Searching for the Ghost of the Founder in Hollywood, Florida

The Man Behind the Mangroves

Most people come to Hollywood, Florida, for the sensory overload of the Broadwalk. They come for the specific, salty perfume of sunblock mixing with hot buttered popcorn, the rhythmic clack-clack of bicycle wheels on pavement, and that endless, glittering expanse of Atlantic teal. But if you turn your back on the ocean and drive a few miles inland, the city’s frantic, vacation-mode energy begins to fray at the edges, revealing something older, more rigid, and deeply fascinating.

It was on a Tuesday afternoon, while trying to escape the mid-afternoon glare, that I found myself on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and 19th Avenue. I wasn’t looking for monuments. I was looking for coffee. But there, squeezed into a narrow, unassuming pocket park tucked between a nondescript apartment complex and the clinical glow of an optometrist’s storefront, stood Joseph W. Young.