Alice E. Moore

When Alice E. Moore died Monday morning at 96, broken was a thread going back more than a century to the origins of both West Palm Beach and its oft-ignored black legacy.

"She was a bulwark, a stalwart of this community," city commissioner Ike Robinson said Monday. "She was the matriarch."

Ms. Moore, who taught for three decades at Roosevelt Elementary School, now a middle school, lived for some 80 years at the white-picket-fenced house at 801 Fourth St., home of her foster parents, pioneers Haley and Alice Mickens. It's on the National Register of Historic Places.

After financial straits had led the teenager to leave her large family in Titusville in the 1930s, the Mickenses took her in. She excelled at Industrial High School and graduated in 1946 from Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, where a dorm is named for her.

Haley Mickens had helped start Palm Beach County's first black church, Payne Chapel A.M.E. Church, in 1893 in the Styx, the shantytown that sprang up to house black people building and staffing the hotels. A year later, when the black community moved to the mainland, Payne moved with it.

Mickens built his home on Fourth Street in 1917 and owned a building on 500 Division Ave. that once housed musicians who played at the nearby Sunset, the club that in the 1950s was a mecca for music lovers, both black and white.

Alice Frederick Mickens was "the most beautiful person I have ever known," Alice Moore wrote in an essay for the 1994 book "Pioneers in Paradise: West Palm Beach, The First 100 Years." With her foster daughter by her side, "Mother" Mickens helped open theaters to blacks and boost school standards. She was on the board of Bethune-Cookman for more than 30 years.. A West Palm Beach city park is named for her. She died in 1988, three months short of her 100th birthday.

With the phasing out of segregation, when people could shop and dance and live elsewhere, many did. Over the years, West Palm Beach's Northwest section became rundown and overrun with drugs and crime.

Late in life, Alice Moore lived a dream she didn't live to see fulfilled: to turn her historic home, and several others she owns across the street and nearby, into Mickens Village, a collection of learning centers and museums.

"When I'm gone, I don't want these homes to be torn down like all the other houses in the neighborhood," she said in 2010.

Many of the homes were tied up with liens, and Ms. Moore was prepared to donate them. Even with that, the city estimated at the time that making Mickens Village a reality could cost millions.

The idea "hasn't gone anywhere yet," Harvey Oyer III, a local lawyer, author and preservationist who worked on the plan, said Monday. While he believes the idea still has merit, with Ms. Moore's passing, "it may be a completely lost opportunity," he said. He called Ms. Moore "A font of knowledge on local history."

Goddaughter Yolanda Grooms, a Broward County educator, who was christened at the Mickens home and grew up there as well, said Monday, "hopefully the city will still find that it's viable for the community."

Funeral arrangements are pending, Grooms said. Ms. Moore, who never married, is survived by two sisters in Daytona Beach.