Florida Past Comes Alive On West Palm Beach Mom's Website.
By Leslie Streeter
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Kunze, 44, a West Palm Beach mom, local rocker and part-time receptionist, refers to "Florida Fresh & Other Slices," her Tumblr.com blog page, as "my weird dorky hobby."
But for its fans, the images of old Florida are a fond reminder of the state's storied and colorful past.
"Many people don't know what old Florida was like so I want to show you all that's historic, beautiful, retro, kitschy and untamed," she writes in the introduction of the page, found at OldFlorida.tumblr.com. "Much of it has changed now, but you can still be a part of the adventure if you look in the right places."
And a growing number of followers are looking at Florida Fresh - "That's one of my favorite blogs ever," says Matthew Dockery, who maintains his own Tumblr page dedicated to his hometown of Lakeland (lakelander.tumblr.com), and shares with Kunze a crusade to expose Florida's pre-mega theme park and mini-mansion days.
"I love how she posts all the old postcards and everything. People in my family have been in Lakeland for years, and they've told me old stories about the places they used to hang out that really stuck with me," he says.
"That's what the Old Florida page is like."
The images on "Florida Fresh & Other Slices," come both from Kunze's personal collection, including postcards ordered off the Internet, and as gems from the State of Florida's photo archive, or the Florida Memory Project.
Nostalgic images popular
Archive manager Jodi Norman says that she's thrilled that bloggers like Kunze and Dockery are spreading a knowledge of Florida's past.
"People love to see the places they visited as a child, that they remember going to. And they love seeing what their towns looked like 50 or 100 years ago," Norman says. "And they like seeing the mermaids and the flying machines and the ostrich races. We encourage them to use it."
Kunze's love of images of bathing beauties and pristine beaches predates the archives. A Hialeah native born into a Cuban-American family, she moved to Belle Glade as a child.
Part of her attachment to the South Florida of her youth - one of her favorite photos is her as a baby on a local beach - is that for so much of her life, things were relatively unchanged.
"West Palm Beach was pretty much the same forever, until I-95 came through," she says. "Teenagers now don't have an idea about things before. But there was a Seminole history, a pioneer history of people who had to travel 110 miles to get to the county seat. There was an ambitious pioneer spirit that still lives here ... I find it very important, especially in West Palm Beach, to remind people. Everything's gone. Where City Place is was all old 1920's houses."
And she's always been drawn to it - she remembers skipping school as a teenager to go ride the elevator at the historic Breakers, taken by the fact that it had a real live elevator operator - "I was a punk rocker, but really I was dorky," she admits.
