March 18, 2011--Snowbirding: Welcome to Paradise

Our neighbor has a flower-festooned sign by her front door that says Welcome to Paradise. It does not require much imagination to agree that this is no exaggeration.

Her place is perched luxuriously atop the dune line, a few steps from this shimmering beach, and from her upper deck all the world is there for her. As is it for us, though we are set back a little and have what a real estate broker would call a “partial view” of that same splendor. So it is not for me to point fingers. We too are blessed.

But not far from here, less than a mile away, just on the other side of the Intracoastal can be found the other side of paradise—Osceola Park. Don’t be fooled by its Floridian name. It is this area’s version of a slum. A drug- and crime-infested wreck of a trailer park.

Osceola was a war chief of the Seminole Indians and led their resistance against the invading Manifest-Destiny-seeking Americans during the Indian wars of the 1830s. Betrayed, as were so many, when he attempted to make peace, after objecting to the details of the proposed treaty which equated Indians with slaves, he was captured and died of malaria less than six months later.

His local legacy? This miserable so-called park inhabited mainly by destitute African Americans, some of whom I suspect share some of his noble DNA.

This place in the sun is one of hidden contrasts. Up the coast, which could easily be called golden, but actually is called the Treasure Coast, is the perfect Palm Beach where everyone who has property facing water dresses in Lily Pulitzer when venture out. This is the territory of the Social Register. Names you, and certainly I, would not know because they are from Old Money, the kind that is never discussed, whispered about, or conspicuously displayed. Where Trumps, of course, and even Kennedys are considered to be arrivistas. So nouveau that they are not worth noticing or even deprecating—they simply do not exist.

But right across their Intracoastal drawbridges, as from mine, screened from sight in the grid of dilapidated streets, are people who decades ago were shunted aside when the rising value of agricultural land and merciless inheritance taxes drove the landowners to sell their farms. With their jobs eliminated these field hands drifted into poverty and despair. Surfacing to public view now in one of two ways—on the Police Blotter reports in the local papers or when they show up on the 6:00 o’clock news being led away in handcuffs after holding up a 7-Eleven.

While we enjoy our portion of paradise, back in Osceola Park, their pleas to the local authorities ignored, residents have formed vigilante groups in an attempt to take back their unpaved, unlit streets. Their patience has run out. Felonious crimes, the tip of the iceberg since most incidents are never reported, rose by more than 70 percent last year. There were nearly 300 car thefts, assaults, and break-ins tallied in a community of only 271 homes.

Up to now, those who live in Osceola Park have somehow learned to live with the daily crimes. But when a child was shot in the head in November they finally said, “No more,” and began to take matters into their own hands. Florida’s very liberal gun laws ironically making it easy for watch-groups in gun-ravaged communities to arm themselves.

It also hasn’t helped that the town of Delray chose to locate 15 so-called Sober Houses in Osceola. Places where recovering addicts are supposed to recover and avoid temptation. But in Osceola Park, with so many active addicts and their dealers controlling the neighborhood, people in rehab are easily tempted, fall off the wagon, and get kicked out of the houses only to wind up living on the streets.

Meanwhile, in that other gilded place just south of Delray, Boca Raton, another story has been unfolding. Not far from the glittering boutiques, posh restaurants, and plastic surgeons’ offices is the Palm Beach County Housing Authority.

About a month ago, they made available to low-income residents applications for a lottery that would award vouchers to a fortunate few who would then be eligible to submit them and after that wait for a number of years for access to subsidized housing. Underestimating the demand they printed only 500 applications. Many more residents than that had lined up eight hours before the office opened; and when housing officials discovered that the supply was exhausted long before all who were waiting could get one, what the press reported as a “disturbance” broke out.

On the local TV news later that evening one could see police in full riot gear, pushing their Plexiglas shields into the press of bodies surging toward to doors of the Housing Authority. Mostly mothers clutching small children, virtually all seeking applications were Black as nearly all the policemen where White.

"Leave or face arrest," police officers shouted at the crowd as they urged them to disperse. People were forced to leave the vicinity altogether, with officers directing them to move across the street and into a parking lot.
It quickly became a mass of women nursing crying babies, pushing strollers, and waiting anxiously for officials to give them information.

When none was forthcoming, people grew agitated. Several fights broke out. Police and firefighters said they were prepared if things were to turn violent. Nearly 50 firefighters and paramedics from the city, county, and nearby Delray Beach set up in the parking lot. And they were needed as some of the women in the crowd had been trampled and injured when things turned ugly.

A 28-year-old mother of five who had been pleading with police officers to let her drop off her housing application, refused their orders to leave the housing office. She was handcuffed and dragged off to a police van, charged with disorderly conduct, disobeying a lawful order, and resisting arrest.

Another, who had waited in line for hours with her three-month old daughter, is currently living in a maternity home from which she must move by June. She is desperate to find housing. "That's why I'm here. This is my first child," she said. "We really need it."

A 22year-old from West Palm Beach, was so angered by police tactics that she shouted at them, "This place is gonna get shot up later. You can’t treat us like this."

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Delray Beach historical notes:

In 1894 the first school was established. There were enough children for the citizens of Linton (Delray’s original name) to petition Dade County to allow them to have one. It was named Dade County School #4—Colored.

Two years later Linton’s first church was established, Mt. Olive Baptist Church. It too served the Colored community.

In the same year, 1886, “Ma” Cohen, a midwife, who had settled in Linton and was of African descent, was the only trained person available to serve the birthing and medical needs of mothers and babies of all races.

A second church, St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME), was built in 1897 by Colored settlers.

“Ma” Cohen was joined in 1898 by Susan Williams, a trained midwife and general nurse practitioner. She too was Colored and treated patients of all races since there were no White people in town who had any medical training.

In 1903, hurricane winds wrecked the British ship SS Inchulva, near Delray Beach. Though the town was by then more White than Black, settlers of African descent who had emigrated from the nearby Bahamas, initiated the rescue of survivors.

In 2011, descendents of those founders of schools and churches, and others who are the great grandchildren of those who had provided medical care to all and risked their lives to save those cast into the stormy ocean, today they languish in Osceola Park, ducking drug dealers’ stray bullets and struggling to meet the payments on their ramshackle trailer homes.

All just down the road from my Paradise.