City picks a Miami group to anchor Currie Park's $37M makeover

What started as a fairly contained repair of mold problems at West Palm Beach's police headquarters has turned into one of the city's bigger budget headaches. The cost to fix the building has climbed from an early estimate of about $6 million to roughly $38 million, according to the Palm Beach Post.

The jump reflects how a rehab that looked moderate on paper expanded once crews got deeper into the structure. The number is worth tracking because it competes for the same capital dollars as roads, parks and other city services, and a figure that keeps moving is harder for the commission to plan around.

Expect the police HQ cost to resurface in upcoming budget talks as the city weighs whether to keep repairing the existing building or change course entirely.

Parker Avenue, a corridor residents have complained about for years, is set for a full overhaul the city estimates at $14 million to $15 million, with work expected to begin later this year, according to WPTV.

The street has been a recurring source of frustration over potholes and flooding — the kind of pavement-and-drainage problem that turns routine summer storms into impassable stretches. A reconstruction at this scale typically rebuilds the roadbed and upgrades stormwater handling, not just resurfaces the top layer.

Drivers and nearby residents should plan for the familiar tradeoff: months of lane closures and detours in exchange for a road that stops flooding. The city hasn't released a detailed construction schedule, so the start window and phasing are the next things to watch.

Northwood Village hosts its Nights in Northwood street festival Friday evening, starting at 6 p.m. The district's shops and sidewalks fill with more than 50 vendors selling art, fashion, jewelry, vintage finds and food, alongside live music and boutiques staying open late.

It's an easy, low-cost Friday night close to downtown, and one of the better chances to catch the Northwood corridor — one of the city's older walkable commercial strips — at its busiest. Parking is on the street and in nearby lots, so arriving early helps.

If your backyard tree is dropping fruit faster than you can eat it, Saturday's Florida Mango Festival is built for you. The event runs June 27 at the Palm Beach County Convention Center downtown, with rare mango varieties to taste and growers on hand to answer questions about cultivars, grafting and coaxing more fruit out of a home tree.

It's a genuinely local summer outing — South Florida is one of the few places in the country where mango is a serious dooryard crop — and it leans toward enthusiasts and curious eaters rather than a big commercial fair.

Night Runners WPB holds its sixth annual Pride 5K Run/Walk on Saturday, June 27, with the evening start keeping participants out of the worst of the day's heat. The 6:30 p.m. step-off makes it a social walk as much as a race, and registration is handled online ahead of time.

For late June, an after-dark 5K is one of the more comfortable ways to be outside and moving near downtown.

A new exhibition at Resource Depot, the West Palm Beach creative-reuse nonprofit, turns discarded plastic into artwork carrying a pointed environmental message from a prominent scientist. The show pairs the kind of material the organization normally keeps out of landfills with a direct argument about plastic waste.

Resource Depot is a quietly useful local institution — it collects clean industrial and household castoffs and resells them cheaply for classrooms and art projects — so an exhibition there doubles as a reason to see what the place actually does. It's a low-key indoor option for a hot weekend afternoon.

Meals on Wheels of the Palm Beaches has opened a new West Palm Beach headquarters with a larger kitchen and added training space, a build-out the group says will let it reach more seniors. For a service that delivers daily meals and a wellness check to homebound older residents, kitchen capacity is the practical bottleneck — and the kind of expansion that quietly raises how many people the program can serve.

West Palm Beach incorporated on November 5, 1894, two years before Miami, as the mainland city grew alongside Henry Flagler's Palm Beach resort and railroad era. It is a small reminder that today's downtown debates are happening in one of South Florida's older city centers.