Pompano Beach, Florida

Pompano Beach /ˌpɒmpənoʊ ˈbiːtʃ/ is a city in Broward County, Florida, United States, along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean just to the north of Fort Lauderdale. The nearby Hillsboro Inlet forms part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. As of the 2010 census the city's population was 99,845, with an estimated population of 102,984 as of 2012. It is part of the Miami Metropolitan Area, which was home to 5,564,635 people at the 2010 census.

Pompano Beach is currently in the middle of a redevelopment process to revitalize its beachfront and historic downtown. The city has also been listed as one of the top real estate markets, being featured in CNN, Money and the Wall Street Journal as one of the country's top vacation home markets. Pompano Beach Airpark, located within the city, is the home of the Goodyear Blimp Spirit of Innovation.

History

Its name is derived from the Florida pompano (Trachinotus carolinus), a fish found off the Atlantic coast.

There had been scattered settlers in the area from at least the mid-1880s, but the first documented permanent residents of the Pompano area were George Butler and Frank Sheene and their families, who arrived in 1896 as railway employees. The first train arrived in the small Pompano settlement on February 22, 1896. It is said that Sheene gave the community its name after jotting down on his survey of the area the name of the fish he had for dinner. The coming of the railroad led to development farther west from the coast. In 1906 Pompano became the southernmost settlement in newly created Palm Beach County. That year, the Hillsboro Lighthouse was completed on the beach.

Pompano Beach station

Pompano Beach is a Tri-Rail commuter rail station in Pompano Beach, Florida. With 109,000 passengers in the first six months of 2011, it is the 10th busiest Tri-Rail station.

The Pompano Beach station is located at Northwest Eighth Avenue and 35th Street, just southeast of the intersection of West Sample Road (SR 834) and Military Trail (SR 809). The station, officially opened to service January 9, 1989, offers parking. Pompano Beach is the last station not to be renovated to include better platform roofs, elevators and a pedestrian bridge over the tracks like most stations underwent.

In 2011, Tri-Rail received a $5.7 million grant to renovate Pompano Beach as an environmentally sustainable station, collecting more than 100% of its energy demand through solar power, with the excess to be put on the grid. Construction was to have started in spring 2012 and finished by May 2013 but the project fell through. In December 2014 Tri-Rail's governing board awarded a $40 million contract to Gulf Building to build a new headquarters, parking garage and station on the site of the Pompano Beach stop and on April 17, 2015 the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that groundbreaking was to take place later in the month. The upgrades are scheduled for completion in summer 2016