Over the last dozen years or so, we’ve seen towering condo buildings, one after the other, sprouting up downtown along the New River.
That means a whole new wave of people wondering, can that eight-story building on prime waterfront property on the south side of the river really be a jail? How did that happen?
Well, to tell that story we need to go back to a time when the New River Settlement didn’t even have a police officer, much less a jail or concerns about high-value waterfront property. Settlers, farmers, Seminoles seemed to get along fine without them – until they didn’t.
The location of the current jail is a story about three institutions – the court, the Broward Sheriff’s Office and the prison itself.
Postmaster Frank Stranahan came along in 1896, and the first substantial courthouse and working sheriff were here by 1915. Before that, there was a tin-roofed shack with a dirt floor and two beds for miscreants on SW Second Street between Andrews and Brickell avenues.
And attached to that shack was a lean-to that you could call the first sanitation department – manned by a beast of burden. The “Sanitary Mule Cart” was used to empty cisterns.
A.W. Turner, a local county businessman, was elected sheriff in 1915, and served in that post for its first 10 years. The Fort Lauderdale Sentinel proclaimed Turner then to be “one of the best men for the place. He does not drink [and] is a man of the very best habits.” He returned after an election loss and served several more terms.
The courthouse was on the corner of Third Avenue, a block from the water. A new jail facility was built near the original jailhouse in the 1920s. A two-story concrete structure, it could hold 50 inmates. One of its most famous inmates for a time during the Prohibition Era was Walter R. Clark, who was then our county’s sheriff, indicted on charges of “working with a disreputable figure who ran syndicate-controlled gambling casinos in South Florida,” according to the BSO’s own historical account.
In 1970, city fathers decided that a much larger jail was needed, and that it should be built adjacent to the court, essentially on the New River. While there was opposition, proponents argued, “Do you want to guarantee that deputies won’t get killed transporting a prisoner from the court to a jailhouse somewhere else?”
And so the jail has stood there for over 50 years, with expansions and additions as years went by.
From the early days, there are tales of wrongdoers being simply driven out of Fort Lauderdale and dumped in Deerfield Beach.
What kind of wrongdoers? Newspaper accounts of a Pompano ordinance shed some light. Fines or arrests were in order for “rogues and vagabonds, common pipers and fiddlers, and common nightwalkers, and all other idle and disorderly persons.”
The population was 4,500 when Broward County was incorporated in 1915. As our population headed towards one million in the 1980s, the exploding prison population prompted a jail expansion to house 3,200 inmates. A further expansion in the 2000s increased that capacity to 5,400 inmates.
That final addition to what was once dubbed the “New River Hilton” was a new building with medical and mental health units, classrooms, and a new kitchen and dining area. Educational and vocational programs and substance abuse treatment were also upgraded.
While the BSO headquarters is now on West Broward Boulevard, it still administers the jail as well as three others in Broward County.
So there you have it, from a dirt-floored shack (next to the mule’s quarters) to the massive, handsomely landscaped, slit-windowed edifice across the river, one strategically lighted during the evening hours. Either is a place where you’d rather not spend the night.
