Front Street, the 1919 fire and the move to New Haven Avenue

Melbourne has had two downtowns. According to the history in the 2016 National Register nomination for Melbourne’s Green Gables, the first grew up in the 1890s north of Crane Creek along Front Street, with general merchandise stores, a meat market, a newspaper, lumberyards, hotels, a telegraph office and a post office. Houses went up along Riverview Drive and Melbourne Avenue at the same time.

The waterfront street

The historical marker that stands where New Haven Avenue meets Front Street, near the causeway, fills in what the street was. It dates the business section to the 1880s and lists what lined the water: dry goods and grocery stores, a fish house, boat building and the post office, mostly in wooden buildings. The Riverside Hotel stood on the east side of the street. A city dock ran 1,400 feet out into the Indian River, and the steamboats stopped there. In 1894 the Melbourne Times, the town’s second newspaper, was founded in a building on Front Street.

Even the street’s southern tip changed names twice. The marker says it was called Hatterman’s Point, then Stewart’s Point, then Vorkeller’s Point.

The 1919 fire

The first downtown burned. In 1919, the nomination says, a fire destroyed the commercial district along First Street; the marker on the spot calls it Front Street and says every commercial building on it was lost. Its explanation is blunt: the fire engine bogged down in the sand and never reached the fire, and a citizens’ bucket brigade couldn’t hold it. On August 31 of the same year another fire partly destroyed the Union Cypress sawmill at Hopkins, just south of Crane Creek, which the nomination calls the most important industrial complex near Melbourne, and left hundreds of workers without jobs. The fires, with the economic slump after World War I, ended a prosperous period.

New Haven Avenue

The town rebuilt somewhere else. By 1923, the nomination records, Melbourne had paved roads, concrete sidewalks, electric street lamps and better water and sewer systems, and a new commercial area along Melbourne and New Haven Avenues had replaced the old one on First Street.

The cars came with it. After the Dixie Highway was completed in 1915, automobile tourists arrived in rising numbers, and auto-related businesses lined the highway between Crane Creek and what is now Line Street; a 1959 Sanborn map still showed seven along that short stretch. Tourists who camped by the road gave rise to tent cities and tourist camps in Melbourne and Eau Gallie, among them Midway Camp, a tent city in 1922 on the grounds of today’s Riverview Park, which grew into Midway Colony, with 140 cottages, a swimming pool, a 1,200-foot fishing pier and a recreation hall.

Further Reading

• Florida: A Short History by Michael Gannon