LIVING HISTORY
32
Port St. Lucie 50th Anniversary
CHRISTINE WILLIAMS
Christine Williams, at about age 6 or 7, stands in the Shell Bazaar parking
lot. Behind her, the woods eventually became Town Centre on U.S. 1, a
massive shopping center that sprawls all the way to Port St. Lucie Boulevard.
the fastest-growing state in the nation, according to a 1961
Time magazine article called Fast Growing Florida. Northerners
couldn’t get to Florida fast enough; the state grew in
population by 79 percent compared with the country as a
whole at 19 percent.
Another GDC community, Port Charlotte on the Gulf Coast
of Florida, shot from vacant land to a population of 7,000 in
four years, Time reported. The land boom was on and GDC
hoped to cash in on Port St. Lucie the same way it had done
with Port Charlotte.
In 1961, GDC president Frank Mackle Jr. was selling furnished
homes at the Port St. Lucie Country Club (later known
as Sandpiper Bay) for a $5,200 down payment, and renting
the homes out for enough to cover the mortgage payments
when the owner went back north, according to Time.
POPULATION ZERO
When GDC incorporated the city, it had no residents at all,
McAfoos says. Anticipating protests from people who did
not want to pay city taxes without city services, the giant
development company carefully incorporated only uninhabited
parcels, and excluded all of River Park. So, although
the Mackle brothers first began building Port St. Lucie there,
River Park homes never became part of the city.
To this day there are small areas dotting the city that are
not officially part of Port St. Lucie. Still, McAfoos says,
people who live on those parcels consider themselves to be
Port St. Lucie residents — and in a sense, they are because
for many, the moment they step off their property, they’re in
Port St. Lucie.
>>
/www.AllInFun.com