Happy 100th birthday, Greenacres!
The central Palm Beach County city is celebrating the centennial of its incorporation with a series of events that include a chili cook-off, a 100th birthday bash and the inauguration of its Sunday Sounds park concert series.
The city kicked off the celebration in December with two community events that featured fair rides, an ice skating rink and a drone show. It held its annual Fire Rescue chili cook-off on Sunday, March 1.
The city will host its 100th Birthday Bash on May 24 at the Samuel J. Ferreri Park. The free event will feature live music, local vendors and, of course, a birthday cake.
Here are five things to know about the city of Greenacres.
Who founded the city of Greenacres?
Lawrence Carter Swain, a Massachusetts developer, founded Greenacres in 1923 and incorporated it as a city in 1926. The city’s name was picked out of a hat.
During the 1920s, the Town of Palm Beach and nearby coastal cities were booming with high-end housing. Swain wanted to build a community for middle-class families and accumulated over 1,000 acres in the area.
One of the city’s first residential plots was laid out half a mile west of Military Trail to build the Greenacres’ “original section” in the area of the boulevard that bears Swain’s name. It still features homes with an old Florida look.
Who lives in Greenacres now?
Greenacres is home over 45,476 people, making it the eighth-largest city in Palm Beach County.
In 1926, Greenacres began with an estimated 1,200 residents. The city’s population picked up during the 1980s to 18,600 people and by 2000, it had over 27,500 residents and a majority white population.
Since 2000, Greenacres’ population’s has almost doubled and grown diverse, becoming a hub for the county’s Hispanic and Caribbean communities, with 43% of its population being foreign-born. Almost 45% of its residents identify as Hispanic and about 30% identify as Black, according to the 2020 census.
Greenacres is a haven for working families. Most of its adults travel 30 minutes to jobs in administration, health care, construction, retail and the food and hospitality industries, census figures show.
Greenacres: City of Hispanic flavors, music, entrepreneurs
Over the last 20 years, Greenacres has become a hub for people whose families hail from the Caribbean and Latin America.
Greenacres is home to the Fiesta de Pueblo, an annual festival each January founded in 2016 that features performances, live music and a Three Kings Parade.
The city has also won fame for its wide variety of restaurants and bakeries that serve authentic dishes from Mexico and Guatemala, from the island nations of Cuba, Puerto Rico and Haiti; and all the way from South America including Uruguay, Peru and Argentina.
Greenacres has also been the city in Palm Beach County where Hispanic entrepreneurs have founded their business including supermarkets, beauty salons and barber shops and even medical centers.
What are Greenacres’ biggest challenges?
Over the last decades, Greenacres has struggled to keep up with the housing demands of its growing population and is becoming increasingly unaffordable.
While West Palm Beach has boomed, Greenacres has been overlooked, with residents saying much of the area has remained “stuck in time” for over 20 years, with smaller homes having to house larger families.
City planner say however, Greenacres is mostly built out and is seeking to attract business and developers to invest in retransforming outdated shopping plazas to build multifamily housing for the county’s workforce population.
The vision for Greenacres: Becoming a ‘destination’
Over the next 10 years, city planners envision Greenacres to be a place where people do more than just sleep and drive by while also keeping its identify as a safe, affordable city where people can raise a family.
Greenacres planners want to make it a destination by as establishing a town center that will give residents a place to gather, shop and dine without having to drive to West Palm Beach or Wellington.
County officials said Greenacres also has the potential of becoming a hub for workforce housing if it lures developers that build high-density development and businesses that offer jobs for economic growth.
Valentina Palm covers immigration and Palm Beach County’s western communities for The Palm Beach Post. Email her at vpalm@pbpost.com and follow her on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, at @ValenPalmB. Support local journalism: Subscribe today.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Greenacres marks 100th birthday as home to immigrants, entrepreneurs
Reporting by Valentina Palm, Palm Beach Post / Palm Beach Post
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
