 |
Comeau Building (Yellow Building with Arches
at Street Level Behind Palms) 2012 |
Before I started school in 1966, I frequently traveled to
West Palm Beach with my mother to meet my
father for lunch. We headed for his office in the
Comeau Building
which had that wonderful smell old buildings get, probably from decades of
polish on wood trim and walls . We rode up to his floor in elevators that forty
years before had been hailed as modern and swift and came complete with elevator operators. At age five, I didn’t notice them being
particularly swift and there were no longer operators standing by in sharp uniforms, but the elevators were still
impressive as elevators were few and far between in the North Palm Beach area in the mid-1960s. I was always fascinated with the mail chutes,
too. One would put an envelope in the chute on say, the seventh floor, and it
would disappear into the murky shadows. Heady stuff for a child and I used to beg my father for a
piece of mail to contribute.
The
Comeau Building is still there on Clematis Street.
It was built in a Classical Revival style from 1916 and was completed in 1925. The
building withstood hurricanes (including the horrible one of 1928 which
destroyed buildings all over South Florida) and a fire in the mid-1980s that gutted the 10th floor. The building, named after Alfred J.
Comeau, an early entrepreneur of the area, has been through foreclosures and
several owners over its eighty-six year life span, yet it still stands. It was
named to the U.S. National Register of Historic Places on September 6, 1996.
At
one time, a company was going to turn it into a hotel. That would have been
something to see. I would have loved to stay there, but the hotel plans never materialized.
The latest information in the May 4, 2011
South Florida Business Journal. AW Property “plans to completely renovate and modernize the
90,000 square foot icon with about $2 million in initial capital and tenant
improvements. The building’s use will remain office, with ground-floor
restaurants and retail storefronts.” I’m glad that building isn't being renovated out of existence.
Being
on Clematis Street itself is an odd feeling for me. In my mind, I have the
pictures of how it looked when it was a big event to go downtown and fancy patent-leather shoes and socks with lace were required to go with a fancy dress to meet my dad. The buildings on Clematis are the same
shape and size, but the facades are totally different. My memory takes me back
and forth between what was and what is now. The last time I was on Clematis, 2010 or thereabouts, the old Woolworth store space was occupied by a design store. The lunch counter had disappeared as had the bins of ten and twenty-five cent knick-knacks that I loved to sort through while my Mom looked at more interesting things.
After
dragging my dad out of his office in the 1960s, we’d head to the
lunch counter there in Woolworth's to eat. I’d pester to sit in a booth by the front window so I could watch shoppers and businessmen walk by as I devoured lunch. I don’t think
anyone in town made a grilled hotdog quite as good as the cook at Woolworth's
and if I could find a way to time-travel, that would be one of the silly,
little things I’d want to go back and try just one more time.
