ads featuring him served to carry the day. "Come on down!" the redhead said.

Basically, two kinds of people responded: those who moved south from the industrialized northeast, and others who moved north from the Miami area. Among the latter were folks who had worked for organized labor. Before too long, differences arose between condo owners and the developer. The labor union people were in the vanguard of condo owners who led the legal battle against what was to become WPRF. Out of that eventually grew the various condominium laws that still serve to regulate condo disputes from Tallahassee. Out of that, too, eventually would emerge the United Civic Organization, UCO.

To me, Century Village appeared to be rather a deceptively vital, dynamic place. For one thing, not everyone was retired. Some came and began new careers or did charity work. Others who preferred simple pleasures to work found them on tennis courts or a golf course, in boating and swimming, even shuffleboard and bocce ball. If there were newcomers advanced in years and not as fit as they would like to have been, many in their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s were still youthful and active. The Palm Beach Post for years labeled anyone over 50 as "elderly," an inaccuracy and a distinct disservice to Century Villagers.

The fact is, these early comers to Century Village were pioneers. They were the first folks in recorded history, or at least in American history, voluntarily to leave their families, friends, neighbors and the comforts of home in order to begin a new life with strangers about whom they knew nothing except that all were "older," a generation that had lived through a Great Depression and a Second World War.

Think of it: For millennia, most people had basically lived and died in the hometowns where they were born. Later, young folks left to build new homesteads or to find work in distant places. But here were parents and grandparents, couples and singles, including widows and widowers, who chose to move away from people they loved, people whose company they enjoyed, plus the security that comes from being in a safe, familiar environment. They trusted that in mingling with peers roughly their own age, they would become "born again." Despite their advanced years in comparison with the general population, these Century Villagers were optimists. They had a pioneer spirit, much like Israelis in the 1940s and 1950s or like most Chinese today, or indeed, like 19th century Americans who had crossed open territory to settle in the West.

Choosing to relocate to a different, distant place solely on the basis of age, they were participants in a brand-new social phenomenon that has yet to be fully appreciated by the media or documented by historians. Century Village, West Palm Beach, was the first of its kind. Other CVs came later. Today, retirement communities are an accepted part of America's landscape.

Not all was paradise, of course. Adjustments to a new environment, to a new life had to made. Not every neighbor loved every other neighbor, although personality differences were more or less overcome, since everyone understood that they had essentially the same reason for coming here. And even if they were unhappy, if their new surroundings failed to meet their expectations, they couldn't go home again, for that would be an admission of misjudgment or defeat.

The new life was harder on women. Most of their generation had been traditional "homemakers," nurturing children, bolstering their men. When they were "back home," wherever that had been, they had seen their husbands twice a day and fed them at night. Now the men were constantly around, expecting to have both lunch and dinner, moreover, expecting the wife to prepare it. They'd not anticipated that. There were divorces as well. Two of my mother's dearest friends were a newly married couple. But "she" had been "the other woman" in a nasty divorce case. What became of the wife I don't know, but the scandal was such that the newlyweds stayed in Century Village for little more than a year before moving to another Florida condominium. This was hardly a unique occurrence.

Another problem which emerged was anti-Semitism.

Century Village was open to everyone. The developers didn't care who bought a home so long as they were paid. And initially, the Village had rather a diverse population. Yet, fairly quickly, Jewish newcomers became the majority (hence the on-premises synagogue).

During the American Civil War, Floridians had fought on the side of the Confederate States. Until Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s, Florida was still "southern." West Palm Beach was a springtime training camp for the old Brooklyn Dodgers or its then-Montreal farm club. The first blacks, or "Negroes" as they were still called, who integrated the team, were not allowed to stay in the same hotel as their white teammates. The Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach was "restricted": no Jews or blacks allowed. The same rules were applied by Palm Beach's exclusive social clubs. When it was evident that Jews were establishing a sizeable presence in Century Village, anti-Semitism surfaced. The editor of The Palm Beach Post predicted that riots would ensue. The Cox family, then as now the newspaper's publisher, shipped him off to Texas, or so I was told.

Cooler heads of course prevailed. The business community, for one, realized that an increased population would vitalize the dormant local economy. Accordingly, new bank branches opened just outside Century Village: retirees would want someplace to put their Social Security checks. The Palm Beach Mall opened with a heady mixture of upscale-downscale stores, most of which initially did very well. (The decline of the mall — becoming a hang-out for youngsters — is another story waiting to be told.) New furniture and home furnishing stores opened their doors. Supermarkets came and pharmacies and doctors and gas stations, which were needed to help everyone get to all those other places. Every bit of this was new. And sure enough, the local economy grew.

Century Village and the Palm Beach Mall were built on reclaimed marshlands, drained and made ready for people-use. They also pointed the way to western expansion in Palm Beach County, especially along Southern Boulevard and Okeechobee Boulevard. When I first arrived, there were still cows to be seen on Haverhill Road, Jog Road and all the way out to the Glades. Century Village literally broke new ground!

