The recent Neighborhood Action Walk in Middle River Terrace Park was a crime walk on a truly grand scale. Members of four neighborhood associations in the city’s northeast section began gathering in the park an hour before noon, about the time the Fort Lauderdale Police Department set up what they call their “community outreach.”

The roughly 100 residents in attendance, driving in from South Middle River, Lake Ridge and Poinsettia Heights, were showing up for an event organized by Mary Pat Rhodes, head of The Community for a Better Lake Ridge.

“I started work on this in December,” Rhodes said. She had organized about 10 monthly crime walks in her neighborhood, and this time sought something on a grander scale: a solidarity march.

The neighborhoods involved border each other and, with a population of nearly 20,000, make up a big chunk of the city.

“There’s strength in numbers. Instead of just fighting our own battles, why not get everybody involved?”

The four neighborhood effort started on Northeast 13th Street, went all the way to Northwest Third Avenue and wound through the neighborhood before returning on Dixie Highway. An officer on horseback and a squad car, roof lights flashing, led the way.

Capt. Robert Dietrich, District One evening shift captain in the FLPD, introduced six officers as the Neighborhood Action Team.

“This is a new unit,” Dietrich said. “We are going to be assigned to address concerns individual homeowners associations have. We’re updating our schedule now to include the meeting dates of all the different associations. We’re going to be attending.”

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Three years of effort by residents of the Colee Hammock neighborhood will pay off in April when three entryway signs, approved by the Fort Lauderdale City Commission near the end of last year, will finally be put in place.

“We want everyone to know that Colee Hammock is first and foremost a residential neighborhood,” said Jerry Jordan, former president of the Fort Lauderdale neighborhood's association. “We’ve been fighting battles to preserve our identity for years.

Green Construction Technologies Inc. of Wilton Manors was awarded the $24,040 contract after submitting the only bid last July.

Points accumulated under such programs as Citizens Volunteer Corps and Community Area Planning added up to $18,000 of the $24,040 estimate.

The signs will be placed at three locations: the corner of Southeast 15th Avenue and Broward Boulevard; in front of Timeless Beauty Aesthetic on Southeast 12th Avenue and Broward Boulevard; and on Southeast 17th Avenue and Las Olas Boulevard.

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The Community for a Better Lake Ridge, a coalition of residents representing the Lake Ridge neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale, is filing papers to become an organized association.

The coalition was created roughly four months ago by residents eager to cut down on crime.

Said the group’s founder, Mary Pat Rhodes. “We’re gonna show the bad guys we don’t want [them here] anymore.”

Rhodes put together a series of monthly crime walks, the next of which is scheduled for Sept. 21.

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Efforts to rescue the old Shippey House at the edge of the Sailboat Bend neighborhood in Fort Lauderdale - including move it to a better spot - have inched forward.

Last month the City Commission reviewed the preservationists' work and concluded it should continue, though without any taxpayer money. The 1914 structure is “better than I expected,” said District Four Commissioner Romney Rogers.

Right now, the dirty-white house at 215 SW Second Ave., just behind the Broward Center for the Performing Arts, is a derelict. Paint is blistered, windows are smashed and boarded. The whole battered building, its foundation gone, sits atop huge rusted metal girders.

“The house is a contributing structure to the Sailboat Bend Historic District,” said Alysa Plummer, head of the neighborhood association and co-founder of the Save the Shippey effort. “It's one of the structures that helps identify and create the actual district.”

Plummer and her colleague, city Realtor Jackie Scott, hope to resuscitate the house and move it to city land at the Cooley Landings Marina, about 1,000 feet to the south.
The present story began in 2009, when the city's Unsafe Structures Board decreed the building should be flattened. The Historic Preservation Board ruled against the demolition and the matter went to the City Commission, which concluded last spring that a nonprofit organization was called for. It must raise about $200,000 to relocate and restore the structure.

Plummer and Scott created a website, which includes a brief bio of Judge Frederick Shippey of which the house takes its name. The website also estimates the cost of the move including everything from drywall to electrical wiring and the fee for relocating the home.

“The house can't stay where it is,” Scott said. The owner, a New York debt collection agency, bought it for the land about a year ago, she said, and has been tolerantly waiting for the house to go. The spot at Cooley's Landing was chosen for relocation, she said, “because it's at the western edge of Riverwalk, which begins with the Stranahan House to the east. We want it to end with the Shippey [house].”

Mark Budwig, chairman of the board of Riverwalk Trust, said “funds are being raised to relocate and renovate the Shippey House, which would become the offices of Riverwalk Trust upon completion.”

However other matters need to be resolved, as city commissioners outlined at their Aug. 23 meeting. What zoning laws apply? Are county and state grants available? Will FPL have access to a transmission line that goes over the water at the proposed site?
Nothing is definite but the need for more money.

Two fundraisers have produced “almost $10,000,” Plummer said. “The city will not spend any money. This is a community project and the funds are to be privately raised.” The project has a ways to go, “but that's part of fundraising.”

“You've just got to keep puttin' it out there,” she said.

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West Marine, one the largest boat supply chains in the U.S., is going to open its grandest store on South Andrews Avenue in Fort Lauderdale.

That was startling news, since the California-based company has two stores here now. One of them is just a few blocks away on Federal Highway near State Road 84.

“We just outgrew that building,” said Bobby Greenwell, West Marine’s South Florida district manager.

The new structure, at 2401 South Andrews Ave. in the Poinciana Park neighborhood, takes up 50,000 square feet. But when the massive parking lot is included, the whole enterprise will cover nearly three times that. Greenwell declined to say just how much West Marine is spending on the new store but called it “a significant investment.”

The new store will hire “about 75 associates,” he said. “Nearly all are expected to be local.”

So far, the South Andrews community is welcoming the new store. The area has been struggling for decades to recover from its slump in fortune after the city grew northward.

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