Just in time for the summer, the bright colors of a giant beach ball will soon pop out for all drivers to see off Interstate 95, thanks to a newly repainted water tower that’ll no doubt command attention.
“It’s just been pretty boring,” Lake Worth Beach Mayor Betty Resch said of the tower’s previous off-white design. “So I thought to myself, ‘Let’s make it look more fun.’ So it’s being painted like a beach ball.”
The soon-to-be vibrant water tower is part of an effort by Lake Worth Beach, formerly known by the less catchy name of Lake Worth, to up its image. The town changed its moniker in 2019, even though most of the municipality is located west of the Intracoastal Waterway — the water tower, replete with a beach chair logo, is essentially a billboard for the town.
Adding “beach” to a town name is a bit of a tradition in South Florida: Sunny Isles became Sunny Isles Beach in 1997. Dania became Dania Beach in 1998, and Hallandale followed suit a year later, becoming Hallandale Beach. One of the oldest changes is Deerfield Beach, which went from Deerfield to Deerfield Beach in 1939.
“The leisure travelers often say ‘beaches’ in the top three reasons they come to Florida, always — and that’s never changed,” said Peter Ricci, a Florida Atlantic University professor who specializes in hospitality and tourism industry trends. “So ‘beach’ is always a biggie in the title (of a city).”
So, does tacking on this hypnotic word actually make a difference?
It’s only bound to help Lake Worth Beach, said Milton Segarra, chief marketing officer of The Palm Beaches, a tourist information center.
More visitors and new residents could help business owners gain more customers. “If you can effectively demonstrate that you’re truly portraying a beach experience, that will enhance the possibilities for an increase in the price point and certainly to the revenue levels of the operators or owners of those establishments,” Segarra said. “The addition of the word ‘beach’ in 2019 seems to be contributing to overall visitation success in the city.”
Lake Worth Beach’s beach includes a handful of hotels and attractions, like Benny’s On The Beach and a pier, but there is less than a mile of actual beachfront.
For Resch, a longtime Lake Worth Beach resident, she isn’t certain the ‘beach’ name change has conjured that image yet.
“I haven’t really seen that much of a giant difference in how we’re perceived,” she said. “We’re being perceived as coming up in the world, and being more open, and being more friendly and fun. That’s just what’s happening in the city anyway.”
Making a change
Lake Worth Beach’s name change came after a close vote in 2019, with 1,402 votes for the change and 1,342 against, a difference of only 60 votes.
Beside wanting to accentuate its 19-acre asset, Resch said people petitioned for the change to further differentiate Lake Worth Beach from some unincorporated parts of Palm Beach County, and the crime in those areas. “We were getting kind of notorious for crimes that had nothing to do with us,” Resch said.
While the majority of Lake Worth Beach residents did vote in favor of the change, many also were opposed, citing concerns about how it would not actually improve the city’s image and would only incur additional costs.
At the time of vote, the city allocated $150,000 to fund the change. Everything from commissioner email addresses and business cards to street signs and buildings had to be changed. Still, some signage likely won’t be updated soon — a sign on I-95 still reads “Lake Worth.”
After the city’s 2019 name change, the water tower still kept its drab “Lake Worth” color, but it’s currently due for its 10-year paint job — a bit of serendipity. In recent days, workers were repainting the water tower entirely white, giving it a clean slate before starting to paint it to look like a beach ball.
Ultimately, Lake Worth Beach’s name change has a good shot at proving fruitful, Segarra said, because the city actually offers the experience that it now markets.
“Anybody can add a name, but you have to be true to the experience, and you have to have the support of the residents,” he said. “You can’t fool consumers. If you say ‘Lake Worth Beach,’ they will have a mental expectation about what they want and what they’re expecting to go to a beach destination, and you have to make sure you deliver that.”
The post-war beach boom
After the end of World War II and the invention and subsequent development of air conditioning, people began flocking to Florida for its year-round climate.
“Prior to that, people had no clue what was going on in Florida,” said Sally Ling, a Deerfield Beach resident and author of six historic nonfiction books about Florida’s history.
It’s no surprise that some cities chose to add “beach” to their names. The beaches were a consistent lure.
“It’s the beach that really attracted them,” Ling said. “In fact, Boca Raton grew exponentially as most of the communities did, including Deerfield Beach, after World War II, because people were exposed to the beautiful weather, the beaches and the ocean.”
Longtime South Florida residents can attest to the region’s big changes through the years.
Jeff Fisk, 63, who graduated from Deerfield Beach High School in 1978, recalls when the most popular club was the Future Farmers of America. And even though the city had already become Deerfield Beach by then, Fisk said it was nothing more than a small farming community.
“Property on the beach used to be considered worthless because you couldn’t grow anything there,” he said.
Avoiding ‘beach’ names
With this string of renamed cities over the past several decades, why have some cities abstained from the beach-name appendage?
For example, the cities of Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton have far more acreage of beaches than Lake Worth Beach, and their reputation as being coastal cities is more established, so it certainly would not be far-fetched to rechristen the name for either.
“Those names are top of mind for many, many consumers,” Segarra said. “So the need to add a beach is not as necessary perhaps as for others that want to take advantage of having a beach and make it front and center.”
Finding the right vacation spot?
Tourists, at times, can be so eager to get to the beach, it can result in mix-ups. They may wrongly assume that because a city’s name has “beach” in it, every hotel is right by the sand. They don’t bother to first check their hotel’s location.
Ricci, the FAU professor, saw that happen in the early 2000s. He worked as a hotel manager for a few months at what was once a Hilton in Deerfield Beach.
He received five to 10 calls a week from people complaining about how they’d booked the hotel expecting it to be directly on the beach because the hotel was located in Deerfield Beach, he said.
“I started having visitors who would claim false advertising for our Hilton not being on the beach, but the city was called Deerfield Beach,” he said. “It was really their perception that if you have beach in the name, then your hotel is on the beach, which is very interesting when you can Google websites and can do a million things to show where the geographic location of the property is.”