Politically, most of the new arrivals were self-styled "liberal Democrats." Throughout almost all its history, Florida had been a Democratic state — Republicans did not even appear on election ballots — but a backlash in "the old South" to the civil rights movements of the 1950s and ’60s helped to revive the Florida Republican Party. In Palm Beach County, the local powers-that-be gerrymandered, divided Century Village into two voting districts, thereby diluting Democratic Party votes.

Despite the Democratic majority in Century Village, Republicans could always be found here (including my mother, a contrarian when she wanted to be). Throughout the eight years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, the parents of his Chief of Staff (who is still active in Washington), lived in Century Village. I sat next to them at the opera.

Similarly, the mother of Mr. Reagan's first director of the Office of Management and Budget was a Century Village resident and a friend of mine. The son even now teaches at Harvard. Century Village always had an intellectual component. A syndicated Washington columnist, whose columns frequently appear in The Palm Beach Post, had parents who lived here and attended my "Weekly News Summary" course. A current class member has a son who teaches at Princeton University: He is one of less than a half dozen people given full access by the University to all of Albert Einstein's scientific papers.

Some of the first people I met in Century Village were truly memorable. There was a non-resident American woman, a guest of a friend of my mother, who had married a Japanese man and been in Hiroshima when Americans dropped the A-bomb. There was a man who claimed to have belonged to the Stern Gang, a group which in the 1940s bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing many British soldiers, when the city was still part of a British Mandate. That terrorist act has long been held to be a main reason for Britain throwing the whole question of Israeli independence into the lap of the United Nations.

I was introduced to a tiny circle of friends whose conversation invariably turned to the Spanish Civil War. Their talk always fascinated me. World War Two had passed. The Korean War had passed. The Vietnam War was being fought. And they were still debating 1930s Spain!

Much, much later, I met Walter Schanzer, the only one I name here, because he passed away not too long ago and had other friends besides myself in Century Village. Columnist, playwright, poet, Walter had been born in Vienna. Although he loved the city of his birth, in Nazi times, he knew he had to leave. That knowledge led him to pore through every American telephone book he could get his hands on. He picked out names at random and wrote, asking for help, asking someone to sponsor him so he could come to America and survive. Few people replied, yet some did. One person wrote, "All of your kind should be gassed." But Walter, who was Jewish, received another response. "Come. We'll be glad to have you." His sponsors were Christian, and Walter lived with them in Missouri until the old folks passed on. Until Walter died, even when he lived in Century Village, he kept up a running conversation, in letters, with the children of his sponsors.

Century Villagers' greatest contribution to Palm Beach County — other than bolstering the local economy and paving the way for others —arguably came in the realm of Arts and Entertainment. Especially among those who had lived in the museum-theater-concert hall northeast, they saw a West Palm Beach and surrounding cities and towns that to them were a "cultural wasteland." And they raised their voices in communal protest. The theme was picked up by members of the local media, who spoke and wrote about the need for cultural upgrading.

Naturally enough, there had always been locals who had hungered for more cultural outlets, but they'd not been united. The Kravis Center ultimately was paid for mostly by Palm Beachers, but the hue and cry for such a concert hall began in Century Village.

Palm Beach Opera firmly established its toehold in the Village. So did Regional Arts, which still presents great symphonic concerts. And so, to a large extent, did WXEL, National Public Radio and television in Palm Beach County. The Palm Beach Post initially editorialized against Channel 42 (our Channel 6) on the grounds there already existed PBS facilities broadcasting from Miami. The principal mover and shaker for the new channel, one Sam Marantz, didn't live in the Village, but he came here often to promote it, and promote it he did until the new stations became a reality.

From the time I came here, I basically held two job positions, talking and writing. At Palm Beach Community College (and briefly, at Northwood University), I taught a variety of history and social science courses: The Great Religions, Foreign Cultures Around the World, Current Events and the like. I was a frequent guest on radio talk shows. And at one time or another I wrote columns for numbers of local magazines and newspapers.

Primarily, but not exclusively, I wrote Arts and Entertainment pieces. In this latter capacity, I was always delighted when people I interviewed told me that their parents or aunt and uncle or someone else close to them lived in Century Village. We still have people active in Arts and Entertainment living here. And I'm told, although I haven't checked it out, we have staff people from The Palm Beach Post also residing here.

Times change. Today Century Village is once again a multi-ethnic community. In my unit alone, we have French-speaking, Italian-speaking and English-speaking Canadians. We have several Spanish-speaking people, including one who actually came from Spain. We have an Irish-born lady. We even have two illegal immigrants, a cat and a dog, whose masters brought them into our buildings despite the fact we have several people who are allergic to animals and voted "No" to household pets. I thought that the debates over The Spanish Civil War were intense! They were nothing compared to the Battle of the Critters!

Posted by UCO President at 11:35 PM