Florida History: Lauderdale Manors rises where houses were stolen

Bridge at Andrews and Sweet Building today

By Jane Feehan

Fort Lauderdale grew significantly during its second real estate boom.  Work began in February, 1950 on a ‘huge new development” - Lauderdale Manors - in the northwest section of the city.

The first permits for Lauderdale Manors that year were issued for 15 houses on the 1500 and 1600 blocks of NW 11^th Street. The dwellings were to cost $7,000 a piece. The development, which originally took up one fourth of the old mile-square Chateau Park subdivision, was platted without any through streets.

All the houses were planned to be built on courts that ran east and west, a unique footprint at the time. The entire project was platted from NW 10^th Place to NW 14^th Court and from 15^th to 20^th Avenue where hundreds of houses were eventually built.

After the first real estate bubble burst in the 1920s, mortgage holders for the five or six houses that were built in Chateau Park came to pick up the pieces. According to builders of those first few homes, the mortgage people found things to be so bad that even the houses had been stolen. When is someone to think of that in today’s real estate downturn?

For more on Fort Lauderdale in the 1950s, see:

http://janesbits.blogspot.com/2011/02/florida-history-fort-lauderdales-henry.html

or

http://janesbits.blogspot.com/2010/10/florida-history-broward-county-and-fort.html

or use search box at top right to find 1950s

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Sources:

Fort Lauderdale Daily News, Feb. 4, 1950.

Tags: Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods, Fort Lauderdale history, Fort Lauderdale in the 1950s, film researcher